Hi there! We’re Alejo and Andrea, and we’re so excited to have this little space to share our story with you.
In 2016, just four months after getting married and buying our regular (brick and mortar) house, we decided to leave our full-time 9 – 5 jobs. The ‘traditional’ life simply wasn’t what we expected it would be. Back then we thought we were doing everything correctly; we went to college, got good jobs with health and retirement benefits, bought a house and had cars… It almost seemed like the perfect life. The only problem was that we didn’t have what we desired the most, TIME. Time to be together. Time to be with our dogs. Time to do what we love. Time to simply be happy.
It almost seemed liked we were robots working to pay for a house and cars. We would barely see each other because we had completely opposite schedules and it just wasn’t what we had signed up for when we got married.
I (Andrea) couldn’t take the monotony anymore. I couldn’t get used to a life without meaning or purpose. I simply couldn’t keep doing something that didn’t fulfill me every single day so I told Alejo that we needed to quit our jobs and find another plan, such as starting our own company. He told me to quit my job and he would keep working at the end of the day, we still had to pay for our mortgage, cars, gas, food, etc… But that wasn’t an option for me, he had the toughest schedule so I would still have a hard time seeing him.
That’s when we decided to change everything. We went on our honeymoon and spent the entire two weeks listening to podcasts, planning our future and putting together a business plan. By the time we had both left our jobs, we had already rented the two empty rooms in our house, sold one of our cars, stopped eating outside, cut almost 50% of our expenses and processed our first order with a manufacturer in order to start our e-commerce business.
We had managed to stabilize our expenses and our income with a side (remote) job with my parents that lasted two months. And after four months, our hard work and persistence had paid off, we were officially digital nomads and could literally work from anywhere so in May of 2017, we asked our tenants to find another place because we were taking off to Cabarete, Dominican Republic to learn how to kitesurf.
We rented our house through AirBnb and our car for three months, packed two suitcases and and left with our dogs without knowing what to expect. It was shocking at first since a small town in DR was certainly different from downtown Miami but in two weeks we had already gotten the hang of things; we had rented a house, purchased a USD $200 motorcycle and started our kiteboarding classes. We learned to work around the wind schedule and our business was slowly thriving. In a year, I had traded make-up for sunblock and heels for flip flops. Funny enough, by the time we had to leave, we didn’t want to go back and upon arriving to Florida, I cried multiple times! Not only did I miss the wind to kitesurf everyday but I missed not moving around in a car. I missed the simplicity of life. I missed not having too many clothes. I just missed everything.
Chasing the wind and living in simplicity was everything we wanted, it just had to be our daily life. So in an attempt to chase the wind around North America we decided to purchase an old travel trailer and covert it into a beautiful, off-grid, tiny house. We worked on it for three months, sold about six boxes worth of clothes and pretty much everything we used to have in the (brick and mortar) house, rented the house and finally hit the road in the beginning of 2018. We had everything we needed! A comfortable bed, a beautiful kitchen, solar energy and most importantly a windy beach in front of us to kitesurf for hours everyday. We travelled Baja California, the Pacific coast and the southern states of the U.S. and we had the most incredible time! But even though we loved traveling, our biggest passion was kiting and we simply had to keep chasing the wind.
We’re not in a vacation, this is our lifestyle so we don’t see an end. We figured out how to make money while traveling and as long as we have a meal everyday, we will continue doing what makes us happy. A lot of people say we should enjoy while we’re young and don’t have any kids, we say we’ve been carrying these big, hairy dogs everywhere, we’re pretty sure we can handle a few kids when the time comes. For now, we will continue to live life to the fullest by ourselves.
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