First Year Fauxmads -- How We Cheaply Saw the World and Embraced a New Life

Where We Traveled:

February is almost gone, so it seems like now is the time to examine how we did with our first full year as "fauxmads" — i.e., long-term but not quite nomadic travelers. A quick timeline recap for those of you who don't know our story:

June 2024: We retired from our respective careers in education and public health, sold our Rhode Island home and all of our belongings, paring down our stuff to six 27-gallon plastic totes, two carry-on suitcases, and our underseat bags. We dropped the totes in the basement of some friends in Buffalo, NY before leaving for Santa Ana, Costa Rica. Our plan was to recuperate in Costa Rica for a few months before traveling the world as full-time nomads.

September/October 2024: We fell in love with San Nicolas de Bari, the eco-development condominium community where we were renting an Airbnb. Beautifully designed and nestled in the mountains at the edge of Santa Ana, we realized this was a special place — and over those couple of months we got to know the special people who are now our neighbors. We took a portion of the proceeds from our Rhode Island house sale and made an offer on a two-bedroom condominium with a balcony overlooking the jungle, the mountains, and the lovely sounds of water flowing through the Rio Oro just below us.

November 2024: We spent our first slow-travel month in Málaga, Spain. With the help of an excellent local attorney we were able to close on the condo remotely. And with the help of an exceptional interior design firm, the apartment was painted, prepped, furnished, and decorated while we were on the road in Europe.

2025 in a Nutshell

January 2025: We had planned to visit some non-Schengen Eastern European countries like Turkey and Albania during the winter and spring of 2025, but we decided to head back to Costa Rica to see our new home base, then pick up our travels where we left off in the spring. We had a big housewarming party with our neighbors, got back in the swing of things with our expat pickleball group, and very quickly eased into the beautiful weather and friendly people of Costa Rica.

March – July 2025: We've already written at some length about our travels, and you can see pictures and itineraries here. Over those four months we took a repositioning cruise from Florida to Rome; spent a month overlooking Kotor Bay in Montenegro; made new friends in Croatia; cared for two horses, eight dogs, five cats, and five ducks; cruised the Rhine through four countries; and hosted friends and family from the US while house-sitting in Scotland. A smashing success!

August 2025: From our home base in Costa Rica we made our first trip to South America with two of our favorite Costa Rica expats. Our ten days in Medellín, Colombia were fun and enlightening.

September/October 2025: Barbara and I visited our daughter in Austin, TX for a few days before heading in different directions. I flew to Seattle for "Bromoto," a week-long motorcycle trip down the Pacific coast to San Francisco with my college roommate Eric, his five siblings, and sister-in-law. Meanwhile, Barbara headed to the East Coast to see friends and family in New England and New York.

November/December 2025: Barbara and I reconvened in Costa Rica for about six weeks before flying to Los Angeles to embark on a 21-day cruise to Hawaii and French Polynesia. The highlight of the trip, hands down, was our 24-hour stay in an over-the-water bungalow at the Westin Bora Bora. Coming in a close second were our four nights in a HomeExchange hilltop villa in Papeete, Tahiti, overlooking the island of Moorea. From Tahiti we flew to San Francisco for five nights in that great city, then took advantage of the relatively quiet airports on Christmas Day to head to Rochester, NY for some time with Barbara's family before returning to Costa Rica on New Year's Day — another easy airport day, if you can manage it.

Tahiti and Bora Bora

LESSONS LEARNED

We used 2025 as our crash-test-dummy year, sampling modes of transportation (flying, cruising, trains, and buses), accommodations (house-sitting, home exchanges, Airbnb-style "casual" rentals, and hotels), and travel styles (a month in Kotor vs. a string of 2–4 night stays in various cities vs. a river cruise/floating hotel).

Transportation: Repositioning cruises are the bomb! The relatively low cost, good food, and great social experiences delighted us so much that we are taking three transatlantic cruises in 2026: Florida to Norway and Rotterdam in April, Florida to Barcelona in August, and a return from Rome to Florida in November.

Through Europe we strongly preferred trains to buses for longer travel, but came to appreciate the ease and efficiency of public transportation for short hops. The bus, tram, and subway apps in Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Edinburgh are fantastic.

Accommodations: Truly, the big wins for us as travelers were hooking into TrustedHousesitters and HomeExchange. The pet-sitting gigs with TrustedHousesitters were uniformly wonderful and took us to places we'd otherwise miss — like St. Gallen, Switzerland, where we cared for two horses and a beautiful Pitbull in a lovely home overlooking the Alps — or places we'd otherwise be priced out of, like Edinburgh, Scotland, where we stayed in two fantastic, large homes. The pet owners in both places graciously allowed us to invite friends and family from the US to visit, which made those stays all the more special.

