Dabbling in a nomadic life
Exploring life's possibilities in Girona
Ageing sucks. That’s the general consensus. But I think people lament ageing because it naturally pulls us away from some of the best years of our lives. Namely, our childhood.
Obviously I know not everyone had a great childhood. But by and large, a kid’s life is full of imaginative adventure without a lick of responsibility. You can hop on a bike, storm down the streets with friends, and pretend you’re on the run from Johnny Law without, ya know, actually being on the run from Johnny Law.
You come home indifferent to the sweat, ready to eat a big meal, go to sleep, and do it all again the next day. Only the regular rigamarole of school stands in your way.
On the contrary, the more we age, the more we’re lapped with responsibility and told to “act like an adult.” That is, until you retire (if you’re lucky enough to live that long). Once you’re of a certain vintage, society deems you free to pretty much say and do whatever you want without a ton of consequence.
My goal is increasingly to age in reverse; to get closer to the freedom of childhood abandon. I can’t Benjamin Button myself back to those years, nor do I have the financial arsenal of a Bryan Johnson to stuff myself with vitamins to try and literally reverse the process of ageing.
But I have made decisions throughout my adult life that have made it considerably easier to make changes based on how Melanie and I want to live our lives. We can (and we have) eschew the traditional societal streams of life that can easily suck you in like a strong current, and instead forge our own path.
In the lead up to my acquiring German citizenship, we imagined what life might look like if we lived a bit more like a nomad. Somewhat serendipitously, an opportunity came up to spend a month living in Spain. It took next to no discussion. We were in.
The experience confirmed our suspicions that we might like spending prolonged periods of time living in different countries. I for one loved it, switching up the German for some Spanish, and getting a feel for life in a different country. It didn’t take long for my imagination to run wild. We could spend one winter in Greece, a spring in Japan, and more time in the US with families before changing it all up again the next year. And I could continue chasing down the kind of stories you only have access to the longer you’re on the ground in one concrete place; the task that fills my life with immense meaning.
During that month in Spain, we spent a night in Girona. Both of us felt a similar sense of excitement about the medieval city-turned outdoor lover’s paradise. And so we vowed to return come winter, both to escape the soul-sucking depression of Berlin dark and to get a better feel for the city. Could this be someplace we’d regularly return to and make into a third-home of sorts?
Life happened, so the full month in Girona we dreamed of didn’t happen. But we were able to squeeze in a week in Catalonia back in January with five of those days spent in Girona. By this point, I knew I’d be leaving shortly to run in the Oman Desert Marathon, so the visit doubled as a big training week for me––the perfect excuse to run myself tired around trails (not that I needed the excuse).
We left Girona as resolute as ever to chase our dreams of a more nomadic life. Neither of us are interested in image that comes to mind when you think of the buzzword version of the “digital nomad.” We don’t want to hop around week-to-week, month-to-month, or take advantage of places that are seeing their communities hollowed out because of digital nomads.
We want to slow travel as responsibly as possible, experiencing as much of the world we can, while we can. For me, I want to find my own, unique way of being useful to the world; which I increasingly believe is help amplify local voices and let people tell their own stories rather than the throngs of YouTube vloggers who parachute in with the camera glued to themselves. (This is a task I admittedly failed at in Girona.)
Above all, I want to find a happy medium between using the wisdom and experience I’ve gained in my adult years with the freedom I felt running around as a kid. I want to let my imagination run wild like it did when I was rolling around town in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tee shirt, and see where it takes me.
Thanks for reading! But what about you? What are the dreams you’re chasing? What about your childhood would you like to incorporate into your adult years?
Coming soon: I’ve finished the first of what will be a multi-video series covering my experience running the Oman Desert Marathon. The first episode picks up where Girona leaves off with me prepping for the race and my first few days in Oman before the race starts. I’m holding onto that until my article on the race goes up with Outside Magazine. In the meantime, you can listen to an interview I did with Omani radio about the race.
Next challenge: I haven’t shared this anywhere else yet, but I feel confident enough that it’ll happen that I’m okay sharing now. On March 15th, I’ll set off on the Via degli Dei or Path of the Gods––a 125-kilometer trail from Bologna to Florence. I’ll meet folks along the way and turn the journey into a short film and story. Stay tuned!
What else?: I’ve been awful about promoting the Travel Tomorrow podcast I co-host with my writing partner, Alicia Underlee Nelson. So here goes nothing! Our first episode of 2025 dives into solo travel. Next, I’ll share my conversation with Laura Ericson to talk all things group travel. Why do we sign up to travel with strangers? She’s got a hunch.