Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Extra! Extra! Read All About The Senior Nomads!


Wednesday night, February 25th was sort of like Christmas Eve. We knew the story about our travels would be in the New York Times the next day - so it was hard to sleep. And hard not to peek under the "tree" in the middle of the night. We woke up to wonderful messages from friends and family who had seen the story on-line already since it had posted while we were sleeping. What an amazing feeling to see our lives chronicled this way!

We owe a great big thanks to the New York Times for the coverage they gave our adventures. If you didn't see the story, Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/garden/retirement-plan-an-airbnb-travel-adventure.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0 It has been humbling as well as gratifying to receive comments from around the world and are now swamped with e-mails from new readers of our blog. It would appear there are many of people out there ready to follow their dreams, too! We hope we can help.

Our son in Seattle sent this picture of the actual coverage in the paper. We were blown away!
Special thanks to Steven Kurutz who wrote the story. He interviewed us for an hour and a half by phone when we were in Essaouria, Morocco and then a week later for another hour when we were in Marrakech. He was patient and engaging and we think he did a great job of capturing essence of why we're Senior Nomads and our chosen lifestyle. Thank you Steve. Thanks also to photographer, Andy Haslam, who made us look so good in our cozy Paris airbnb.
Photo by Andy Haslam taken in our Paris airbnb

The idea to publicize our story started around a year ago when we had been on the road for 9 months. We were having the time of our lives living full-time in Airbnb apartments all over Europe. We thought someone at Airbnb might like to know about us, and our goal was to help them inspire others to do what we are doing. So, we wrote a blind e-mail outlining our experiences and sent it to three contact addresses we found on the website. We were pleasantly surprised when we got a reply a few weeks later from Airbnb's communications department. We made friends with two great people on the staff who loved our story and they set about finding ways to share it. We also had a great visit to their headquarters in San Francisco last fall when we were there to renew our visas at the French Consulate.

The French visas that help us travel easily throughout Europe's Schengen Zone
Voila! Six months later, the New York Times helped us reach our goal of telling their readers about how we decided to reinvent our retirement.

We started our blog almost two years ago because friends and family wanted to stay in touch and to vicariously enjoy our adventures. We never intended them for a larger audience, but that has certainly changed in the last two weeks! Thank you to the thousands of readers who have visited the blog! It's a little overwhelming - but from the feedback and emails we've received you've enjoyed reading them, so we are encouraged to keep posting. You have asked great questions about how we manage to live this lifestyle and we will be adding blogs with answers and tips along with our usual travel stories.

On the road again - packed up in Paris and heading for Italy
Today is day 610 of our Senior Nomads traveling lifestyle. We've now stayed in 48 airnbnb's, visited 29 countries and explored 69 cities!  Currently we are enjoying time in Rhodes, Greece. We are truly blessed and grateful for this opportunity and look forward to sharing it with you - and encouraging you to live your dream.

Debbie and Michael
Senior Nomads

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