Above: Everything I owned in the sidewalk waiting for the bus to the airport

After being abroad for six years, moving home was scarier than leaving in the first place.

When I say ‘home’ I mean returning to North America, where people speak English, the culture feels less exotic, and food and housing are incredibly expensive compared to Asia and Central America, where I’d been living.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to earn enough money as a travel writer to get by. I was worried about running into tax problems after having an international  bank account for so long. And, more than anything, I was afraid that I’d get sucked into the North American rat race that had consumed so many of my friends, and somehow forget about the freedom of travel.

Basically, I was afraid of becoming broke and boring.

So, you’re probably wondering, why would I move home?

I had to. There were so many reasons. My father’s health has been slowly getting worse and, although he’s not in imminent danger, it’s apparent that he’s not going to be around forever. As amazing as travel is, it’s certainly not more important than making the most of the dwindling time that I have with my father.

Also, my sister is having a baby. In fact, as I write this, she’s 8 days overdue and ready to bring my parents’ first grandchild into the world at any moment. I was always close with my aunts, uncles, and cousins growing up. I don’t want to be a distant uncle.

And, my girlfriend Emilie also had to be near her family because a close family member  became ill.

A lot of travel bloggers write about perpetual travel. They talk about breaking free and living some overly-idealized life on the road. They tell you that you can gain financial independence, leave your job, and travel forever.

But, for most people, that’s not realistic.

Long-term travel is great for a lot of people at certain times in their lives. However, after a certain age many of us want a place we can call home. We want to spend time with the people we love while we still can. We want to explore our relationships with our families and friends which, in its own way, is just as challenging, frightening, and rewarding, as exploring the jungles of Borneo or the swimming among whale sharks in the Philippines.

Many of the best-known travel bloggers have decided to spend more of their time settled in one place. Last year Nomadic Matt announced that he was choosing a home over life on the road.  My good friend Ayngelina of Bacon is Magic had many of the same concerns I did when she moved home last year. This story is a familiar one. The traveler returns home to find that the life there had gone on without them and they no longer fit in

There’s not getting around it. Moving home is hard, But, I’m here to tell you that, although it’s frightening and depressing, it’s OK to move home.

There are a lot of upsides to my new life in Utah.

First, I can be healthy — which is extremely hard to do on the road. I can go to the gym and cook for myself (I don’t care much for restaurant food) as much as I want to. I love that.

Second, like a lot of people, I never explored as much near my home as I should have. When you live in a place, you tend to forget that it deserves as much exploration as a foreign one.

Third, I can finally, after years of blistering sun, annoying sand, and swimming in warm ocean waters, enjoy a full season of freezing my ass off on the ski hill.

Last, having a home doesn’t mean you can’t travel. I still get out a fair bit. Here’s what I’ve done at home and abroad since I’ve been back:

• Spent a week in Mazatlan, Mexico.
• Spent a week hiking, surfing, and exploring small islands in Taiwan.
• Climbed a mountain near my hometown that I’ve wanted to climb for years.
• Hiked for three days in beautiful Zion National Park.
• Canoed for a week through Manitoba’s pristine backcountry (link forthcoming).
• Gone horseback riding in Utah’s beautiful Soldier Hollow (link forthcoming).

And best of all, I’ve gotten to know Emilie’s wonderful family, and spent time catching up with my own.

If you’re tired of travel, you’re not alone, and it’s OK to go home. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Adventure is not an activity, it’s a state of mind.

Never forget, there’s treasure everywhere.

The post Why Perpetual Travel is Unrealistic (and It’s OK to Go Home) appeared first on XpatMatt.

A lot of people email me and ask me how I became a travel writer, so I decided to write this post so that I could just send them a link to it and they’d get a good answer to their question.

This post is not meant to be a guide to becoming a travel writer. It’s just meant to show how I got here.

If you’re interested in learning more, I’ve also written about my evolution as a writer on my About Me page.

I’ve Always Wanted to Be a Writer

When I was ten years old I wrote my first book — a children’s book about a cat — during summer vacation. In high school I took creative writing and got an ‘A’.

I didn’t want to be a travel writer back then. I wanted to write moving novels about the human condition like Steinbeck and Dostoyevsky.

