When I first planned this series of adventures and decided to pack up my life in Baltimore, I had a rough plan. July 2021 would be a bit of a mixed bag of visiting friends and family for a week here and there, but by August I would start a pattern of moving to a different city every 1-1.5 months. This timeline would give me time in each location to settle in, meet new people, have some uninterrupted time to work, and explore how I felt as a potential part of the community. Not to mention lots of time to try out local restaurants and activities.

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True digital nomad life sounds amazing to some and crazy to others, and I find myself in the middle. I like exploring new places and meeting new people, but I also love having a set place to come back to. I like being able to set up my space, have a dedicated spot for all of my things, and to take my clothing out of suitcases and packing cubes and just live in one place for a while. I don’t mind packing up relatively often, or taking the occasional side trip. But being able to decompress and have your own space can be important, especially for an introvert like myself.

When August hit I had just spent a lovely week with family in Arkansas, and a few days with my parents in Santa Fe, so I was ready for the next part of my plan. I packed up the car and little Fred and made the drive from New Mexico to Los Angeles, California to start my first such “Test Month”. I stopped in Kingman AZ for a night on the way to break up the 13.5 hour beautiful drive before continuing on to Cali the next day. And here my friends is where the story got a little interesting.

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As the fates would have it, I have learned again and again on this trip that nothing truly goes to plan. at times we just have to make “PIVOT” our mantra.

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It all started on a sunny morning in LA. I arrived around noon and I was a bit early to check into my AirBnB near Venice Beach. The listing was a bit of a weird one, it was a standalone room / studio in a little artist complex called “The Circle”. I was in the “Zen” room (a converted yoga studio / garage of sorts), but there were also a Tiny House, a Hobbit House, and the main house, which all shared some communal outdoor space. It was definitely an over-the-top hippie spot, but since it was LA and Venice beach and I only planned on being there for a month, I thought it would be a fun story. Turns out it was just a shorter story than I was imagining.

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When I got there some of the other residents were in the central garden area and told me that the room was all ready for me. I went inside to find an absolute mess. Garbage on the floor, bed crazy unmade, stuff left all over. It seemed like someone had woken up from a late night of partying and realized they had to catch a flight in 20 minutes so they just threw everything important in a bag and left the rest like the aftermath of a tornado.

Fred was such a chill presence while I tried to figure this all out

After some communication with the host about the potential mix-up with the cleaning crew, I was told it would be taken care of. In the spirit of going with the flow, especially since I had arrived a few hours early, I went over to Santa Monica to meet up with my amazing friend Daisy who I had only met via a zoom yoga class during the pandemic to wait until the apartment would be ready. We got to hug in person for the first time and she got to finally meet my dog Fred. A lovely perk of traveling like I am is getting to see folks you may not have otherwise met in person, and I was soaking in this special experience.

A few hours later after hugs and some lunch, I headed back over to Venice to see if things had been sorted out. Sadly this is where the true problems started. When I returned around 4pm (the original check-in time), the place was just as I had left it. No cleaning crew, no change to the mess, nothing. Since it was now late on a Sunday and I had work in the morning, I tried to contact the host to say that I would make the bed with my own sheets and make due, but that the cleaning folks definitely needed to come in the morning and that we should probably start discussing some kind of discount. Little did I know that the host was actually on vacation in Sweden… and so was not answering my messages because she was asleep. I sadly only found her location much later in the evening when the situation had escalated …

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Back to the mess: as I resigned myself to doing some tidying so my dog and I could safely and cleanly stay the night, I discovered two key things. First, as I was moving a clothing rack to find an outlet I found a series of mouse droppings hidden off in one corner (which I promptly documented and sent off to the sleeping host in Sweden). Then, as I was trying to take the dirty sheets off the bed, I saw a bug crawl out of the sheets and dive into a hole in the mattress. At this point I was already grossed out by the room’s general mess, but this was the last straw. I documented all of the issues to the host, but due to her location, I didn’t get any response.

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I made the decision that I could not put myself or my dog at risk of whatever bugs were living in this place, so I contacted AirBnB support to file an official complaint and a request for a refund and re-housing. I could go into a long and drawn out story about the trials and tribulations of dealing with AirBnB support, but I’ll save that for another time. The end result was that I contacted them around 5:30pm, and by 8:30pm that night I had had almost no response, the original case person I had went off shift and I got transferred to another person, and I finally got told (as the sun was going down at Venice Beach and I didn’t have a place to stay), that I should go find a hotel and AirBnB could continue to help me in the morning.

