Smoky Mountain National Park - Gatlinburg and the Peaceful Side

In this week’s blog I chat through our official first week on the road as we visit Smoky Mountain National Park, with home bases in both Townsend and Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

First NP of the trip!

This was our first week on the road since our 2021 RV trip and required getting back into the “swing of things” balancing earning income and exploring. Just like at home, where we (as a society) try to strike a “work-life-balance”, we’re trying to strike a balance between earning an income and actually experiencing the places we visit (otherwise, what’s the point?). Anyway, here’s how week one went…

Attempted family picture in front of our cabin

Where: This week we drove from Alexandria, Virginia directly to Townsend, Tennessee and spent 3 nights on the “peaceful side” of Great Smoky Mountain National Park (NP). We had absolutely no idea how “peaceful” this would prove to be until we spent our final four days in Gatlinburg.

Let’s just say, if you are looking to relax, eat great food and be close to “The Smokies”, Townsend is where you want to stay.

We put our feet up at the Dancing Bear Lodge in a two bed, two bath cabin, with a wood burning fire place, back deck and hot tub. For our family of four, it was IDEAL. Selima couldn’t get enough of her own “private pool”. The Dancing Bear property also made food very convenient because it has several restaurants on site for breakfast, lunch, or dinner (or just an after dinner beverage, or smore at the Appalachian Bistro). And the food was great all around. To boot, it is associated with the Peaceful Side Social Brewery + Craft Kitchen, just down the road. So we stopped in after one of our morning hikes to enjoy lunch and a beer. Townsend and the Dancing Bear Lodge were an A+ experience. We’ll be back.

Driving into Gatlinburg was like entering a portal to another realm. It was the complete opposite of what we had just experienced. On a scale of 1-10, the level of energy increased from 1 to 10. There was literally something for anyone. Want to visit an aquarium? Ripley’s Aquarium is located in the center of Gatlinburg. Want to ride a chairlift to the top of a nearby mountain? Not a problem. Free moonshine tasting? There’s one on every corner. It was truly a site to behold. We actually checked out the aquarium, while we waited for our Airbnb rental to be ready. It was pretty cool, as they had a transparent tunnel that went through the shark tank - the girls (and adults) loved it. While we probably preferred the environment in Townsend, there was no doubt we enjoyed ourselves in Gatlinburg - and it was still really well located to the park.

The girls enjoying the aquarium

The craziest part of our stay was probably the wildfire threat. As we were sitting at lunch before the aquarium visit, cell phones all around us suddenly started blaring an alarm alerting us that evacuations were under way, due to a local fire. We also received another one of these loud alerts at 1:30 AM the next morning, waking us suddenly in the middle of the night. While the risk was very real, we never needed to evacuate our Airbnb. I won’t lie, we were glued to the TV for a few days wondering if we were going to need to leave quickly. Fortunately, we weren’t impacted, but MANY people were. The blaze burned over 3,300 acres and 300+ structures. At the time of my writing, the fire was still only 60% contained. My thoughts go out to all of those impacted.

Alright, on to the business side: For me, there isn’t much better than working from a beautiful location. I love the feeling of accomplishing a task or deliverable remotely and then walking out on a balcony, beach, veranda etc.. It’s probably a strange fascination, but to each our own…

Work from the cabin - FYI, these noise cancelling headphones from Bose are a must (link on our gear page)

The Dancing Bear Lodge provided exactly this. Each cabin had it’s own high speed WIFI, so I had plenty of bandwidth to host my meetings and complete my development work. My core skillset for my current role is Power BI development, so I move a lot of data - and I had no issues working from the cabin. The only drawback to Townsend (which I think is a contributor to what makes it special), is that the cell service isn’t great. So if I needed to rely on a cell connection for internet, I probably would have had to drive somewhere. Luckily, the cabin had me covered.

When it was too cold for the balcony, I setup inside at either the kitchen table or loft, with my portable Lepow monitor

In Gatlinburg, the weather was nice, so I setup my portable monitor on our balcony and took most of my calls from the great outdoors, overlooking the city. It’s times like these when I complete the proverbial “pinch-myself” because I’m truly bending the traditional work environment successfully and I love it. Besides the balcony “work space”, there was also a third bedroom/loft that I could have used as an office. For me, this is the huge benefit of using short term rentals over traditional hotel rooms.