After high school I enrolled in the University of Victoria’s creative writing program. I made a few friends. We drank a lot, because that’s what writers are supposed to do. We wrote weird experimental prose because that’s what we believed good artists did. We’d show up to class hungover and write poetry on the blackboard before anyone got there.

Nobody was very impressed.

I wrote one extremely dark nonsensical short story on which the instructor wrote the comment, “Pure nihilism does not make a story.”  I burned one poem in front the class while reading it — The Fire Poem.

My teacher didn’t like The Fire Poem, but I still think it was pretty good. The presentation must have biased her.

Since my professors didn’t recognize my natural genius, I switched to the Professional Writing (i.e. journalism) program planning to earn money writing for magazines until I published my first novel.

I’ve managed to accomplish the former, but I’m still working on the latter.

Just Another Starving Writer

After I graduated I moved to Vancouver where I worked various crappy jobs (bartending, tutoring, mowing lawns, planting trees) and wrote in my spare time. I submitted stories to any place that would publish me — and a lot that wouldn’t — usually for little or no pay.

After a year-and-a-half of doing all my writing between 6 and 7 a.m. and barely being able to pay the bills, I made one of the best decisions of my life: I decided to move to Taiwan to teach English

Taiwan and Xpat Magazine

In Taiwan I could English 20 hours per week, make enough pay my student loans, live in a nice apartment, go out on the weekends, and still have a bit of money left over.

To jumpstart my writing career, I decided to use my newfound time and money to start a magazine. I called it Xpat.

Although Xpat would turn out to be quite successful, I’d later learn that it was also a mistake (I’ll get into that a bit later).

I worked about 60 hours a week on Xpat. The learning curve was steep.

I had no budget, so I found young creatives who were looking to build their portfolios and convinced them to help me make a magazine. Since my ‘staff’ was all volunteers, I could never expect everyone to finish their work on time. During the production of any given issue, I was guaranteed to have at least a couple of volunteers go MIA and I’d have to finish their work.

So, I had to learn how to do everything.

I learned Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign and designed about half of the issues myself. I built the magazine’s website in Dreamweaver using the elementary skills I learned in University. I wrote articles, edited everything, and on the weekends I rode my motorcyle to different cities in Taiwan to sell advertising to pay for the magazine to be printed.

My sales pitch was one of the first conversations I learned to have in Mandarin.

Over the next two years I grew Xpat into one of the biggest and best-known all-English magazines in Taiwan.

Then, after three years, I sold it.

Freelancing

Although I gained experience as an editor and learned volumes about running a business, Xpat did little to help me advance my writing career.

I thought that experience as a magazine editor would give me a foot in the door when writing query letters to magazines.

I was wrong.

The only boost my career as a writer received from Xpat was the fact that a few editors in Taiwan knew my name. I had no paying gigs and very few connections to editors, which are the the two most important elements in a freelancer’s career.

Without Xpat, my writing lacked direction. I sent a funny story to McSweeney’s, which they rejected (though I hold to this day that it’s as good as anything on their website).  I wrote a feature about a Taiwanese biker gang for a local news publication.

Although I was getting published, I was not selling nearly enough of my work to earn a living.

I decided that I needed to become an expert in a niche. It’s much easier to convince editors to buy your articles when you’re an expert on something. There were few writers publishing stories about travel in Taiwan, and I knew a lot about the country, so I decided to become a travel writer.

Choosing a topic to focus on was definitely a step in the right direction.

Before long I was writing a column for Transitions Abroad. And, while writing an article for that column I made a discovery that would change my direction as a writer dramatically.

Blogging

The editor at Transitions Abroad suggested that I interview some successful travel bloggers.

At that time I had no idea what blogging was. Like many ‘professional’ writers, I looked down on it. I was amazed to learn when I interviewed Nomadic Matt that he was making more than $3000 each month.  That convinced me to get serious about my own website which, until that point, had simply been a resume and list of links to my published articles.

So, I began writing blog posts semi-regularly and, after about a year, my blog started to bring in money.

In the meantime I also started blogging occasionally for the Huffington Post for exposure.

