Home On The Road

The motorcycle taxis of Nairobi no longer offer helmets. In the age of Covid-19, sharing headgear is considered a greater health risk than head trauma. I wish I could say I ran straight to the nearest motorcycle, or “boda boda” shop to buy some protection, but I didn’t. Instead, I peeled out — bare headed – on a red and black Yamaha dirt bike, careening along a patchwork brick and river rock road between matatu buses emblazoned with portraits of Notorious B.I.G and (for some reason) actor Scoot McNary. After all, I was fully vaccinated. I felt invincible.

Three months earlier, in August of 2021, my wife Marissa and I had rented our tiny townhouse in Long Island to two strangers, dropped our cats off at their “aunt” and “uncle’s” apartment in Manhattan, and headed West with everything we owned in a 10-foot U-haul. On the itinerary were both coasts of the United States, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Kenya, Spain and England. After 15 months living and working in less than 1000 sq. feet, we were ready to put our newly honed work-from-home skills to the test on the open road. Perhaps in the pandemic’s curious logic, the same scourge that killed six-million people could liberate us.

There was an urgency to our plans. Marissa’s first novel The World Gives Way, had just hit bookshelves around the U.S. and after years of delay, we were finally ready to start a family. We had both traveled extensively before we met, but less so together. That meant that many of our favorite stories didn’t involve one another. This seemed our last chance for a shared Grand Tour before the bonds of domesticity replaced those of the virus.

There were other factors at play. Our parents are all now in their 70s and we believed this trip might be our last chance to spend a significant chunk of time with them. As such, instead of just jetting straight to Singapore, we set aside six weeks in Alton, New Hampshire, where Marissa’s family lives, and in Phoenix, where most of my family lives, followed by a week in Mexico to see my dad and his wife. That would still leave nine months for our Grand Tour, but give us some bonus time with our aging parents.

We were hardly alone in our wanderlust. Last year an estimated 35 million digital nomads roved around the globe, according Singapore-based Nomad List, a membership-based group of 45,000 travelers. Half of them were American. Nearly 80% are male, most of them in their 30s (I’m older), and the lions share (34%) are making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. Almost all (97%) are fully vaccinated, including my wife and me. And, like most remote workers, our fellow wanderers work hard: Since the Work From Home era started in the winter of 2020, productivity has actually increased 67% among those whose jobs afforded them the luxury of working remotely.

Starting the adventure with family though meant the first skill I had to develop was perhaps the most difficult. I had to chill out. My first day with the in-laws—somewhere between pounding my desk about a source standing me up and dropping countless F-bombs over a meal thoughtlessly crammed down my gullet—my mother-in-law leaned over to her daughter and asked, “Is he okay?” “Oh yeah,” Marissa replied. “He just talks loud at work.” On good days, I’ve been told I have an actor's ability to project. On bad days, the neighbors would come over to make sure everything was okay.

By the time I made it to Arizona, however, I learned to button-up a bit and even started taking civilized lunches in the dining room with my family. One day, I left my mom’s home altogether and had some quinoa-steak bowls with two high-school friends and took an evening dip in one of Phoenix’s seemingly mandatory back-yard pools. Another bonus: By starting the trip with our families we were able to save the money we’d normally spend on rent for future travel expenses. I am a journalist; my wife is a novelist. Being frugal was a requirement if we were going to pull this off. Every flight – excepting the very last leg from London to New York – was paid for with frequent flier miles.

At the private Passport Health clinic in Phoenix, just before departing to Mexico, we were presented with a menu of vaccines for our imminent overseas trips, covering everything from Japanese encephalitis to cholera. It was unclear what we actually needed. But a horror story about a friend of a friend passing through customs in Kenya and being given a choice between one room for those who had the yellow fever vaccine, and another room with some random guy holding a needle in one hand while the other beckoned for cash, motivated us to be safe rather than sorry.

After a brief account of the more disgusting cholera symptoms (including the phrase “oatmeal textured”), during which we concluded I’d probably caught the disease in Egypt in 2000, we opted for a yellow-fever vaccine and a regimen of malaria pills to take daily during our entire six weeks in Kenya, a nice compliment to the two doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine we already had swirling around inside us. As an extra precaution we also picked up three giant bottles of picaridin, the more environmentally friendly alternative to Deet mosquito repellent.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that our changing routines were slowly reconnecting us to a healthier work-life balance. In Arizona, I bought a new pair of running shoes for the first time in years and started taking light jogs through the South Mountain desert trails on which I was running 20 years earlier when I first learned about the September 11 attack. Marissa did a morning yoga routine watching the sunrise over the North shore of Mexico’s largest lake, Lago de Chapala. In the jungle where my dad lives, I worked in a studio, protected from curious hummingbirds by curtains made of bamboo and filbert nuts.

