2024 marks one more year behind us as full time nomads! On December 31 not only did we look forward to a new year, we celebrated 7 years since we left our home on Grand Cayman to live a life of home free travel. We have been traveling for 84 months or 364 weeks or 2,555 days!!! Every year we are amazed at how fast the time has gone by and this year has been another interesting one, we added 5 new countries to our destination list and spent a significant amount of time in Asia for the first time 😊 We will definitely be heading to SE Asia again.
I am a bit of numbers geek so our travel stats always interest me! Over the past 7 years we have traveled 122,449 miles/197,053 kilometers through 33 countries.
2024 was a fun travel year for us! At the start of the year we were still in Chiang Mai, Thailand where we remained until mid January before flying to Bangkok. Our week in Bangkok did not go as planned, Blair needed dental surgery so most of our sightseeing plans went out the window but it was important for Blair to have this surgery done while we were in a large city renowned for it’s medical tourism. All went well 😊
From Bangkok we flew to Siem Reap, one of my favorite places in SE Asia, for 3 weeks of touring all the magnificent temples in the region and getting to know Siem Reap. I love it here and I’m sure we will be back! Next up was a week in Phnom Penh, which we did not care for and will likely never go back, but we had a reason to go there and that was to get on our river cruise down the Mekong River to Saigon/HCMC in Vietnam. We enjoyed the 3 day cruise and it was a highlight of 2024. Saigon/HCMC is a huge city so we kept our stay there to a minimum before heading to Da Nang. Between Da Nang and Hoi-An (just 40 minutes south) we had planned a 42 day stay but at the end of it we had fallen in love with the area and extended our stay in Da Nang by 29 more days. I think that extra time to unwind, not travel and meet up with other nomads was just what we needed before we began 6 weeks of fast (for us) travel. Most of that 6 weeks was spent around northern Vietnam but we had to slip into Laos to renew our Vietnamese visas so we spent 9 days in Luang Prabang, another place we thoroughly enjoyed and would go back to. Of all the places we toured in northern Vietnam I think Ninh Binh made the biggest impression on us with its stunning scenery, we would go back there.
Once we finished our SE Asia travels our next stop was Japan, but we decided to stop in Seoul for a week, because it was on the way! Japan ended up only being 9 days because on the advice of a Japanese friend, we would not enjoy being there in the summer, it’s just too hot. But we did tick off a wish list item while in Japan, riding the bullet train, another highlight of our year. Cutting our time in Japan short we flew to Calgary in mid June where we stayed until mid September.
After 3 months in Calgary, we had almost 8 weeks to spare before flying to Europe so we decided to return to Loreto Bay, Baja, Mexico. We have been here before and it was an easy place to relax and enjoy some lovely warm weather in a familiar location. After Mexico it was a quick stop in Calgary to re-pack our suitcases and fly to Paris where we picked up our leased car and hit the road taking 16 days to make our way through France, Spain and down to The Algarve in Portugal where we remained until the end of the year.
The travel stats for 2024 shown below list 12 countries visited during the year but the 5 new ones for us were Cambodia, Japan, Laos, South Korea and Vietnam.
How did this year compare to our previous years? Here are just a few of our stats for the past 7 years:
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | |
| Flights taken | 13 | 7 | 5 | 4 | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| Airlines flown with | 5 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 6 |
| Countries visited | 11 | 15 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 11 | 12 |
| Cities lived in | 26 | 29 | 23 | 8 | 18 | 38 | 29 |
| Apartments rented | 12 | 23 | 20 | 6 | 18 | 34 | 17 |
| Nights in apartments | 200 | 302 | 260 | 360 | 363 | 341 | 206 |
| Hotels booked | 19 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 12 |
| Nights in hotels | 143 | 17 | 9 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 30 |
| Cars rented | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 11 | 4 | 4 |
| Countries we’ve driven in | 5 | 8 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 7 |
| Phone numbers we’ve had | 8 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 6 |
| Gyms we’ve joined | 8 | 13 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 25 | 6 |
It was one of our better years looking a the number of countries visited with 6 of the 11 in close proximity to each other around Asia. It was also the year we took the most flights, most of them being short hops around Asia. The number of hotels is significantly higher than any other year and that’s because in SE Asia it’s more economical to stay in a hotel with breakfast included and eat out the rest of the time. It’s less expensive to go out for dinner every day than it is to try and cook at home so we did not cook for almost 6 months!!
Of the 26 cities we lived in during 2024, were would we go back to? Siem Reap, for the amazing history of the surrounding area***Da Nang, for the low cost of living, good food and excellent beach***Ninh Binh, for the breathtaking scenery***Loreto Bay, for the warm weather, lap pool and paddleboarding***Bordeaux, it’s just one of those places we can return to over and over***Tokyo, because our time was cut short there.
