After getting laid off yesterday (for the first time in my life), today marked my first official day as a free (of any income) man. Friends keep asking, “What are you going to do now?”
Right this second, I am riding my motorcycle on the coast near Palermo, Sicily and recording my thoughts through my helmet comm. I’ll either post it as a audio blog post or transcribe it and post it as a traditional post. By the way, the scenery is spectacular.
Long-term? I have no idea.
Shorter-term? I’m going to keep traveling full-time and documenting it. I’ve been traveling on my moto in europe for the last couple of years while working remotely from noon to 8pm local time. The thought—for now—is to attempt the “noble” (and likely humbling) transformation into a digital creator. Apparently, all one needs is a camera, some Wi-Fi, and some (likely misplaced) confidence.
One thing I’ve wanted to do more of while traveling these past couple of years was to camp. The fun kind, you know, pitch a tent in the dark, become an expert mosquito assasin before going to sleep, figure out how to stay relatively dry in a thunderstorm, try to not be dinner for bears, all of that. But being tied to a noon to 8pm work schedule made that tricky even for me, the master problem solver… Hard to enjoy a sunrise when you’re racing to beat a 12 p.m. Zoom call from a roadside gas station with questionable Wi-Fi.
I wanted to wake up to the sound of the sea, or the sight of mountains, or anything that didn’t involve someone screaming at their kids in the apartment next to my Airbnb at 7:00 a.m. (real thing that happened this morning!)
So today I made the 1st move. Stopped at Decathlon and bought a tent, sleeping bag and a few other things just enough to camp and make something that roughly resembles food. On the moto, there is very little space and I didn’t have much left before this …
Now I’m actually looking forward to that first night of camping. I’m checking out of the Airbnb tomorrow, and after that… well, I’ve got a ferry from Palermo to Rome on Sunday. That leaves Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday wide open—four gloriously unstructured days, or as I like to call them “do whatever the <censored> you want” days. Like all my days, starting today.
I could book another Airbnb, but I should probably start reducing expenses. You know, since I’m now officially drawing from the Bank of Hope and Ramen, I might look into hostels. I haven’t stayed in hostels much, if at all, this past year, but hey—new environment, lower cost, and occasionally, interesting people. I hope they don’t snore louder than I do… Worth a shot.
I’ll take a break from riding as soon as I find a place with a nice view and I’ll poke around the internets and see what i can find.
