My nomad life Two months ago I left Florianópolis with my family to start our nomad journey.
We’re three: me, Tânia: my girlfriend/wife and Lorenzo: our five-year-old soon.
I lived in the amazing Florianópolis island for two years, and I love it at all. Our life there was going pretty well. We have a few great friends there :)
Then, I started working at Toptal almost ten months ago, and they’re a full remote company. In Toptal we have a few inspirational travelers there, with dozens of people that keep traveling all the time. They don’t have a house to come back, and all they need is buy another one-way ticket.
I loved it, and I started pitching the idea to Tânia and check how could we became nomads.
Tânia accepted the challenge, and as we have Lorenzo, we need to take care of his school and guarantee he keeps going to the school while we go abroad.
During our plan, we put a few limits to guide our travel:
- We’ll move only during the weekends to not impact my work days in Toptal
- We need to stay at least three weeks in each city to guarantee we have at least two weekends free to explore the places and have fun there.
- Just by bikes: We don’t have a car, and we’re going to move by bus or airplane
We also defined our interests:
- I want to go to friendly cyclo touring places. I’m addicted to being cycling, and I’d like to explore every place I can go by bike.
- Tânia wants to go to places that she can learn and practice permaculture. I’m also very interested in this topic and we’re trying to stay in green villages and places where people are practicing permaculture.
- I’m a tech community guy, and then I’d like to be participating and promoting developers events in every place I go.
And that’s all we keep in mind.
Our first stop - Imbituba
Our first move was from Florianópolis to Imbituba. And I moved by bike (97km distance) + boat and Tânia went with Lorenzo in a friends car that was cycling with me on the travel.
That trip was fantastic. We got a boat in the south of the island and crossed to the continent again.
Our objective was aligned in our first stop, and we rent a small house for the first two weeks at morada ekoa there.
Our stay was cool, and I faced my first issues with my internet connection there. I upgraded my plan from 8 GB to 32 GB, and I’m only using 4G to work remotely.
In average I use 700 MB per day without watching videos or listening to online music. I needed to use Spotify offline and sync it one in a week to not destroy all my band limit. It’s working fine. My 4G is working better than my previous house connection.
Bike trips in Imbituba
Our first stay was at Ibiraquera, a district region of Imbituba that is also full of lakes and I did a few cool bike trips there:
I was very interested in Imbituba because of the lakes in that region. It has a few immense lakes and my major bike trip objective there was circumvent “Maruí” lake there. It’s a 100 km trip to bike around all borders of this lake.
I did it with two friends in the last weekend before depart:
I also did my first trip only by the beach. The sand was pretty heavy and it we cycled more than 50 Km only in the sand. It was a cold and rainy trip :)
I made a few other trips during those days in Imbituba. I cycled around 750 Km in the region, and it was cool to be there.
Meetups
As Imbituba is a tiny city and they don’t have organized any meetups before, I did the honors and created the first dev Meetup there: Imbituba/Garopaba Dev group. We invited “everybody” from Imbituba and also Garopaba (another amazing beach city near by). And it was very interesting that a few people are working with cool technologies there.
I met guys that work with GPS based applications, others from VOIP hardware and another cool company named G-Surf, but they’re not about surf. They are a tech company in a surfing area :D
Great to see that the tech people are everywhere, but there are no community in small cities and almost everybody is lazy to make something happen.
I promote two events there, and both were very cool. Check out the pictures:
I also continued participating of Floripa On Rails where I helped co-organizer a few events there.
I made a few good friends there. I love that group. Awesome people.
@jonatasdp falando sobre Abstract Syntax Tree #ruby #parser no @floripaonrails pic.twitter.com/BhrXJMLEA8
— Leandro Parazito (@parazito) June 13, 2017
Our second stop - Curitiba
Curitiba is the capital and largest city of my state: Paraná. We traveled by bus to there, and we found a school to Lorenzo even before move to there.
The pic below is from our depart in Imbituba, waiting for the bus with our “home” things :)
Lorenzo suffered a bit to adapt to his new school, but the good part is that he got just one week, and then he got school’s holiday to relieve a bit ;)
The school offered one year ahead of his current experience, and we thought it was the problem for him. By the way, we believe that those experiences are also shaping him. Making him smarter and more prepared to diversity.
We’re still exploring the city. Great place and a lot of parks and amazing places to be visiting. We love it!
In the first cycle touring day I explored three different parks with my son trying to get familiar with the cycle lanes.
The cool part of becoming a nomad explorer is that you don’t need to be a tourist in the place and you can visit places as you want and go to places that even the people that live there sometimes does not try to explore so intensively like us. I acquired this feeling residing in Florianópolis, exploring the island in such way.
I’m trying to spend full days exploring places by bike, and in the previous weekend, I did the most long distance trip carrying my son on my bike traveling from Curitiba going down to the ocean in Antonina. Lorenzo waked up at 5:30 AM to be my partner on the trip 8-)
Pheew! Almost 100 km and our previous record together was 63 km I think :) The hard part of being carrying him is that he sleeps in the seat during the trip and I need to hold his head to keep him in tighter in his seat. During this trip, we introduced a neck pillow to keep him safe, and it worked \o/
Keep going
This week we’re in São Paulo because I’m talking about The Developers Conference And I brought them with me. We’re pleased and our life is going very well. I also get some days off from Toptal to be exploring here and participate more efficiently to the conference. I love #TheDevConf, and the event is growing each year.
In the pic bellow I was talking in the functional programming track about a tiny compiler I’m working on fast.
Saturday I’ll be talking about manipulating abstract syntax tree at Ruby Track.
In the next week, we’re back in Curitiba, and our next city will be Brasília: the federal capital of Brazil.
I’m delighted to keep going and doing my life a bit different from the regular life, working in one place and keep commuting everyday to there.
I expect to keep myself traveling and working from everywhere \o/