SE Asia is also incredibly budget friendly leaving us 15% under budget at the end of the year, and that’s with just 6 months in SE Asia. Our accommodation costs were 20% under budget contributing significantly to our yearly savings and despite taking a lot of flights, our transportation costs were under budget by 12%, mostly because we did not rent a car anywhere in Asia. All in all, it was a good year for the pocketbook and much less expensive than living in Canada full time would be, plus we get to live in some pretty cool places. Looks like we can continue to afford this lifestyle, because we still have so much more to see! Plus, I think 2025 may be an expensive year with a safari in our plans so we will take our savings from 2024 and put them to good use during the upcoming year.
As we look back over the past seven years we have been to some truly unforgettable places and had some unforgettable experiences. Here are a few of our favorite memories:
The Matterhorn in Switzerland***Mont Saint Michel in France***Petra, Jordan***Dubai, UAE***Italy….anywhere😊***Istanbul, Turkey***The Caminito del Ray walk in Spain***Cappadocia, Turkey and our balloon ride***The Algarve Coast, Portugal***The Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand***The Great Ocean Road in Australia***Scuba diving near Adelaide and finding a Leafy Sea Dragon***The Sunshine Coast of Australia***The Dolomites, Italy***The Vatican in Rome, Italy***Bryce Canyon, USA***Cliffs of Moher, Ireland***The history in Derry/Londonderry, Ireland***The Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur***Angkor Archeological Park, Cambodia***Ninh Binh, Vietnam***
He is a man of few words, but here are Blair’s thoughts on 2024:
Well, 2024 went pretty much according to plan, which is a nice change. I enjoyed the remainder of our SE Asia journey very much. Siem Reap is a favorite of ours because there is so much to see and the people are so friendly, although a tree root jumped out and tried to kill me on a morning run 🤔
As Susan explained we really enjoyed Da Nang with its world class beach, good food, good beer and again very friendly people.
South Korea and Japan were great with so much history, we need to do more of Japan.
As usual I really enjoyed our summer in Calgary, golfing with my brothers and their wives, seeing friends and cycling.
Loreto Bay is a great place to chill and get fit. As I mentioned in the 2021 post, running in Loreto Bay is really nice and they expanded their gym. Susan spent a lot of time swimming in the fabulous lap pool, and we were on the paddle boards every calm day.
The last month of 2024 and first month of 2025 is in The Algarve, Portugal. We have been here before and are enjoying the lack of crowds due to it being off season. Lots more beach running and walking, just a lot cooler temps. On that note I am realizing more and more that I like being warm. I think future travel plans will have to focus more on no colder than 20C. 😊
All in all, a great year and I am really looking forward to Africa in 2025.
Thanks Blair for your comments on 2024, it’s nice for people to hear from you once a year 😊
Life is not all sunshine and roses, so aside from places and numbers, how are we doing? When we began this journey our plan was to do this for 10 years and we are still on track with that time frame. 7 years seems like a long time in some respects and in others the years have gone by more quickly than we imagined, some days we lament that “we only have 3 years left”. Why only 3 more years? As Canadians we have yet to find any health insurance plan that will cover us for a full year once we hit 70 years of age. Yes, we can get short term insurance but the caveat with all these policies is that we must live in Canada for 5 to 6 months every year and qualify for provincial health care. So even though we may not wish to settle down part time, we may have no choice. That being said, once we reach 70 we may be quite happy to have a home base and travel for just the 6 or 7 months a year that we are allowed. We are finding that the time and effort involved in full time travel planning is getting a bit tedious and doing less of that sounds appealing. Plus, we find it challenging to stay fit and healthy while traveling which is why we enjoyed our 8 weeks in Loreto Bay this past fall when pretty much all we did was exercise and eat healthy. So, for a variety of reasons it may not be such a bad thing to have a home base when we move into our next decade.
But before we worry about the future, we have some exciting plans coming up in early 2025. Our first visit to South Africa, a safari in Tanzania and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. We toured Egypt way back in 2001 on vacation but this will be our first visit to the African continent spending more than a couple of weeks on a holiday. We are looking forward to heading somewhere completely new and different from our past nomadic travels.
While we are busy making our 2025 plans, we hope you are looking forward to your own year of joy, adventure and discovery. Time is marching on and there is so much more out there to experience, so off we go into Year 8 as nomads 👣👣
Thanks for joining us on our travels, we love and appreciate having you along!!
Susan and Blair
I will leave you with a few of my favorite photographs from this past year of travel (click on any one to enlarge)
