Being truly nomadic while working is an odd experience. With our jobs earning us plenty of money without ever needing to be in a particular place, we’re free to live wherever we want to in the world. This feels really odd. Most people in the US live where they do because that is where they grew up. The go through high school, get a job locally and stay there. Some people will move to go to a college far away but then they’ll get a job either in their adopted city or maybe move one more time with a new job offer. Maybe you’ll have a strong love of cities or the country or a particular state and go looking for jobs in a particular area, but generally, where you (or your significant other) end up getting a job is where you end up living for a huge part of your life.

For us, the whole “live where you get a job” thing doesn’t apply. Our jobs don’t care where we are. We could be in Iceland or South Africa or Thailand and as long as we keep US business hours and have good internet, no one at our jobs will care one bit. So that brings up an odd question. Since we don’t need to live in a particular place for our jobs, where do we want to live?

The whole time we’ve been on the road we’ve been evaluating the places we visited with the thought, “Would we like to live in this place?” We even thought about making a grading rubric to help us judge places (of course we did 😉 ). We’d have categories like “Distance from a major airport”, “Accessibility of whitewater rivers”, “Accessibility of trail systems”, “Quality of beer at local breweries”, and “How did the size of the city feel”. We’d give each category a score out of 10 and then add up all the scores to help figure out which city we liked best.

We never made the rubric official but we certainly had some favorite places. Of the places we visited last year, Salida, CO, Bend, OR, and Boise, ID all felt like pretty great places to live. And this year, I fell in love with Telluride, CO. And we have a whole other list of places we loved to visit but wouldn’t really want to live year round at.

That all said, being on the road has made us realize how much we miss having close local friends we can visit often. I miss kayaking with a crew where I’ve boated with all the people before. We have friends with young kids where we are missing out out on seeing them grow up and being a part of their lives.

So after all the travelling and judging places, both of us are recognizing how much we are missing what we had. Sure we will always be able to find new friends, but in the short term, we’re looking to settle down for a bit and we’re thinking we want some good old Colorado front range action again (Denver-ish for those of you not familiar with Colorado). Could that change after a while? Sure. But for the moment, we’re looking for some easy time with friends we know. We’ll still be finishing up this summer and fall of travel, especially because we’re really looking forward to the Utah national parks next, but there is a pretty good chance at this point that we’ll be settling down for a while come next year.

So, sure we could live anywhere (and some long term travelling internationally might be in the cards eventually) but after a year and a half of the nomadic life, we’ve learned that what we’re really looking for is friendship and people who do what we like to do more than any of those other categories we thought we wanted.

So that’s where our thought process currently is, but we’re curious where you’d want to live. If you really could live anywhere in the world, where would you go? Would you stay near family or friends? Would you move internationally? Would you live at a National Park? Let us know in the comments or shoot us an email at [email protected].