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

Cost of Greece Vacation: Here are ALL our numbers!

In this post I discuss how we spend our money abroad and then break down the cost of our Greece vacation. From a cost perspective, I’ll dive into how we got around, what type of restaurant we dined at and which hotels we chose.

Overview of how we spend money and our style

When discussing money and travel abroad, it always seems like such a mystery as to how much things cost. I’m not sure if this is a result of the travel agent industry, or because culturally we don’t like to talk about money…but it’s an issue. (It also could simply be because it’s difficult to budget a trip until you plan it and the average person isn’t going to spend time on the entire planning process).

The truth of the matter is that we all travel differently depending on our style, financial situation, families etc.. For example, the person who has no kids and wants to travel frugally, can grab a backpack full of clothes, get the cheapest plane ticket they can find to Portugal and stay in hostels. On the other hand, a full family of four, who wants to be comfortable visiting Iceland, has a larger budget and wants to travel comfortably, might spend a LOT more money. Those two trips are dramatically different in cost.

Watching the sunset in Imerovigli (Santorini) with a bottle of local white wine!

For Kailah and I, we approach our time abroad “somewhere in the middle” when it comes to money. Below are the factors we consider relevant to a traveling budget and the route we took for our Greece trip:

1. Location: We targeted the “hot” locations (like Athens, Mykonos and Santorini), which obvious came with a larger price tag than others.

2. Duration: We limited our trip to 7 nights - flying out on Friday night and back home on the following Saturday. We have kids, so we didn’t want to leave them for much longer than that.

3. Family travel: This was a couples trip, so we were much more flexible this time around and could book smaller accommodations.

4. Accommodations: Lets just say…our appetite for international travel was “high” when we planned this trip. While we didn’t spend for luxury (as we rarely do), we definitely didn’t look to save money on accommodations.

5. Restaurants: We went “all-in” on food and drinks (that’s our style). Again, we didn’t look for luxury, but easily spent $150-$200 a night on some dinners.

6. Logistics: We moved around a lot during this trip, driving up cost a bit (4 different locations in the first 4 days). Planes are generally the largest cost in this category, but ferries and car transfers definitely crept up on us.

Mid-ferry beers on our way from Mykonos to Paros (yes, things like this wound up in our “food and drink” cost)

Summary of expenses

The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Drum roll please…the Greece cost for our 7 nights was…

$5,863.92 (all in, including flights)

The official break down by category is as follows:

• Accommodations: $1,293.85

• Food and drink: 2,255.91

• Parking: $323.00

• Transportation: 1,991.17

I’ll break down each category a little…

Our Santorini balcony and hot tub at Zenith Blue Villas (respect the “farmers tan” ;) )

Accommodations: Since we stayed 7 nights, our average cost ran at a rate of $185 a night. Which is extremely reasonable in my mind. Especially including that we stayed ON the caldera in Santorini for three nights. That was our most expensive rate at ~$230 a night. Our most inexpensive was $105 for our VERY well located boutique hotel room in Mykonos (Hotel Carbonaki).

Food and drink: Yea…we know. This sounds like A LOT to spend in a week. And it probably is. But if you read our restaurant travel style above, you can easily see how we spent that much (and it was worth it!). A few examples of where we ate…

Our Mykonos dinner at Karavaki overlooking the beautiful town and harbor at sunset summed $185

Dinner at Karavaki overlooking Mykonos

Our first dinner overlooking the caldera in Santorini at the Aegeon Restaurant summed $159

Our final dinner in Santorini cost us $194 at Oia Gefsis in Oia (Santorini)

Parking: $323 is unnecessary here. The economy garage was closed during covid, so we chose to park in central parking at Boston Logan. We easily could have parked at a “park-and-fly” for a much better rate.

Transportation: We saved on flights by using points and only spent $681 to get to Greece. We tacked on another $302 for our flight getting us from Santorini back to Athens. The remaining dollars spent went to ferries and car transport, with the majority being allocated to Ubers and hotel transfers.

To sum it all up…

Exploring Mykonos and found this spot in front of the windmills!

Before I let you go, I want to make sure to drive one point home. I’m sure I sound like a broken record by now, but…cost is relative. This trip fit our style for THIS adventure (styles can change, even between trips!). We could have done it cheaper and we could have done it MUCH more expensive. And with that being said, if we had more flexibility with our time, we probably would have looked to save cash by eating in more and finding longer term accommodations.

If you are interested in all of the details of our Greece 2021 trip, check out our itinerary located here. (you can also see our 2017 Greece details here!).

I hope this helps with future planning and gives transparency into the cost of travel to Greece!

Kyle

Want alerts for when new blogs are posted? Scroll down and subscribe to our email list!

***If you haven’t seen our YouTube videos on our October 2021 trip, check them out below!