Surprise - We Left.

Have you ever checked out Facebook's "On This Day" feature? Neat, isn't it?

If you're anything like us, you look at it, occasionally, and go: "Where the h-e-double-toothpicks did the past 5 years go?!?!". Well, our last 5+ years have been a whirlwind of startup nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, valuable lessons were learned around every corner, but much of the meet-up, fake it till you make it, buzzword infested b.s. was just that. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that we decided to take a step back and look at how we spent a lot of our time. Much of it was spent running in circles, trying to appease investors and focusing on things that didn’t really matter - it was a big realization. 

After spending so much time worrying about what other people wanted, we started looking at the things we’d sacrificed. Health was at the top of the list, but there were many things that we’d pushed so far down on our list of priorities that we stopped thinking about them almost altogether. Time with family, too busy; time with friends, too broke; date night, forget about it! After a while, it was like living the same day again and again; and it wasn’t even a day we liked living once. It was time for a break.

Thailand? Sure, Why Not?!

After a much-needed reprioritization, we started looking for ways to lower our cost of living so that we could increase our quality of life while we continue to learn and build on our various projects. We popped on over to nomadlist.com and started checking boxes: Beach, check; Low cost of living, check; Safe for tall blonde women, check… When all was said and done, we had a fairly short list of places to explore, most of which were in Southeast Asia.

Now, I don’t know about you, but Trista and I are not well traveled. My travel experience consists of about 5 trips to Canada and a honeymoon in Cozumel, Mexico. Trista’s is a little more robust, with mission trips to Africa and China. Any way you look at it, we’re new to this whole “digital nomad” thing. We think that’s the most exciting part though - stepping out into the unknown to see how you handle it can be terrifying, but it’s invigorating. People have traveled the world for thousands of years, and they didn’t have Google Translate OR Uber!

So on a list of places to live first on this new journey, we decided to try Chiang Mai, Thailand. We’ll keep you posted on how it’s going right here :)

Thanks for reading!

Till next time,

Erik Hayton

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