It was 2010 — the year that I got serious about making money writing. As my desire to earn a full-time living as a writer increased, I realized a couple of thing.

First, I saw that I should have started blogging much earlier. Nomadic Matt started his website around the same time that I started Xpat. If I’d put all the time and money that I put into my magazine into a blog, I would have been much farther ahead.

However, it was too late to start a budget travel blog. There were already dozens of good ones. The niche was full.

Second, I realized that I was very different from other travel writers. I didn’t want to write about exotic foods and luxury hotels. I liked traveling by the seat of my pants, getting lost, riding motorcycles in monsoons, and climbing mountains of bat poo.

One afternoon I typed “adventure travel blog” into Google. A few blogs that belonged to magazines showed up, but there were no independent adventure travel blogs. I decided that would be my niche.

It fit my personality perfectly and it was one of the best things I could have done for my writing career.

Travel Writer 2.0

Remaking my blog as an adventure travel site was a big turning point for me. I wanted to focus more on setting it up as a business.

I spent a lot of time making it look as professional as possible. I put up carefully crafted writing and photography portfolios. After that, there was a marked difference in the way editors responded to my queries.

Several editors made comments about it. In fact, my first really good assignments came not from people who I had pitched, but from people who had only seen my website.

This website has probably sold more articles for me than all the experience I gained running Xpat, all the hours I spent studying in University, and all of the clips I’ve amassed, combined.

These days, I continue to work on my blog and in hopes of building a large audience that attract a long-term sponsor and expanding my business.

I continue to write for Transitions Abroad, the Huffington Post, Travel + Escape, and write the About.com Snowboarding Guide.

I also continue to pitch and write for magazines — most recently En Voyage (Eva Air’s inflight magazine) and Kootenay Mountain Culture.

I haven’t finished that novel yet, but I will.

The post How I Became a Travel Writer appeared first on XpatMatt.

So, here’s a bit of news: I’m moving to Salt Lake City, Utah!

If you’ve been following my blog or social media accounts then you probably have the impression that I’ve either been living in Taiwan, or have been traveling constantly. The truth is that, with the exception of a few short trips (Taiwan, Mexico, and Canada) I’ve been in the USA since February.

Since February, my girlfriend Emilie and I have been spending most of our time in Santa Clara, California, where Emilie had been helping out her sister who has been struggling with cancer.  I can’t really tell you how incredibly strong the family has been through this awful ordeal. Emilie’s sister has a small house with three bedrooms and a garage where she lives with her husband and two children.

When she was diagnosed last September Emilie moved into her garage to help out. Since then Emilie has been the primary caretaker for both her sister and her sister’s children. That’s right. Two children. Once cancer patient. Living in a garage. For almost a year.

I can’t tell you how strong she has been.

I was in Asia when Emilie’s sister was diagnosed and I came back as soon as I could (February) to try and help out. Although I’ve done my best to help out around the house and take a bit of the load off of Emilie, my writing work keeps me very busy. I wish I could have done more. I certainly didn’t do nearly as much as Emilie.

Now, after six very difficult months of living in the garage, Emilie’s sister has gotten strong enough to take over the house again. Her cancer is not gone, and never will be, but, after spending the last year fighting to regain the strength she lost during the early stages of her illness (there were times that it didn’t look like she was going to make it) and is once again a vibrant energetic mother. It’s incredible.

Now, it’s time for us to leave, but Emilie and I don’t really have a plan.

We can’t go too far. The caner is not, and will never be, gone, so Emilie may have to go back to California at some point. So, we’re going to Salt Lake City where Emilie’s parents have a house that they aren’t using.

It’s actually a really nice 4000 square foot three-story house. So, that’s a perk. And, I was recently hired to write About.com’s Snowboarding Guide. So, Utah, which has some of the best ski areas in the world, sounds like an awesome place to spend the winter.

I can’t tell you how excited I am. A big house. Snowboarding. My girlfriend all to myself. Not sleeping in a garage.

Although I don’t have any travel plans yet, those opportunities tend to pop up when I least expect them, so I’m not concerned. All in all, things are looking up!

What are you planning to do this winter?

Lead photo by San Diego Shooter

The post I’m Moving to Utah appeared first on XpatMatt.