The technical problems didn’t really start until I took my first Zoom call in Mexico, when the best Internet money could buy still resulted in conversations that made it seem like the person on the other side was a glitched-out Max Headroom. This wasn’t going to work. I desperately rang my phone company back home, long distance be damned, and begged them to help me out. They found some long dormant package for travelers that let me turn my phone into a hotspot for a mere $13 a month.

In Kenya, the technical issues got more serious. Per the doctor’s orders, a week before we left Mexico, we started taking our daily dose of malaria pills, and set off for the Great Rift Valley, home to some of the earliest humans — and a burgeoning cryptocurrency scene. For the first couple days we worked in the guest bedroom at our Airbnb on the 10th floor of a building in the Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. A beneficial exchange rate meant I had a real home office for the first time during the pandemic, but I ended up being too far away from our Internet router, and video calls once again degraded into fragmented audio and pixelated portraits.

To make matters worse, twice a week, my wife remotely taught a creative writing class at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop in Brooklyn, now starting at 3am Kenya time. I’m a light sleeper, so I popped a sleeping pill on these nights, while she slept and worked in the guest room until 5am. After two days of running back and forth between the living room for video calls and our shared office to write and teach—and moving our limited supply of power converters from room to room depending on the time of day—we relocated the desk to the living room and bought a power strip converter from a French grocer at the local mall.

Technical issues aside, the experience was life changing. On our very first night in Africa, we taught ourselves how to cook ugali nyama choma na kachumbari, a form of maize meal, grilled goat and a salad similar to bruschetta, but with coriander leaves instead of basil. Six weeks later, chronically overworked and under-slept, we joined a dozen crypto entrepreneurs around a campfire on the banks of a swamp named after the giant hippos that once lived there, raising a hollowed-out cow horn filled with homemade spirits, called ratish, and toasted each other's health.

This was however complicated by the fact that after testing negative for Covid before boarding our flight from Nairobi to London, my wife tested positive upon arrival. That meant we spent the first ten days in London, in our tiny studio apartment just outside Notting Hill, in North Kensington, in quarantine. England’s health service offered us the support of local volunteers who would bring us groceries, but we opted for a delivery service that hides supplies in apartments and storage facilities around London, and within 20 minutes our first delivery arrived, including chips (French fries), coffee, and a bottle of whiskey.

It was a miracle that not only did we not go broke, but we managed to save at the same rate we had been back home. Higher rental rates helped. More than 320,000 New Yorkers were suddenly looking to rent property just outside the city’s limits. We used that income for rent abroad, in places that were largely cheaper than Long Island. The few hundred extra dollars we received from our tenants each month meant we could splurge on an extra wooden sculpture on Safari with the Masaai tribe in Southern Kenya or a pair of dragon-scale cufflinks from Henry Poole & Row, the oldest tailor on London’s storied Savile Row. We ended the year having met our annual savings goal, and celebrated in style with bottles of champagne at the Three Goats Heads Tavern in Oxford, England.

If the goal of the trip was to escape quarantine malaise, it was a huge success. Working from home on the road transformed all the mundane tasks of life—from grocery shopping to doing laundry—into adventures we’ll never forget. We never would have guessed that turning those humdrum moments into memories made the actual tasks of work feel more like a choice, and a joyful one at that. For a few months we’d truly escaped the rat race. But if the goal was to prepare for a life of grown-up decisions and changing diapers, we still haven’t begun. No ceremonial trip, it turns out, can prepare you to make that leap. I’m still terrified.

Technically, we’re still working from home on the road, and still learning the tricks of the trade. While our trip was supposed to last a year, Marissa ended up accepting a job teaching creative writing at her alma mater, Stony Brook University , and we returned home six months early. No Singapore, no South Korea, no Spain. Since our tenants still have a lease for at least another five months we ended up living in yet another Airbnb, this one, non-exotically, located just up the road from our property. But in the corner of my most recent temporary desk—wedged between a book on the history of China’s central bank and a book on blockchain in Outer Space—sits my very own hollowed out horn, a gift, for the next time we raise a toast of ratish with friends in Kenya.