🎆 Happy New Year!

As the second calendar year of our fully-nomadic adventures comes to an end and we celebrate the beginning of a new year in Bangkok (the most-visited city in the world), it’s fun to reflect on what an adventure it’s been.

Mark and Monica in Rome
We spent three weeks in Rome this year

The Year in Numbers

Here are some fun stats about 2024:

  • We visited 24 countries (including 4 new ones).
  • We took 5 ocean cruises (and one river cruise) and sailed 14,720 nautical miles.
  • We did 9 food tours in 6 countries.
  • We traveled 106,852 miles, according to the Polarsteps app.
  • We flew 73,025 miles, according to our TripIt app, which we use to keep track of flights.
  • We spent 153 nights in a hotel/serviced apartment (mostly Hyatt and we earned Globalist status for 2025!), 70 nights on a cruise ship, 16 nights in an airbnb, 30 nights with friends or family, 42 nights in a condo we own, and 2 nights on a plane.

Highlights of 2024

Some highlights of the journey include:

  • Finally getting to new places like Albania, North Macedonia, Curacao, South Korea, and Wales
  • Seeing U2 in concert at the incredibly cool Sphere in Las Vegas
  • Hosting close friends in Lisbon and the Algarve, Portugal
  • Spending the day at Disneyland Paris with our daughter in the pouring rain
  • Getting together with friends and family in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, and Madison, WI
  • Enjoying the beautiful cherry blossoms (and lots of great food) in Japan in April

YouTube Channel

Our YouTube channel grew a lot this year! One of our old 2023 videos (on repositioning cruises) quietly reached 10,000 views so we refocused our efforts on the channel – and cruise content. Today we have 6,000 subscribers (with 1,450+ in the last 28 days) and we hit the monetization benchmark in August.

Travel Blog

The DigitalRoamads.com blog is coming along, despite Google’s best efforts to kill it. Nevertheless, we KNOW we have lots of great travel content to share – and now it’s getting traffic from YouTube and Pinterest – so we’ll keep on keeping on until Google gets on board.

It’s Really About the People

What makes this lifestyle most worthwhile are the awesome people we meet along the way. It’s so great when we hear from followers about their travel plans or on one of our live broadcasts. This year we’ve been able to visit our families scattered around the U.S., as well as spend time with old friends (and a few new ones) in Portugal, Rome, Paris, and Barcelona. We ran into our old foreign exchange student in Chiang Mai. We particularly love meeting up with other fellow nomads – and there are a lot of folks doing what we do – in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Austin, Carvoeiro (Portugal) and Rome. Traveling this way makes for such a rewarding journey and we look forward to continuing the adventure in 2025.

Looking Forward to 2025

In 2025 we have seven cruises scheduled, including at least two with multiple nomads we know, and we literally cannot wait. One of those will be our very first transpacific cruise! New countries in 2025 will include Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Tunisia, and Taiwan. Will we hit country #100? We’ll see!

See you out there!


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