In this week’s blog post, we are now taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent $1,445 USD during our 34 day stay in Chiang Mai, Thailand in the fall. We picked Chiang Mai as our first stop in our 6 month journey to South East Asia for the food, the festivals, the weather, the culture, the large digital nomad community and of course we knew it was also very affordable.
After spending a lovely summer in Europe, we embarked on a 6 months journey in South East Asia (SEA). While Mrs. NN already visited SEA before we even met, I never set foot there so there was definitely some excitement in exploring a brand new region as part of our 2nd year of nomadic travel. For our first stop, we decided to stay an entire month in Chiang Mai Thailand and we were blown away by the culture, the food and the digital nomad community. So without further ado, let’s go explore Chiang Mai and unveil in this two part article what we did, ate and saw!
In this week’s blog post, we are now taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent $1,172 USD during our 17 day stay in Kotor, Montenegro this summer. We picked Montenegro over its more popular neighbor Croatia because it’s got beautiful scenery, is less busy and is more affordable compared to Dubrovnik.
For the final stop of our 4 months journey in Europe, we stayed in Kotor Montenegro. We picked Montenegro over its more popular neighbor Croatia because it’s got beautiful scenery (check out the view from our apartment below) and is not as busy or pricey. While we stayed only 2 out of the 4 weeks we initially planned, we really enjoyed it and would really recommend it as a lesser known gem. Let’s go explore Kotor!
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For the past 18 months of our nomadic journey, we basically lived full-time in AirBnB apartments apart from visiting family. That means a total of 17 AirBnBs in 17 cities and 8 countries. That’s a lot of bookings, making ourselves at home and enjoying beautiful places. Since our stays aren’t just a quick weekend but our homes for at least a month, we want to make sure our apartments are not just good but amazing! We prioritize level of comfort, the location, an awesome kitchen, ideally a view and of course the budget we want to stay within.
We’ve gotten so good at finding temporary homes that we share our best tips to find the best and most affordable AirBnB homes in our ultimate Airbnb money-saving guide.
In this article, we will be going over our top 5 AirBnB homes along with many pictures and of course the cost. Accomodation is one of the big three expenses categories people have (along with food and transportation) but it can also be quite affordable to live in beautiful places. The same quality of apartments in San Francisco, where we were living before, would have been ridiculously expensive. Are you ready to see some of our amazing homes around the world?
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In this week’s blog post, we are now taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent around $2,000 USD during our 3 week stay in Lisbon, Portugal this summer. While we thought Porto was expensive, Lisbon actually became the most expensive city we have lived in since we started traveling around the world!
After Porto, we spent the second half of our time in Portugal in Lisbon for almost a month. We decided to stay in this capital because we were curious to know more about this growing digital nomads hub that has become a trendy European destination over the past few years. The city actually reminded us a lot of San Francisco which we will talk more about in this blog post. Let’s go explore Lisbon!
In this week’s blog post, we are taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent less than $2,400 USD during the month we spent there.
One of our favorite things about our nomadic lifestyle is that we can design it however we’d like based on our priorities. We can slow it down or speed it up, go to a food destination or a cultural city, spend time sightseeing or working on projects, meet up with friends or set out on our own, save money in Central America or splurge (within reason of course!) in the Caribbean. One of the biggest advantages to us is the ability to spend long periods of time with family and friends that live in different parts of the world. Since my family lives in France, I didn’t get a chance to see them very much during my 10 years in the US. Now we plan on spending 1-2 months every year with them and focus on great quality time versus the quick holiday catch up I was used to do. This is what brought us to Europe this summer!
Today we are fast forwarding a bit to our first slow travel destination of our 2nd year of long term travel: Portugal. (June was spent in France with family and was all over the place. Early July was spent with friends in beautiful Costa Brava Spain and we well talk about both at a later time). Given how popular Portugal is among expats, digital nomads and retirees, we were looking forward to see what the hype was all about! We decided to spend about 2 months in Portugal, spending our time between Porto and Lisbon. Porto was our first stop and we ended up with pretty mixed feeling about this city. Let’s see why by exploring Porto!
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You have to visit the Douro Valley if you are in Porto, I can’t believe we even hesitated because it is an amazing place. Not only does this valley have the perfect weather conditions to produce Port wine, the beautiful and dramatic landscape make it seem unreal. No surprises that this site has UNESCO World Heritage status in 2001 as you will be able to attest through the pictures and video we are sharing in this post.