Are we still loving our life on the road? Yes!

Is it all smooth driving, rainbows and sunshine? Of course not!

Yes, we did think (a little naively we know) that quitting our jobs and living the much sought after nomadic/full-time travel life, that everything would be dandy. Whilst we are 100%, not for a minute, regretting our choice to change up our lives, we do want to be truthful.

We still have days were nothing seems to work out, where we are stressed, feel a little blue, and days were we doubt if this was a smart move or not. Life is always going to have its ups and downs, and living on the road is no different to that.

We do think that this lifestyle gets shown to people with very Instagram filtered glasses. We all see the great times people have living this life and are very seldom shown the struggles and the bad days. We don’t want to fall into the trap of filtering our journey, so here are a little of the struggles we faced during the last few months living on the road.

Be sure to check out our Instagram so you don’t miss a minute of our journey!

Let’s talk budget…

Something that you generally have no matter what lifestyle you live. Living nomadically and without full-time jobs, this does get amplified.We are lucky to have saved a great deal before starting this chapter in our lives, however; we don’t want to blow those savings too quickly.

Unfortunately, we love adventurous activities and eating out. We also keep trying to have that Insta life which, of course, isn’t cheap (do people just have buckets of money? Or do they get this stuff for free? #influencers, we wish we knew how that worked!). It doesn’t lend itself to a small budget.

We have had to make quite a few sacrifices to keep our spending down. Something we hadn’t thought we’d have to do as much as we are.

We eat out less than we had hoped to, saving it for truly delicious restaurants or special occasions. We spend less on activities than we would have done in the past and really have to consider if it is worth the money or not. If it isn’t a unique experience or something we desperately want to do, then it’s cut from the list. Sometimes things are just too expensive for us to warrant doing them, which is a little sad at the time, but looking back, we don’t feel as if we missed out.

We have found that a lot of tours ect can also be done on your own, especially around Shark bay and Exmouth where we currently are. We just spent a full day on a self guided kayak tour instead of paying for a guide and the kayaks we only paid to hire the kayaks. We still saw all the amazing wildlife and stunning beaches, just not with others tagging along.

This also meant we could spend money on experiences you can’t get anywhere else. The Didgeridoo dreaming tour with Wula Gura Nyinda Eco Cultural Adventures, was worth the money and then some! All in all, having a strict budget isn’t horrendous, but it does weigh on our minds much more than in our previous lifestyle of full-time work.

Perhaps the most naïve thing we thought when changing to this lifestyle was…

…that it would magically fix all our problems. Tiff thought this would just make her anxiety go away and whilst living this way is helping, it definitely hasn’t magically cured her. Especially given that we have the lovely added layer of Covid uncertainty that makes her anxiety sky rocket every time. ‘State Daddy’ gives an unexpected press conference telling us of a new lockdown or concerning exposure sites. Yes, W.A. collectively refers to its premier Mark McGowan as ‘State Daddy’.

Living on the road has made the anxiety around Covid both easier and ALOT worse. Easier in the sense that we are nowhere near Perth or any of the exposure sitess, so there really is much less stress surrounding the possibility of getting Covid. However, it has created a great big ball of stress at the thought of having to go back to Perth and the higher Covid risk that poses.

Even Nathan hasn’t been immune to this. We both get nervous the closer we get to heading back to Perth. This is probably heightened by the fact that our ability to travel around the state is linked to not being in Perth if an outbreak happens. There is just so much stress that goes with the thought of being trapped in Perth during a lockdown, thus we have avoided Perth like the plague.

We have missed seeing our friends…

…by avoiding Perth so heavily. This in itself has been hard, as not everyone understands where this anxiety is coming from and how bad it can get. The anxiety we have around Perth at the moment really is just too much for us. It is weird to be living a life better suited to us and to still feel like this. We really didn’t see it coming.

It definitely comes back to the filtered way we all present our lives on Instagram and socials. We honestly just thought stepping away from the norm and trying to leave all those societal expectations would be easy and strip us of all our worries.

Our worries are just different now, and don’t get us wrong, we have eased into this life quite well. But believing that life would be easy and filled with nothing but Instagram worthy moments and happiness was so very naïve. We fell hard for the dream of that Instagram filtered life.

What you don’t see on Instagram are the bad days. Honestly, we didn’t think we’d have a lot of them when we started on this journey. Silly, we know, but we are living the dream right now. How can we not be loving every minute of it?

That’s the entire pull of this lifestyle, isn’t it? No bad days, just pure adventure, fun, and happiness.

Sadly, no matter what your lifestyle, that is just never going to be the case. There will always be bad days. You know those days where nothing at all goes right? We recently had a string of these.

In Exmouth, the Airbnb we had splurged on as a treat turned out to be very disappointing. The walls were so thin we could hear every conversation the owners had, including listening to kids screaming and crying early in the morning. The bed sheets also had a lovely brown stain on them, twice! This left us pretty grumpy, however, we were still determined to enjoy our time so went down to the beach to chill out and change our mood.

It was here that we got a call informing us that the weather was too bad for our whale shark tour we had booked the next day and it had to be cancelled. This was literally the sole reason we had come to Exmouth, so that call put us right back down in the dumps. There we were on the beautiful beaches of Exmouth feeling down right miserable! Then we realised how much of a shit mood we were in whilst living in such an amazing spot. Which just made us feel guilty for being grumpy whilst living out what sometimes feels like everyone’s dream lifestyle.

It was an interesting introduction to realising that just because we are living out our dreams doesn’t mean they will always be rainbows and sunshine. It’s that old saying that to really experience happiness, you need to know what sadness is too.

To really live like this, we needed to be able to do it when it wasn’t all working perfectly. We also just needed to realise that it is perfectly ok to be disappointed and sit in those feelings for a while before moving on to the next thing.

We had to stop putting so much pressure on ourselves to be perfect and love every single moment. Bad days are going to happen but more than that average days will happen too and that’s ok!

Having days where we do nothing is perfectly valid too, Tiff still struggles a lot with this one, but hey life’s a work in progress. When we follow people living this lifestyle through our screens, it’s so easy to only see the good sides of it. The adventure and the giddy highs that you end up thinking that’s all it’s going to be when you take the leap and do it for yourself. We thought that’s all it could be as well.

We needed to give ourselves room to actually live it though, and not just Instagram it. Every lifestyle has challenges, has bad days and weeks and things that you didn’t see coming. That is part of what makes it interesting and makes the good days even better, and so what if it’s not all Instagrammable? That’s life, and that’s so much better than what it looks like on our screens.

Would we still say it’s worth it though? Abso-f**king-lutely!

This road isn’t all it is cracked up to be on Instagram, but we will keep on choosing it for a long time to come. The bumps along the way are just what happens when you choose the road less travelled. It hasn’t been as beaten down as other paths. We have found that the view is well worth a few bumps and sometimes those bumps just make it all the more interesting.

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