Building a home wherever I roam

What four years of nomadic living taught me about community

Note from the editors: this is a guest post from Emily Ann Hill, author of Extracurricular Pursuits, a newsletter that intertwines her adventures in full-time travel with her quest for intentional living. With the rise of remote work, there’s been an explosion of ephemeral communities like Emily describes here. As we wrote in our post on traveling quaranteams, they are often a gateway drug to long-term coliving.

---

It’s difficult for me to answer the basic question of “where are you from?”  While I usually default to the technically correct answer of Long Island, New York, it’s a place I don’t identify with and which does a pretty awful job of telling my story. I haven’t lived in New York since I was 18, spending college and the formative years of my twenties in Baltimore, Maryland. I next ventured out to the west coast for a short stint in San Francisco, and more recently, I upped the ante of this transient lifestyle by living out of a suitcase and calling an endless rotation of international cities home.

For the past three years, the view outside my bedroom window has fluctuated between a Turkish mosque, a Chilean desert, and a Japanese fish market. I’ve slept in everything from luxurious Airbnb villas to questionable hostel bunk beds, becoming eerily comfortable with the constant carousel of where I lay my head at night. What’s been even more impactful, surprisingly, is that my cohabitants have also rotated among familiar friend groups to complete strangers.

When I first planned to travel full-time, my intentions were to check some sights off my bucket list, explore a few foreign cities and experience living abroad — all while taking advantage of being a location-independent freelancer — a digital nomad, if you can stand the cringe. Back then I was a rookie when it came to international travel, so I decided to sign up for a trip to Playa del Carmen, Mexico with one of several companies that run month-long coliving retreats for remote workers.

I envisioned days spent on beautiful Caribbean beaches, improving my Spanish and overindulging in endless street tacos. I put little thought into the fact that for the first time since college, I would also be living directly among 15 new friends in the same apartment complex. In fact, the first few days of the trip had a tangible moving into my freshman dorm nostalgia. Our daily routine involved exercising together, swapping professional advice, cooking family dinners, bonding over shared hobbies, and one particular night spent teaching a few first-timers how to throw a proper hurricane party. Don’t get me wrong — there were certainly plenty of tacos and beautiful beaches — but there were also endless laughs, shoulders to cry on, seasoned travelers to learn from, and lifelong bonds to be made.

While I won’t deny that solo travel can be super empowering, my most fun and adventurous memories have come from the safety net of traveling and living with friends: a month of epic hiking in Sedona, Arizona and a no-man’s-land selfie while in the midst of crossing the Costa Rica/Nicaragua border on foot.

Attending this organized trip not only provided a massive head-start towards feeling at ease living in a foreign country, but it also allowed me to discover the concept of coliving and tap into an entire community of immediately compatible new friends, many of which I would continue to live and travel with independently for years to come. Looking back on those first few weeks in Mexico, I absolutely miss the people more than the place.

Fast forward to today, and my living-abroad-comfort-zone has expanded wildly. Though I no longer need the hand-holding offered by these pre-packaged and company-led trips, my preference for coliving and traveling with a community remains. In fact, these days it’s common for my network of travel friends to self-organize trips to [City X] during [Month Y.]  Usually, one person takes charge of scouting out a large home to rent, and the bedrooms are claimed within minutes of the group chat announcement. By trading-in individual apartments for one larger shared home, we often get a lot more bang for our living space buck. Sometimes it even snowballs into others renting a second overflow accommodation on the same block, if possible.

The interesting thing is, it’s not because [City X] is necessarily on the top of everyone’s bucket list. Instead, it’s because we all understand and appreciate the benefits that come with living among friends. In our case, it just so happens to be in a different country every month. In 2023, I attended self-organized coliving group trips like this to Nicaragua, Austria, Cyprus and Mexico.

An impromptu road trip to Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia

In practical terms, we use the Splitwise app for group meals and expenses, divvy up the responsibility of planning weekend adventures, and treat decision-making with democratic WhatsApp polls. Things generally go smoothly, probably because many of the typical “roommate problems” are naturally solved by being constantly on the move: Not getting along with Sarah? No problem! If you can put up with her for 9 more days, you never have to agree to travel with her again. Joey doesn’t pull his weight with the household chores? Who cares! None of us have used a vacuum in years because we change accommodations every 30 days.

