I LIVE IN AIRBNBS
BY EMILY FARAONE
Since April, my partner, our pup, and I have been living in Airbnbs. We don’t just travel a lot… we solely live in Airbnbs. We do not have a “home” or an apartment. The closest thing we have is a storage unit with the remainder of our items. We fit the items we take with us in our SUV, so we had to narrow down our belongings!
Why Nomadic?
I get many questions about our “nomadic” lifestyle, and I want to break down and answer the commonly asked questions… this might become a series–there is a lot to cover! I want to start with the “why.” Why the nomad life? The root is that we are trying to figure out where we want to live. To do that, we knew we had to explore more of the country.
I have lived most of my life in Virginia, and my partner has only lived in Virginia. I knew that I did not want to live in Virginia long-term. I’m a big believer in living life by design and not by default. For me, it didn’t make sense to stay in Virginia just because it is familiar and comfortable. When we think of our dream place to live, it doesn’t have what we are looking for… so we are looking for a place that does! Where you live has a significant impact on your life. I think such an impactful factor should be an intentional decision and not left to “default.” Take a second and think about what factors are important to you. A couple for me are quality grocery stores and walkable neighborhoods. Does where you currently live align with what you love?
Why Airbnb?
A couple of years ago, we knew we wanted to explore and decided to go nomadic. We contemplated and researched doing van life, but we did not think that would be sustainable long-term for us. Plus, the idea of having our home “break down” scared me! Once we ruled that out, we landed on living in Airbnbs. It gave us the flexibility to name the location and length of our stay. Living in Airbnbs has its perks because they are furnished, we don’t have to pay for utilities, and we can still live a similar lifestyle to when we were living in our apartment.
Day-to-day
Since our goal is to see if we like living in each location, we keep our life pretty normal. While we are there, our weekdays are very similar to our lifestyle in our apartment. We both still work full-time remotely, and we cook our meals at home. It is always fun to check out the area’s grocery stores and create our neighborhood walking routes.
A common misconception we get is that we are just traveling around all the time. The adventuring happens on the weekends. In each location, we list areas we want to explore, places we want to go to, and the food we want to eat. We stay in each location for about a month and try to fit in a lot on our weekends. It can be hard to balance exploring different areas and neighborhoods with more touristy experiences.
6 Months Down
After six months, we have learned a lot. Have we gotten closer to deciding where we want to live? We have. When we first booked, we booked six different places to explore. They are pretty different from each other, which helped us narrow in on what we really want. There have been some surprises on what we like. Booking six months out was kinda risky. We were scared this lifestyle would be tiring, and we would hate not having a “home.” However, we haven’t experience that. We often get asked when are you going to stop? We have continued to book more places and have enjoyed living like this. Our list of places continues to grow. Now that we have a better idea of what we are looking for, there are some places on our list that we know we likely wouldn’t want to live long-term; however, we still find it appealing to experience living there for a month.
Interested in learning more? What questions should I cover? Reach out to me! I’m happy to chat about it further. Feel free to send ideas for further blogs about our nomad life.
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