work from anywhere — Work From Anywhere Blog

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.

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 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!

Last week was an interesting one because it was my first of two vacation weeks while we’ve been on the road. We also got very lucky with the timing of this first week because we were staying on Lake Powell, in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and we barely had any cell service - which would have completely prevented me from working. This week I’m chatting through how we handled both.

Family pic on Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

First and foremost, it was SO NICE to be off of work for the entire week. Since I’ve been working on an east coast schedule, while on the west coast, this usually meant getting up around 5 AM and working in the dark for a couple of hours. I never thought it would actually be nice to be woken up by a toddler again. It was also so much less stressful because Kailah and I didn’t have to work around my meeting schedule (not to mention that I could help Kailah with the girls). Normally, we would discuss my schedule and which meetings I couldn’t afford to have background noise during. She would then take the girls outside, or put on a movie in the back of the RV. Last week we didn’t have to worry about any of that!

Stroller ride before sunset over Lake Powell

The other half of “vacation” on the road is purely psychological. I put the word vacation in quotes because I don’t really like using the word. Mostly because of the traditional connotation it carries with it being “something we do to go somewhere and spend time away from home” - usually to disconnect from the day-to-day and let loose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and science shows it is beneficial for all of us, but for Kailah and I, I don’t think it accurately describes what we are trying to accomplish long term. With technology being what it is, we want to free our time and not be limited by the handful of weeks each year that we are allowed to be somewhere other than home. So, when we take time away from work (notice I didn’t use the V word) we try and plan action packed adventures, in our bucket list locations, so that we can experience as much as possible.

That’s where the psychology of this whole cross country RV adventure comes in. Aren’t we already doing that AND working? Whether its my “day job” during the day, or NOE work at night, Kailah and I are VERY busy on the road. We have so much to do on a daily basis, it was very tempting last week to just back fill my additional time with more “stuff”. It took until Monday afternoon, or Tuesday for us to say “STOP”. It was time to literally not work, not plan, not do anything, but enjoy spending time with each other and the girls in the beautiful Glen Canyon NRA.

Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas - Driftwood Lounge (Click on the photo for a direct link to the “Travel Like its 2019” shirts!)

To tie all of this back to WFA…last week we dodged a huge bullet in the form of cell reception. I had originally planned to work from Lake Powell for the entire week, with my previous employer. As fate would have it, I switched jobs and took these two weeks off in between. Not only was the Wi-Fi extremely slow, the cell reception was almost nonexistent. Both of them were around 1.5 mbps download speed, which would not have worked for any video calls and probably wouldn’t have provided enough bandwidth to hold reliable audio calls. Say nothing about managing data and reporting processes virtually (this is the first time that the Verizon coverage map and Outly cross reference has failed us). It would have either been a train wreck of a week, or we would have had to leave our best RV site yet (pictured below). The WFA gods were with us…