Now, I’m not saying this is a good thing — it would of course serve us better to improve our conflict resolution skills and not live like slobs — but it’s the reality of having a revolving front door, and it really gets you thinking about how to improve the configuration of your next trip. It’s a fascinating social experiment, because with constant change, likes and dislikes arrive with in-your-face clarity, and comparing one trip to another is oftentimes less about the city, and more about the living arrangement. 

For instance, Prague was stunning, but I disliked my time there because the five apartments we rented were too scattered for spontaneous hangs, and our too-large group made for constant logistical headaches. On the other hand, even in the massive metropolis of 15 million people that is Istanbul, nine friends living on the same block created a tight-knit community feel, as we constantly bumped into each other in cafés, rotated rooftop happy hour hosting duties and made those over-the-top family style Turkish breakfasts a daily ritual.

Our home for “Nomad Summer Camp,” a particularly special group coliving trip in July 2023. Twenty friends pooled our summer vacation funds to rent a spectacular ski chalet compound in the Austrian Alps. We spent the week hiking, kayaking, playing games and doing all sorts of other summer camp inspired activities.

As a semi-introvert, I sometimes do prefer living alone and have certainly enjoyed my fair share of solo travel. But I’ve learned to never be too far for too long.  I may opt for my own private studio apartment, but I will absolutely choose one that is less than a 3-minute walk from the main group house so I can still drop in for an impromptu morning coffee, afternoon coworking session, or spontaneous game night. There’s a bit of irony in this style of travel, of course — my nomadic friend group leans heavily American, and sometimes I catch myself wondering “why would I travel 7,000 miles to Cape Town just to go out to dinner with someone from Philadelphia?”  It’s important to seek out authentic experiences, attempt to make local friends and embrace the culture of each new country, but contrary to any social media highlight reels, travel isn’t always so glamorous, and on those particularly frustrating days it’s really nice to be able to fall back on a safety net of familiarity.

Photos from a group trip to Cyprus in Septmeber 2023, organized by a friend whose family hails from the beautiful Mediterranean island. We rented two side-by-side villas a block from his family’s home.

When we weren’t harvesting the olive trees out front, the wrap-around porch became our primary coworking and hangout space — often at the same time. Since much of the group worked U.S. hours, the time zone jump meant our work sessions went late into the night. More often than not, they were accompanied by a few bottles of wine and traditional Cypriot souvla cooked on the rotisserie charcoal grill out back.

As I near my fourth year of full-time travel, I’ve reached the predictable stage of the nomad life cycle where I’ve begun to slow down. The travel bug is (partially) out of my system, and lately I’ve been craving a daily routine that doesn’t involve hours wasted on flight delays or hoisting a heavy suitcase around the world. In fact, I’m currently in the process of evaluating where to plant (semi-permanent) roots — and thanks to “accidentally” experiencing coliving these past few years, my decision-making process has become notably different than any normal house-hunting venture.

Rather than selecting an apartment for its open floor plan or abundance of natural light, I’m more concerned with choosing a home that has a built-in community at its doorstep. A walkable neighborhood with friends in the immediate vicinity is now an absolute non-negotiable. In fact, many of my nomadic friends share the goal of settling down long-term together, not just in the same city, but in the same neighborhood. Ideally, it’s also a place where the locals are receptive to mingling with newbies, and somewhere that facilitates community building through its urbanism, access to hobbies, favorable weather, and general day-to-day tempo of life. It’s unlikely you’ll find any of us moving into an isolated suburban cul-de-sac.

So far, I’ve found two places that possibly fit the bill, and in 2024 I’m giving both of them a long-term test run while I also come to terms with the implications of not settling back down in the United States. Committing to a life that involves language barriers, time zone differences and visa applications is intimidating, but having a strong community to lean on makes it feel completely doable. Contrary to what society might tell you, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for how to live life. If you can find a home that provides not just a roof, but also a support system and feeling of belonging, it doesn’t matter how many detours your story has taken.

---

Suggested further reading: 

• Running a local lodge for your internet friends on Richard Bartlett’s substack 

• The Rise and Fall of the Cotty/BarBAEdos Commune

• The Story of Whale House