Wrap up: In retrospect, this week’s work shined a spotlight on my new work arrangement (more on that in last week’s post) and our goal to be location independent. Obviously “spotlights” can be both good and bad.

Middle Prong Trail - Peaceful side of the Smokies

On one hand, I was able to flex my work load and meetings to better fit our schedule. By doing so, it definitely allowed me to better balance our media work and experiences, with making money. I wasn’t tied to a “9-5”. I didn’t have to sit there and twiddle my thumbs if the work was already done, or procrastinate deliverables, since I had to be “working for 8 hours anyway”. I could get my work done and move on. It was refreshing.

On the other hand, the spotlight was on me to deliver. In my mind, I needed to prove to everyone that I could deliver as much, if not more than before. So I put undue pressure on myself and this drove a bit of stress. Ahh the luxury of first world stress…gotta stay grounded.

Alright, enough babbling - what a week! Next week we’re headed across the United states in three days - with a stay in St. Louis and Hays, Kansas. Looking forward to sharing more.

Cheers,

Kyle

Want to follow along? Click here for our logistics map and high level details of each stop!

Want to check out the gear we use? Click here!

Lifestyle Design: Our new business, 70+ day road trip and workplace flexibility

What in the hell are we doing? I don’t like writing about “us” as the topic of a blog, but I wanted to at least update everyone on where we are at and what we’re doing, in case it helps others navigate unconventional lifestyles, lifestyle design, or alternative retirement. So what’s this have to do with “working from anywhere”? Well, if you can earn from anywhere, you can be anywhere…

I’m not sure when our lifestyle design obsession began, but it’s quickly gaining momentum. It started with a love for travel and new experiences. Slowly over time, we started to realize that we couldn’t travel MORE without changing our lifestyle (we both worked traditional “9-5s”). And then we had kids. It will likely come as a shocker to most people reading this (insert wink face here), but the thing about “9-5s” and kids, is that working traditional jobs doesn’t provide a ton of time to see them. Which frankly, kind of sucks - especially when you are passionate about spending time traveling (not to be confused with spending time, time traveling - ok, sorry - stupid dad joke).

So all of this led us to the question: “how could we earn income and do what we love, with the people we love?”. We knew right off that our lifestyle had three buckets of time - one for travel, one for family/friends - and then one bucket for earning income. So how could we fill each one equally?

Lifestyle design: This is where we ran head first into lifestyle design (LD). LD is all about defining what an ideal life looks like and then setting specific goals in order to achieve it. And for us, LD isn’t about “being rich”, or “retiring early” (both of which sound pretty great), but rather defining our day-to-day, month-to-month etc, so that we can optimize our time to earn income and be fulfilled. Since we already defined “how” we want to spend our days, (family/friends and travel), we can start aligning our financial bucket to support them. And that’s exactly what we’ve set off to do.

Alright, hopefully I didn’t lose you with that long introduction.

70+ day United States adventure: First and foremost, we just left for a 70+ day cross country road trip with our girls. We took our truck and we’re staying in hotels and short term rentals (like air bnb, homeaway, VRBO etc). Our goal is to see 11 national parks and over 20 states. We’re very grateful we get to do this with our girls and we’re going to try and see as many other friends and family as possible along the way. For the next 2+ months, our travel and family buckets will be FULL.

Earning from the road and working from anywhere: This is where our lifestyle design plan’s “rubber hits the road”. If we can’t earn income and fill the financial bucket, this trip could leave us with a pretty large hole in our pocket. And if we can’t sustain the lifestyle, it’s back to the proverbial salt mines (traditional 9-5s for us). So what’s the plan?

NOE Media LLC: We made it official! Nowhere on Earth will always be our brand, but we have set up an actual business entity named NOE Media LLC. Functionally, this doesn’t do anything more than allow us to open business accounts (for easy accounting) and protect us from personal liability. BUT officially, this means we’re earning income and making a “run at this thing”. So what do we do? We focus primarily on social media marketing for brands and offer the following:

• Virtual assets - Fully licensed (photos and short form videos) for websites, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts and TikTok

• In-feed Instagram posts/reels highlighting brands on our NOE socials

• YouTube video marketing (product/location appearing within an ad at the beginning of our video OR featured within the video itself)

• Blog posts featuring the product/service/location (fully licensed for client use, or posted on our website)

• Social media management (Consult on, or manage social platforms for brands)

Know a hotel, or product/service that needs any of the above? Please have them reach out!

