Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsey Nubern.
Hi Lindsey, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
One day in April 2014, I came home and rounded the corner into our kitchen and was surprised. I saw my husband, Adam, standing there home early. He’d been laid off. This should have been shocking. Instead, we looked at each other and felt something unexpected: excitement. It was our third sign. We’d been dreaming and saving to quit our jobs and travel the world, but we didn’t know when it would happen. Now we both knew this was the time. We had to go. I’m Lindsey Desmarais Nubern, and this is how NuventureTravels.com began.
In response to this new situation and Adam’s new free time, he packed up our house, prepared it for renters, and I finished up my job and my master’s program. Within a month, we started road tripping the USA and Canada in our Honda Accord and tent camping along the way. We had saved up $32,000 and travel points as newlyweds, and just as many of our friends were announcing they were pregnant and starting their families, we felt the urge to start a family too. However, we found ourselves confronted with three things happening all at once, pointing us toward going for our round-the-world travel dream. We got an extra boost in our travel fund when a friend totaled our truck (he was okay, thankfully), and we decided to go down to having one car instead of two and put the insurance check into our travel fund. Our second surprise was that a dear family member unexpectedly passed away. And now, Adam was let go from his job two weeks before we were both going to resign. It was a moment where we kept coming back to the thought that life is too short, it’s not guaranteed, and we had to give this travel dream a go.
As a calculated accountant, Adam kept us accountable to spending $50 a day as we traveled. We hoped to travel for at least six months with no real end date. Not knowing it at the time, our hope to travel for half a year turned into four years of full-time travel. At our pitstops, I started sharing our #nuventures of stories and travel tips on NuventureTravels.com. Then, on a long drive through South Dakota, we got the news we were chosen as a housesitter for a couple in New Zealand. We now had our next destination. We took off to New Zealand for six months, getting our travel visa to stay longer than one month as we landed in Auckland. We hunkered down in a hostel for a week and realized we could buy a campervan for our stay and sell it when we needed to leave the country. That week, navigating the buying process of a camper was more stressful than our wedding planning, so I set out to write a step-by-step buying guide for other travelers. As the sun set late at night at campsites, I’d write and write in our camper Bernie, and I later found the courage to self-publish our travel guide How to Buy a Campervan in New Zealand. I wanted to equip other travelers with how to buy a camper so they could get out of the city and off into adventuring the incredible landscapes the North and South Islands offer.
Six months into our stay in New Zealand, it started getting frosty and cold camping, so we set our sights on warm Southeast Asia. We downsized to our backpacks and sold our camper the day before our flight to Thailand. We got a boost of home meeting friends there, and then we continued on to Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Back in New Zealand, our time wanting to work on projects was increasing. I was sharing our adventures on social media, blogging, and I started learning how to self-publish our guidebook. I also started working with local travel companies on their social media platforms. Adam also took this opportunity to start his own accounting firm, NuventureCPA.com. In Southeast Asia, we decided to travel slowly as we were now working more and traveling as digital nomads. We were also meeting other digital nomads choosing a similar lifestyle.
As we came up on a year away from seeing family and friends, we missed home. We wondered, “How could we continue to travel but also have the opportunity to see family and friends when we wanted?” Sitting in a mall in Chang Mai, Thailand, Adam had the idea to ask HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters for help. We pulled out our laptops, applied for the show, and were accepted. Away we flew back to the USA to find ourselves a tiny home on wheels.
With the help of HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters, we found our Casita travel trailer, Bernadette, with her simple but luxurious kitchen, shower, toilet, and bed in Richmond Hill, Georgia. We then crossed the country, California-bound, to meet up with ultra-runner Adam Kimble and his crew to attempt the fastest crossing of the USA on foot. We’d met Adam and his wife Karen as we were in Hanoi, Vietnam, and instantly connected as we were both traveling couples. However, Adam had an injury on the first day of his cross-country attempt. The journey didn’t look like any of us expected. He didn’t cross the country the fastest, but he crossed the US on foot with every step it takes to travel from shore to shore.
Being back at home closer to family, we had another moment reminding us that life is short and not guaranteed. Another treasured family member passed away. We were walking down a beach reflecting, and it became another now-or-never moment: We wanted to explore Europe.
Plans were set in place, and we flew out to Hamburg, Germany. We rented a van, set it up as a campervan with a mattress and sleeping bags and a camp stove, and set off camping around Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, visiting towns my ancestors lived in generations ago.
Next, we’d dreamed of seeing the Mediterranean Sea, so we took off to Athens, Greece, and then on to Crete. As we were sailing from one Greek Island to another, we usually worked on our laptops. It was an in-between travel moment to get work done. However, we found ourselves with no Wi-Fi, and we couldn’t get any work done. Frustrating! I looked at Adam, and my mind went blank. I wasn’t sure what to say or do. Then, a light bulb went off. I had questions I’d typed up from the beginning of our nuventures during a long drive across the Dakotas that I pulled out. It was finally time to ask Adam some of these questions. From these conversation starters I’d stashed away on a document on my computer years ago, we had one of the most clarifying conversations about what we wanted for our future. This set in motion my next and most successful self-published book yet, 501 Questions: A Travel Game.
After four months in Europe traveling on to Romania, Hungary, and Serbia, we returned to our camper Bernadette, to travel the USA again. Adams’ workload was increasing and tax season went into full swing. We found ourselves isolated in a campsite on the Florida panhandle. Adam worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and slept all day on Sundays. I found myself alone all the time. This wasn’t working anymore with his increased workload. My soul needed family, friends, and familiarity. We had another pivot moment and decided to move back to our house in Colorado Springs. We set it up to live part-time of the year during tax season and we’d Airbnb our space as we traveled outside of tax season. This setup lasted for a year. Then we took on our next big nuventure of starting a family. We realized we needed a bit more stability learning to become parents and bringing a child into the world.
