Hello!
My name is Jess May and my husband, C.J. May, and I are trying out the digital nomad life. Both working remote jobs, we decided that this was the best time in our life to travel and explore. Working remote wasn’t the only reason we decided to start traveling, we also had help from a bankrupt building company. Allow me to explain.
For the past 2 years, C.J. and I have been living in Pella, Iowa; a Dutch inspired community with a thing for tulips. The company that C.J. works for is based out of Pella, and I had been working as a preschool associate at one of the local schools. Liking the town enough, C.J. and I decided to build a house in Pella. That process started in January of 2021. We got a great deal and hoped to be in the house by that summer of 2021. We were a bit too optimistic. A year and a half went by and our house was about 80% finished when we found out the company building our house went bankrupt. Our soon to be house was given to the bank, the price sky rocketed out of our budget, and we ultimately decided to let the house go. The whole process was stressful and undesirable, but it ended up leading us to our new adventure.
During the summer of 2022, C.J. and I let our house go, got married, and I started a remote job. It was the perfect time to try something out of the ordinary. After realizing that we both had freedom to work from anywhere, we decided that we wanted to try living in new places for a month or two at a time. C.J. was the best at finding Airbnbs and VRBOs in our budget, while I was the one who scoured the reviews to make sure that we weren’t getting ourselves scammed.
Initially, we didn’t know exactly where we wanted to travel to. All we knew was that we wanted to escape the Iowa winter and live somewhere warmer. In order to make our travels feasible, we looked for places to stay that were the same amount or less than what we paid for our apartment in Pella. This didn’t leave us with too many options, especially in the warm places we were looking at. However, after weeks of searching, we managed to find a great place for our first two month stay: a beachside condo in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Check out the next post for our journey from Iowa to Alabama!
– Jess May
Great content! Super high-quality! Keep it up!