A Year Of Traveling Every Month

The Year Of Alicia has forever changed me.

My husband Tyson decreed that 2024 would be the ‘Year of Alicia’. We struck an agreement in 2023 about selling our 2400 square foot home to live in a 25 foot Airstream trailer. I told him the trade off for doing this was that I was going to take a trip every month of the year while we didn’t have a mortgage. Some months might just be a road trip somewhere close by, but every month, there would be something. Here’s a look at how a year of traveling every month, and the Year Of Alicia ended up being one of the best years of my life so far. 

2024 is the first in many years that I haven’t been counting down the days until it ended. It was actually a great year, and not just because of all the traveling. Here’s a look at where I traveled this year:

Jan – Moncton
Feb – Mexico
Mar – Barbados
Apr – Greece
May – Greece
Jun – South shore of Nova Scotia, New York & Newfoundland
July – Fredericton
Aug – North shore of Nova Scotia & Ottawa
Sept  – Portugal
Oct – All over Nova Scotia filming our Eastlink Show ‘Trailer Travels’
Nov – All over Nova Scotia filming our Eastlink Show ‘Trailer Travels’
Dec – Halifax

Some trips I made with Tyson, some with friends, and some were solo!

I honestly wondered before it began, if I would tire of that much travel. Of the flights, the airports, the jet lag. I can tell you now that I didn’t at all. It was incredible. Initially, I told Tyson I would commit to one year living in the Airstream with this travel plan in place. As that date came and went, I only felt a small twinge to begin planning our house build. The allure of being mortgage free and mobile has honestly been too good to let go of just yet.

I learned a lot of unexpected lessons this year of traveling every month. It was by far one of the most memorable years of my life so far, and there are no signs of slowing down this momentum. I realize what we did was an extreme change that not everyone can do. We’re what the internet calls DINKS – dual income, no kids with not a lot of expenses on our plate. I work for myself so I have flexibility to work while we travel as well. But I think this experience has changed my brain chemistry.

Reasons Why This Was The Best Year Of My Life Besides Traveling

Obviously having more travel this year made it an awesome year for me. Distilling it down further than that, here are a few other reasons that made 2024 such a stellar year:

1. Less Financial Burden – no mortgage and 1/3 of our bills when we owned a house meant more money all around.
2. I worked a lot less. I could take the time off to travel once a month because we had a lot less to afford in life. Working less meant I was less stressed or worried about work or finances which lead to a happier year.
3. Less property upkeep meant more time to other things like writing, painting and being active.

We already having lots of travel planned for the first quarter of 2025! I can’t help but wonder how long this will be sustainable for. Our initial goal with living full time in the Airstream was to eventually be gone for the winter months. We couldn’t make it happen for this winter, but we are definitely intent on making it happen for the next winter season. We’re still examining the possibilities there are with this living scenario. It’s truly showing us how we are the architects of our own lives, and the allure of living them in a non-traditional way!

If you’re wondering about how we got here…

This all began when we rented a 24-square foot Fraserway RV for a couple of months to see if we could (read: I could) handle tiny living. My husband is a minimalist who dreamed of tiny living, and I am a borderline hoarder who had a house filled with my precious belongings. I could, however, see the appeal of packing everything you needed into an RV and hitting the road. It let us get a taste of tiny living, but also that we’d rather have a travel trailer than an RV. It was a bit cumbersome to explore small towns or tiny parking spaces with the large RV when we could have a trailer that we drop at a campsite, and then unhook it to go explore.

The airstream was my husband’s dream. While trailers that have slides give you more interior space, there also seems to be a lot of issues with the slides leaking, or slide motors burning out, whereas the Airstream is just one aluminum shell with a longer life than a traditional trailer. 

While I was hesitant on how I would fare with it after the initial novelty wore off, I was up for giving it a try. We bought a piece of land before we sold the house with the plan to eventually build a new home on it. In the meantime, we would build a garage to house the airstream during the winter months so we wouldn’t have to worry about winterizing it. I know there are lots of people who do live outside full time in the winter, but after doing some research and evaluating our options, we decided living with potentially no water or busted pipes wasn’t for us. Having the garage also allowed us to have onsite storage for the few things we didn’t sell with the house, and gave us some additional living space.

Is this the best of both worlds? Stay tuned while we find out.