Some 2025 Petsitting Homes

Our HomeExchange experiences were fantastic! If you're not familiar with it, HomeExchange is a paid membership platform where people swap homes — houses, condos, apartments — for vacations instead of paying for traditional accommodations like hotels or rentals. Exchanges can be reciprocal or arranged through the use of guest points earned by hosting other members in your home.

When we purchased our home base condominium in Costa Rica, we felt we needed to put it to some productive use during the six to eight months we're away traveling, but were reluctant to become Airbnb landlords, having heard too many horror stories about inconsiderate guests, calendar management headaches, maintenance, cleaning, and so on. Renting our apartment on Airbnb would also mean scrubbing away all evidence that we lived there — we had lockable closet space and cabinets built so we could hide our clothes, family pictures, and small personal items while traveling.

With HomeExchange, though, our guests understand that they are coming to stay in our home, just as we'll be staying in theirs or someone else's. That sense of mutual property stewardship is the hallmark of the HE membership, and the sense of community it creates adds to our enthusiasm for the service. We saved thousands of dollars in hotel and rental charges in some very expensive cities — Zurich, San Francisco, and Papeete, Tahiti among them — and enjoyed comfortable, charming stays in some cool, out-of-the-way destinations like Amersfoort, Netherlands and Mlini, Croatia. Here are a few of our favorite 2025 HomeExchange stays:

Travel Style: For slow-traveling nomads and fauxmads, the sweet spot in one place is 28 days or more, which is where significant discounts start to apply to Airbnb and other medium-term casual rentals. Four weeks is a nice block of time — you don't have to pack, unpack, and lug your bags around, you get familiar with the local shopping, parks, and walks, and you can build up a bit of a routine. Unfortunately for us, I seem to be a 21-day travel guy: By the last ten days to two weeks of our longer stays, I start to get itchy to move on.

On the other side of the spectrum, we undertook something of a mad dash through Lucerne, Switzerland and then Florence, Milan, and Rome — four magnificent cities in about ten days. My Garmin fitness watch confirms that we did very little but walk and sleep during that stretch. Barb took many pictures and I appear to be having a good time in them, but I have no idea where they were taken.

Our seven-night cruise up the Rhine from Basel to Amsterdam was an interesting hybrid: we unpacked at the start of the week and packed up again at the end. Our floating hotel cruised at night, so each morning we awoke in a different town, jumped off the boat, and tried to see as much as we could. It was tiring, but the upside was that there was no cooking, grocery shopping, or planning required.

The pace that suited us best, I think, came with our TrustedHousesitters pet-sitting gigs. We strung a succession of these through Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scotland — each between 7 and 14 days. Because we had pets to take care of, we didn't have open blocks of time for marathon sightseeing; without the temptation to see absolutely everything, we stayed local, which was still genuinely interesting. Living in well-appointed homes and benefiting from the owners' recommendations about nearby shopping and restaurants made for quick, easy transitions into our temporary lives.

The joys of having a home base: Our decision to purchase an apartment in Costa Rica was equal parts impetuous emotion and cool rationality. It wasn't about having a place for our stuff — at that point we'd sold everything and were reveling in the new simplicity of our lives. Though thoroughly primed to bounce around the world with nothing but our carry-on bags, voices in the back of our heads were warning us that decision fatigue would bite us sooner than we thought.

The big decisions — like choosing where to go next — were manageable at first, until I realized they would also be endless. Every passing month was going to require more thought, care, and planning, and that open road was a little scary when all I could see was the horizon. The little decisions wore on us, too. Each new place required a couple of days of orientation: learning the home or apartment, finding the grocery store, understanding the currency, figuring out the buses and trains, etc. I can do it — the challenge is fun in its own twisted way — but as a guy for whom "higher executive function" is something of an oxymoron, after a while it becomes exhausting. It became clear that my energy for long-term travel requires a charging station to be sustainable.

Costa Rica — where, by the way, 98% of the electricity comes from renewable sources — turned out to be just the right place for my necessary pit stops. The weather in Santa Ana is never too hot, never too cold. We know our neighbors, we have a great group of expatriate friends, we know where the grocery stores are and how to pay our bills. I can convert the currency to dollars in my head. Our apartment is comfortable, functional, and easy to clean; it is a joy, not a burden. The transition from being on the road back to our routine here is minimal. Now more than ever, I appreciate a plug and play life.

Novelty and exploration — the things that prompted us to divest our lives in the United States — are still readily available during our home-base downtime. We are still learning the language, still marvel at the ecological and cultural diversity of this country, and still meet new people from all over the world. And if boredom starts to creep up on us, that's okay. It's never more than a matter of weeks before our next trip somewhere new and wonderful. Our Fauxmad Home in Santa Ana, Costa Rica: