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Sharing our nomad life

alison

New Member
My husband and I retired early a little over two years ago and have been traveling since. I started a blog to share our experience with lots of photos, links, information and ideas and just thought I'd join and share it here in case others find it useful, interesting or helpful as they are planning trips. We have been staying a month in a location and just completed three months in Portugal (one month each in Lagos, Lisbon and Porto) so there are lots of recent posts about that beautiful country. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to help! Here's the link.

The Nomad Oma
 
Hello alison and welcome here. Things can be a bit slow on the forum, but sometimes there are also advantages to being a small community....
Congratulations on your retirement and I wish you good luck in your travel. Keep those nice photos coming...

You mentioned in your blog that you ran a B&B for a long time. Care to share an anecdote or two about that? Us travelers don't always get to see the flip side of "accommodation". And how do you feel about AirBnB? (Personally, I have enjoyed the concept very much as a guest, although I am well aware of the negative repercussions in many popular tourist destinations).
 
Thanks and just happy to find the forum and hopefully my posts during our three months are helpful to others. We have been loving retirement and the travel.
Our B&B experience was both wonderful, exhausting and fulfilling. We had over 1500 guests stay with us each year and I cleaned more bathrooms than I had my entire life! It was great to meet people from all over the world and over breakfast connect and help them with their travel questions in the Bozeman, MT area. Before we opened this we had actually run three rooms within our home on Airbnb. So we allowed guests use of our kitchen to cook if they wanted but didn't offer a breakfast to them and it was way more casual since they really just slept at night there and played during the day. It worked super well for us and we enjoyed it enough that this is what led us to actually purchase a property with the goal to make it an official Bed & Breakfast (we had 6 guest rooms each with their own bathroom). I believe this was the original intent of Airbnb - for someone to utilize unused rooms in their home and share space with other travelers. We had used it this way when traveling ourselves and had stayed in Italy, France, Germany and throughout the US west coast and had predominantly positive experiences. Since that time unfortunately there have been some negatives repercussions and changes to Airbnb. Many of these properties now seem to be owned by investors and managed by others and they have reduced housing in areas, raised rental prices, etc. I'm not a fan of those negatives and am sad that the idea of sharing space or creating a way for someone to have a small form of income and manage a property themselves (or attached to their home) has turned into this. We still use it for a way to find property as we are traveling on a monthly basis. By staying a month we typically are able to get a discounted rate and save ourselves some money by reducing the number of times we pay fees/cleaning costs/taxes. I feel conflicted about us using it when I know it has impacted some areas in such negative ways but it's also a wonderful way for people to travel and experience a more local feel. We don't like to stay in the heavy tourist areas or hotels and being able to find an Airbnb in a neighborhood has really added to our love of traveling places. So ya, that's kinda how it's worked for us!
 
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