Since 2019, we’ve lived in Colorado Springs and have become parents to two kiddos. We’ve slowly learned how to continue adventuring and traveling as a family of four. We’re in new territory as parents navigating evolving seasons of babies, the gear involved, kids turning into toddlers, and now figuring out trips with a preschooler and an elementary-age kiddo. What feels best in this season is micro adventures with bigger ones splashed in throughout the year.
We’re still on #nuventures, they just look different as our season of life and family has grown and changed. Our travel game 501 Questions: A Travel Game is still successful as families are searching for ways to get off their devices and connect with their family and friends on trips. I’m currently working on an app for an easier on-the-go playing experience. I also have more travel games I plan to publish. The future is exciting and bright!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
A smooth road? No way! Now, where would the adventure be in a smooth road? The definition of adventure is “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” Our nuventures have rarely been smooth even from the very beginning. For example, an hour before we even started, we were in the midst of frantically finishing the final paint touches on our home, preparing to turn over our keys to our first renter. While going to clean the paint brushes, I heard water spraying under our house, and we realized a pipe had burst in our crawl space. We had to get an emergency plumber out to fix it. So even before our nuventures started, we had unexpected emergencies.
Our #nuventures campervanning and backpacking all over the world were a roller coaster of both exciting and terrifying new experiences and emotions, meeting new people, and learning new ways of life. First, there were logistically hard moments figuring out the basics of life. Finding food, finding bathrooms, finding where to stay every night, finding electricity to charge our devices, finding Wi-Fi, finding fresh water to fill water bottles, and where to do laundry.
There were emotionally hard moments of loneliness, too. At the beginning of our travels, it was just Adam and I. We were rarely with family and friends. The first Christmas we were away in New Zealand, I spent the day sobbing, so sad to be away from our families and vowed to never do a holiday away from home.
However, the hard parts of our nuventures made us dig deep and reflect. These moments led us to reevaluate if traveling was still working or if we needed to pivot and find a new route for what we wanted. We had to do this several times: going from backpacking cheaply in Southeast Asia to returning to the US and finding a camper to live in. This was to continue traveling, but also be able to spend time with family and friends. Another was what I shared earlier, we also decided to move back to Colorado Springs into our home part time, because Adam’s tax seasons were getting so intense. So out of missing home, family, friends, and wanting familiarity, we pivoted and found a new way forward.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a creative: I’m an author, a blogger, and a mom. I share travel stories and tips and travel conversation starters on NuventureTravels.com. I’ve also self-published three books: 501 Questions: A Travel Game now on it’s second edition; the children’s book Putih the Traveling Pelican, and the travel guide How to Buy a Campervan in New Zealand: Your Complete Step-by-Step Guide.
In sharing our story with VoyageDenver, I’m most proud of our courage to dream this life, to plan for it, and finding ourselves ready to go when the opportunity arose. When we were just dreaming of this around-the-world travel idea, I would lay in bed at night freaking out about all the scary things that could happen or go wrong. However, I’d always come back to the thought that I’d always have regrets if I never went for it. Now on the other side with hindsight, all of the scary things my mind would come up with laying in bed on those nights never ever happened in the four years we traveled full-time. We lost our way, lost our wallets at times, and we always found kind, welcoming people who would help us find our way. For example, I left my wallet sitting on a snack bar at a bus stop in Crete, Greece. I didn’t realize I’d left it until the next day. I woke up to a Facebook message from the woman working at the snack stand. She’d taken the time to find me on Facebook letting me know she had my wallet. I zoomed down there as fast as I could and she casually passed my wallet back to me and everything was still intact inside.
We experienced so many kind gestures along our travels in every country we visited. All of these experiences of kindness from all different types of people inspired me to write my children’s book Putih the Traveling Pelican. It’s a story of a pelican on a journey flying away from home to find her reflection in a distant mountain lake and meeting new friends along the way that help and guide her. In the end, her newfound friends become her biggest cheerleaders and encouragers to help her embrace her unique and special qualities. We experienced so much help and guidance on our travels figuring out travel logistics, figuring out how to start businesses while traveling, and taking each step forward. These experiences inspire my work.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
I am currently navigating where the writing, blogging, and social media industry is going. It’s in a huge transition with AI becoming widely used. Website traffic is down because people are turning to AI to problem-solve instead of searching blogs and websites themselves. That means ad traffic income is down, so budgets are down. However, I believe with AI there’s an opportunity for creatives to create faster and more efficiently and also improve their creations with the support of AI. AI’s been helping me rethink and strategize my business. I’ve also been using it as a sounding board to help me problem solve through moments of feeling stuck and to help me find the next step forward on a project. It’s an exciting future!
Pricing:
- Travel Game: 501 Questions: A Travel Game: Second Edition, $14.99 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle
- Children’s Book: Putih the Traveling Pelican, $12.99 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle
- Guidebook: How to Buy a Campervan in New Zealand: Your Complete Step-by-Step Guide, $21.79 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle
- NuventureCPA.com Tax and Accounting Consulting for 30 minutes: $205
Contact Info:
- Website: https://NuventureTravels.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nuventuretravels
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nuventuretravels
- Other: https://www.nuventurecpa.com/
Image Credits
For the feature photo: Charlie Kaye Media
