About

 

Welcome!

We’re a family of three that found ourselves wanting to travel part of the year, and live in Calgary part of the year. Winters here are long and cold and escaping them for a while is attractive. Most travel sites are geared toward digital nomads, typing out missives with a drink in their hand from a tropical location. But we’re a family with luggage, and clothing and infrastructure – I work with triple monitors for efficiency. So for us jetting into a place and doing a couple of hours of quick work while living out of a suitcase is not practical. I need a minimum of six or seven uninterrupted hours of work per day to sustain my business.

We started looking for a  different way to travel, and for us immersive or slow travel is the way. We seldom travel for less than two weeks at a time, and our preferred way is to settle in someplace, have a favorite cafe nearby, and a local taco or roast chicken joint. This feels like we’re a part of the web of life somewhere, and our daughter can find a play partner. How do we afford this? We travel via house exchanges a lot, and we occasionally rent local properties to stay in. Travel is such a profound experience for us all, that the effort to arrange these stays is completely worth it.

We live in Alberta Canada, and we have slightly fewer options on travel – from fewer Canadian credit cards, to arranging costly cell phone coverage in another place, and I wanted to capture the logistics of slow travel from Alberta and the costs of doing so. Canada also has some of the most expensive flights to deal with, and if there is a seat sale we try to jump on it. During covid as business travel was decimated, there are fewer deals to be found.