Our First Week of Slow Travel

Man oh man but a week does sound like an awfully short amount of time, does it not?

It’s wild to contemplate that we’ve only been ‘officially’ slow traveling in Cape Breton, Canada for one week because it already feels like we’ve learned, seen and done so much.

This post will be an amalgam of sorts: a high-level look at what we’ve been up to, but also a retrospective, if you will (and I hope you will) of the choices I made whilst planning all those months ago and how they are holding up to reality.

Spoiler: it’s a mixed bag! So let’s get into it.

What We’ve Been Up To

Our main activity for our first week in Cape Breton has been hiking all over creation. We are about 20 minutes away from the western entrance to Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and it is GORGEOUS. We’ve gone on at least one hike most days- the climate, terrain and wildlife is so varied at each spot we visit.

PS: I’m keeping track of our mileage on the homepage here, and you can also click here to see which hikes we’ve done.

We’ve also seen live music three whole times! Live, traditional music is quite the situation here and it seems there is an opportunity to hear some every day of the week if one so chooses.

We even went to the 70th anniversary of the Broad Cove Scottish Concert which was really just all of the local Scottish descendants dressing up in their tartans and escorting their children onstage to play the fiddle or do a traditional dance. Every act was introduced by who their grandparents were or how soon they were headed back to Scotland.

I was very into it.

Aside from hiking and enjoying a brew and live music, we also bought tickets for Donelda’s Puffin Tours. This was a true gem.

Donelda is probably in her late 60’s (???) and walks around the outside edge of her boat tying knots and doing things with jibs (???) in the rain while it’s moving out to sea very quickly. She also knows everything about all of the birds you can find on the Bird Islands a few miles out to sea. This was a highlight so far.

Skyline Trail, Cape Breton Highlands National Park

If you are now thinking to yourself- “Phew, it sounds like they packed a lot into just one week…” you’d be correct. Ryan and I had a chat on our hike this morning about how this first week has felt like vacation mode- when we used to take vacations, we’d arrive to a new place and set about seeing and doing all of the things.

But we aren’t on vacation. This slow travel thing is now our life- and if we don’t build in some down time, some time to ourselves, some time to rest?

We’ll burn out.

So. We do have a distillery tour (and more live music!) on the calendar for tomorrow because, priorities. But after that the schedule opens up a bit and we can hopefully learn to live a bit more day-to-day.

Our Month-long Airbnb

The photos above are taken from the windows and porch of our Airbnb. Nice, right?

I honestly feel very lucky to have found this place- there wasn’t a lot available on the island of Cape Breton to rent that a) was in our price range; b) accepted dogs; c) had kitchen/laundry facilities; and d) wasn’t a gazillion miles from where I knew we’d be spending most of our time- the national park.

It’s nothing fancy, but it works really well. What’s been interesting to learn is that it’s a little too far removed from the town for us. This surprised me- I assumed (and booked our first stays accordingly) that we’d want to be out a bit in nature. But while that’s true for our activities, for our daily lives we need to be closer to coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants… people.

This becomes especially true when you consider that we only have one car. Because we aren’t within walking distance to anything much at all, we have to coordinate who will take the car and who will be at home if we aren’t doing something together.

Not a huge problem- but something I didn’t consider when booking.

How It Feels to Stop Getting Paychecks

Perhaps this will be its own post at some point, but it’s worth mentioning that July was the first month in which we didn’t earn money in exchange for our time.

(We stopped working at the end of May, but were still getting residual paychecks from those days in June.)

This has been an interesting switch- but mostly in the way that it hasn’t felt that interesting at all. We made our FI budget using Ramit’s Conscious Spending Plan (the free gift that keeps on giving), we know how much we have in each bucket, and we move on with our lives.

Honestly? I feel more free with money than I ever have. And by “free” I don’t mean that I’m spending more lavishly necessarily- though we did budget a much larger discretionary spend than we ever have- I mean that I just don’t think about it much. Everything has been figured out already.

And as an aside- I don’t think this kind of peace with finances has to wait until one reaches financial independence. I think it can come at any stage, right? As long as you have the systems in place so your money is managed in a semi-seamless way.

That’s where we are now. We have the systems in place- so we can leave it alone and head back out for a hike or to hear some guys play some fiddles.