I found a last minute room at an Extended Stay America by LAX (AirBnB had said they would reimburse me… but the agent had been cagey and wasn’t entirely sure they would reimburse all of it, so I didn’t want to go crazy at a fancy hotel just in case). The next morning I contacted AirBnB again and had to juggle taking some work calls with trying to find replacement housing. There were a few key issues with this:

I had booked a month stay, and finding available month-long rentals with an hour or two of notice is very difficult, especially at a reasonable price point. I got AirBnB to agree to give me some extra money to re-book with, but it was still limited and didn’t cover most of the places we could find due to the late notice.
I had booked a specific neighborhood and had done research on staying there, however LA is huge and there are a LOT of different areas. When the AirBnB support person was trying to re-house me they kept throwing me listings in completely different areas of town that I either knew nothing about or knew were not good areas.
I don’t just travel for fun, I also work from home. AND I have a (small) dog. So finding a simple private room in a shared house doesn’t always work out because I need work space and they may not take dogs.

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Long story short, I had to check out of my sorta sketchy hotel by 11am, and there was a ticking clock on making a decision on where to stay. We found a few listings that may have worked, but when I contacted the hosts to try and book they ended up not being available or not actually taking dogs or any number of issues that just made the entire thing seem like a total bust. By 10:30am I had to make a choice: make some kind of crazy snap decision on a place that I didn’t feel comfortable with or pack up and head back to New Mexico to stay with family for a little longer.

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Around this time I sat myself down to just breathe and think for a minute. The entire reason I had gone on this trip in the first place was to find a new place to call home that feels right. I don’t know if this was just bad luck or if the universe was giving me a solid poke to encourage some course correction. Whatever it was, I decided to listen to the feeling in my gut that was saying “something isn’t right”. I packed up the car, checked out of the hotel, and drove 13.5 hours back to New Mexico.

Sunset glow as I made it back to New Mexico

While this may seem like a crazy turn of events and a lot of snap decisions in a very short period of time, this experience taught me a lot, especially about myself:

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First, I am lucky that I have loving parents that recently retired, moved to New Mexico, and have room for me. Since I left for college at 18 I have never moved home, I was ready to go out into the world and explore. I got a job and supported myself and have been proud of myself because of that. But in this crazy time of pandemics and wanderlust and uncertainty and very unlucky AirBnB situations, I am so so grateful that I could take the time to re-set with them and know I had a place to just sit and breathe while I figured out my next steps.

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Second, even when things got crazy and it seemed like I had my back to the wall, I found the strength to stop and listen to my gut. I definitely questioned it a fair amount and had many moments of doubt, but in the end I did what I knew was the most right thing to do with the information I had available. Sometimes that’s all we can do for ourselves: to listen, to trust, and then to let go once we have made a choice. Finding out that I had the strength to do that, even when everything was falling apart, was definitely a positive outcome to a crazy situation.

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Third, that old saying “when one door closes another opens” or what seems a bit more appropriate “when the door closes, go find a window”, is a big truth. In the middle of all of this crazy, the first two weeks of August were my last two weeks at my old job. Not only was I dealing with a crazy changing living situation, I was trying to wrap up projects. Then in the middle of August I was slated to go to Cincinnati, OH for a few days to start my new job. In the spirit of re-imagining my entire plan to fit the current reality, I decided to lean into that new job trip and make some extra plan changes. I’ll share more about the next steps soon, but the moral of that part of the story is that sometimes trusting the universe works out for the better… even if it’s a bit terrifying first.

I’ll share some of the great things that came out of this first major pivot soon, and I fully expect I’ll need to pivot again sooner than I think. Thank you for coming along for this very long deep-dive into one of my biggest Nomad challenges so far. Fingers crossed more fun adventures come out of the difficult experiences of the future.

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Let me know in the comments below if you’ve had any crazy pivot moments that taught you something important about life.

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Until the next time, happy travels ~ V

All photos taken on a first-gen iPhone SE or Nikon D5300 with Nikon AF-P DX Nikkor 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6 Lens