The Uncomfortable Parts of Full-Time Travel
The best parts of travel are easy to imagine...but adapting to what is ordinary, uncomfortable, and ridiculous...well that's what makes it an adventure.
Hudson and Rocio
10/3/20265 min read
The best parts of travel are easy to imagine.
The volcanoes. The sunsets. The meals by the lake.
The feeling of waking up somewhere completely different from home.
What’s harder to imagine are the ordinary, uncomfortable, and occasionally ridiculous parts of building a life while constantly moving. After one week of traveling, we’ve already learned that full-time travel isn’t just about seeing beautiful places.
It’s also about figuring out how to work, train, stay healthy, manage money, create content, and make decisions when nothing feels familiar.
Creating Without Missing the Experience
Before leaving, I wondered how difficult it would be to balance documenting this year with actually experiencing it.
There is definitely some tension there.
You don’t want to look back at an incredible experience and realize you spent the entire thing thinking about camera angles. But surprisingly, we’re starting to find a rhythm.
The backpacking community has been incredibly supportive. I’m getting more comfortable pulling out the camera, and every time I talk to it, it feels a little more natural.
The Acatenango video was significantly easier for me to put together than our cruise video. Part of that is simply repetition. Every video teaches me something.
But I also filmed Acatenango differently. I talked to the camera while things were actually happening instead of trying to explain everything afterward with voiceover.
That made the story easier to tell because I wasn’t trying to recreate how something felt days later.
Rocío and I are also naturally finding our roles.
We both capture footage. Rocío has gravitated toward short-form content, while I’ve been focusing more on the longer YouTube videos and blogs. We bounce ideas off each other and help bring each other’s ideas to life.
And I can’t complain about the office. As I’m writing this, we’re sitting by Lake Atitlán. The water is in front of us. It’s peaceful. It’s beautiful.
And we can order as many cortados as we want...
I’ve had worse workplaces.
Acatenango Humbled Us
We knew pretty early into the Acatenango hike that we had underestimated it. Probably around the second or third stop before lunch.
The altitude started hitting us, and suddenly we couldn’t breathe the way we were used to.
Then it started raining. Then it got cold.
And at some point I remember thinking that this felt surprisingly similar to some of the military exercises I’d done where we were cold, wet, exhausted, and outside for days.
It required a legitimate level of mental toughness. The difference was that this time, I felt much better equipped mentally to deal with it.
And then we got the reward. Watching Fuego erupt was magical.
There’s something powerful about seeing nature do something that enormous right in front of you. I remember seeing volcanoes like that in documentaries when I was a kid. Now one was erupting in front of us.
But strangely enough, the people might be what made the trip.
Our guides were awesome, and we became friends with several people in our group. Everyone was positive and supportive, and they all had completely different stories about what brought them there.
We bonded enough that the night after finishing the hike—when all of us probably should have gone straight to bed—we went out together instead.
That might be another early lesson from this trip.
The places are incredible, but the people you experience them with can completely change the way the journey feels. We already miss our new friends.
Then Guatemala Humbled Us Again
Shortly after Acatenango, both of us ate something our stomachs apparently did not approve of.
For the next few days, we dealt with a pretty annoying stomach bug.
Suddenly, knowing where the nearest bathroom was became much more important than knowing where the best viewpoint was.
Combine that with bathrooms that may or may not have toilet paper, and you’ve got a very different version of adventure travel.
It wasn’t glamorous. It was frustrating. And it was also part of the experience.
Not everything about traveling the world is going to be volcanoes and sunset beers.
Sometimes it’s desperately hoping the next bathroom has toilet paper.
Fitness Has a Different Purpose Now
We’ve been fortunate to find decent gyms in both Antigua and Lake Atitlán, so our resistance training hasn’t changed much.
The cardio is another story.
We’re walking more. We’re hiking. We’re climbing volcanoes. We’re moving around unfamiliar places all day.
And it’s changing the way I think about training. I don’t just want to be fit for the sake of being fit. I want Acatenango to be easier.
I want the energy to explore all day.
I want long travel days to feel manageable.
I want my body to let me say yes when an opportunity comes up.
Training feels less like something separate from our life and more like preparation for the things we want our life to include.
Unfamiliar Is Becoming Normal Surprisingly Fast
Maybe the biggest surprise of the first week is how quickly we’ve become comfortable being uncomfortable.
We went looking for a gym down an alley that initially felt pretty sketchy. After walking it a few times, I started to love it. There were stray dogs around us. At first that felt strange too. Then the dogs basically became our friends.
Another day, a local recommended a secluded beach. Finding it involved questionable directions, private-property signs, locals telling us it was fine to continue, and multiple “No Trespassing” signs.
Eventually we reached the beach…
…and there were a bunch of guys with shotguns.
For a while, we weren’t entirely sure what was going on. Eventually we spotted someone in uniform. Everyone was nice enough, although they also seemed to be encouraging us not to stay too long.
So we drank our Coke Zeroes, enjoyed the beach, and decided there was no need to test our luck.
A week ago, that entire situation would have sounded insane. Now it’s just another story from Guatemala.
The Freedom Part
This life doesn’t feel exactly like the freedom I pictured while I was still in the Marines.
But I’m starting to think that’s because I never actually knew what it would feel like. My brain still wants a mission. It still wants to accomplish something.
Fit 2 Wander has given me an outlet for that. There’s always another video to edit, another blog to write, something to improve on the website, or another story to tell.
The difference is that now those things exist alongside actually living the life we’re documenting.
And I’m incredibly grateful I’m doing it with Rocío.
Being somewhere unfamiliar—where you don’t always speak the language, understand the culture, or know what’s going to happen next—could get lonely quickly.
Instead, I have my best friend with me.
We can laugh when things go wrong, joke about whatever weird situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, push each other through a difficult hike, share ideas, create things together, and then sit down at the end of the day for a beer overlooking the lake.
That’s probably closer to freedom than anything I imagined before we left.
See you on the next one!
-Hudson, out!