My flexible job change: In addition to the NOE Media LLC, we also setup a consulting LLC and fell under agreement to convert my current corporate role to a remote, contractor based position. While this will detract from overall income and benefits, this gives us much more flexibility and the ability to invest more of my time in our media company, travel and our family. It’s all a balance…

Additional investments: So that it doesn’t go un-mentioned, we place a heavy emphasis on planning for our financial future. Just because we’re trying to find a balance between our three “buckets” I mentioned above (travel, family and money), it doesn’t mean that we don’t invest our earned income in the real estate and stock markets. Because we do! It fact, this is the engine that will one day lead us to financial freedom.

Alright lets wrap it up: Well, that was a lot about us. I hope it sheds light on the “why” for “working from anywhere” (WFA) and the foundation for this blog. It is truly integral to our lifestyle design goals. I also hope that it helps paint a very realistic picture for lifestyle design and the power of WFA. It’s easy for people to promote these “pie in the sky” ideas, but we’re living it, learning from it and hopefully helping others along the way.

Thanks for reading - cheers,

Kyle

Selling our RV?! Lifestyle Design and Financial Independence

Selling the RV and RV office?!

Climbing the RV for sunset! (and wine)

After one of the most incredible experiences of our lives, driving across the country and back in 80 days, we are selling our RV and dismantling the “RV Office”. But why?

Kailah and I’s goals are based upon the idea of both lifestyle design and financial freedom. For us, the lifestyle that we are pursuing is spending time with people we love AND experiencing new places, cultures, and people. The only way we can accomplish that is to free up our time, by increasing our passive income, reducing our expense obligations and therefore becoming financially independent. Otherwise, the majority of our time will be spent hammering away at our jobs and grinding our way to a traditional retirement.

For those new to financial freedom, it essentially means that your living expenses are covered by passive income (like rental property, dividends, royalties etc) and you don’t need to actively “work”. This is unlikely the ultimate goal for us, as we enjoy managing our businesses, but we want to minimize the day-to-day effort and give us time back to explore the world and see our families and friends. We don’t consider ourselves true FIRE advocates (financially independent retire early - look it up here if you want more info), but we follow many of the same principles.

Top of RV sunset selfie in Paso Robles, CA

I’ll write a subsequent article on our financial strategy, but for now…that was a long winded reason for why we are ditching the RV. It isn’t financially reasonable long term, given our goals.

So what are we going to do? Stop traveling the US? As Selima would say “No way, Jose!”.

Once we get the RV sold (we’re consigning it to an RV store in New Hampshire), we’re going to take our time looking for the next vehicle. We’re leaning towards purchasing a much smaller Class B Campervan RV, which we’ll use in combination with “air bnbs”. This will give us the flexibility to stay and work from anywhere, keep our costs down and allow us plenty of space in a rental. As the girls get older, a Class B will become easier and easier to spend time outdoors as a family (not to mention it fits in our driveway and Kailah and I can sneak away for a weekend while the grandparents watch the girls).

For the new vehicle, we’re looking for a combination of the following:

1. Best RV for families (space for the girls AND us to sleep)

2. Used (better value)

3. Best price point (pay it off quickly)

4. RV office (we need space to work, even if it is only a few days a month between air bnbs)

5. Small (Can double as a second vehicle, fit in the driveway and allowed in all state and national parks)

“Dry camping” in Beatty, Nevada

This may not be a surprise, but the fall of 2021 isn’t an ideal time to buy an RV. The demand for RVs is so high that manufacturers literally can’t keep up the supply, so this might provide a challenge for us in finding a quality used model.

Our goal is to hit the road again in the Spring to explore the northern part of the country, which we missed in 2021. This will give us an incredible opportunity to keep growing our NOE content business and see more of this beautiful country.

So we have 6 months to find our new RV. Stay tuned…

Kyle