Hi! We’re Laurel and John, the Meandering Minimalists, and we believe in seeing the world. So much so that we no longer have a place to call home. Or, as we see it, everywhere is our home. But we’re in no hurry; we like to get to know places, so we move every month or three.
Since we retired in April of 2022, we’ve been meandering minimalists. ‘Minimalists’ means that we got rid nearly of everything we own. Various relatives have charge of our remaining possessions. These include two hundred fifty books (we’re not savages!), some clothes, and a few souvenirs and family heirlooms. We no longer own a car, a house, or furniture. We travel with two suitcases and two backpacks (see our very first post for how the process of getting rid of stuff went). We’ve written about the continuing process of having less stuff, and also about selling our books. (We were both university professors, so books are kind of a thing for us.) As we continue to travel, we find that we need less and less.
The ‘meandering’ part comes from the fact that we want to see and do (and eat!) everything, but we find being tourists exhausting. All that running around and standing in line, and restaurant meals every night, day after day… we get tired just thinking about it.
So we hunker down for anywhere from one to three months, or even longer, seeing the sights, but also buying groceries, going to doctor’s appointments, hanging out in coffee shops and bookstores, and trying to interact with locals even though we usually don’t know the language. Think of it as slow travel, which is a real thing. In each place, we envision ourselves as short-term inhabitants. If we find the perfect place, we might settle there for longer. Someday. For now, though, we have no plans to stop meandering.
Our goal as meandering minimalists is to help you plan your dream life of travel and to inspire you along the way. Even if you don’t intend to get rid of everything you own, you’ll find lots of practical information about how to own less, travel joyfully, and make your way around the world.
We’re writing for those of you who might someday want to do something like this. We hope to show you that it’s not as inexplicable, or as complicated, as you might think. In fact, we’re having the time of our lives! We’re also writing for those of you who might retire to another country, but aren’t sure which one yet. Finally, we’re writing for those of you sitting at home thinking you’d never want to do such a thing; we’ll keep you entertained with our new discoveries and many mishaps along the way. Including misplacing a whole airport.
We’ve got loads of tips for long-term travel with few possessions (Practicalities); reports on our edible discoveries as well as our own versions of them, usually with poorly equipped kitchens (Food); updates about where we live now and what we’re doing (Life on the Road), details about the unique places we go (Culture and History), and stories about our past travels (Traveller’s Tales).
We’re not on a quest to see every country in the world. But. We do keep track. Here’s where we’ve been, together and separately:
More About Us
We are overeducated and we love books; we also love semicolons. And we possess the vocabulary of a four-year old in multiple languages. We will try most things, especially if they are edible. (We really like food.) This blog is about our obsession with enjoying life simply, everywhere we go. We post a few times a week about what we’re up to and about the practicalities of long-term travel, so check back often. You can always tell where we are from the sidebar list of ‘Where We’re Going’ or by the pinned post, which features our current flat.
Together and separately, we have been to 75 countries and lived abroad for several years on and off. On this trip, we began in Europe but we’ll be meandering pretty much everywhere. Typically we live in a place for two or three months at a time. This helps us to learn our way around, and to know something about it beyond major tourist sites. We intersperse this, sometimes, with more rapid travel, spending a week here and there. Some of our destinations are places we know well, like Oxford, U.K. and Rome, Italy. And others we had never been to before, like Oslo, Norway; Limassol, Cyprus; and Mindelo, Cape Verde.
The two questions we get asked most often are:
- How long are you planning to keep this nonsense up? Until it’s not fun any more. We book flats about six months out, and we’ve committed to at least three years on the road.
- Do you miss your stuff? Not really. But we were never very good at owning stuff, maybe because we lived in tiny New York apartments for many years. We’re not exactly natural minimalists, but we miss very little of what we used to own. (Except the occasional out-of-print cookbook.) Quite the opposite: we really like having so few things we can easily keep track of them.
We’ve even overcome decades of shyness and curmudgeonliness to get on social media. Reward our bravery by following along!
Please feel free to send us an email; we’d love to hear from you!
By sending this email, you are subscribing to receive occasional updates (a newsletter every two weeks). We don’t have anything to sell; we won’t bug you; and you may unsubscribe from the list at any time.
Latest posts
- Surinamese Food: Five Dishes We Fell in Love With!We came for the food, and it was worth it! We fell in love with many Surinamese dishes; here is a sample of the amazing cuisine.
- We Swing in the Guianese Jungle: Part II (Knini Paati)After ‘roughing it’ in the Brokopondo, we went down the Suriname River to a luxury eco-lodge called Knini Paati. We spent three nights there, doing all kinds of jungle things. There are a number of these lodges: we chose Knini Paati because it is the only one under Maroon management (see below). And, friends, this was more like it! After a ride in a van with our new friends (most of whom were Dutch-speaking), we got off at Pokigron. That’s the end of the road, so we got our stuff into pirogues (local name korjaal). These are long wooden dugout boats, motorised and riding very low in the water. The Suriname River is very dry at the moment, so we had to get out halfway through our trip and walk for about ten minutes to another boat farther upstream. The river itself was beautiful, and we saw tons of birds along the way. They met us with a welcome drink (why doesn’t everyone do this?) and lunch, then we went to our rooms. Which were (you’ll remember where we had been) amazing! They had a bed and a toilet and a front door and even air conditioning (during the night). The day’s activities included swimming in the (very tame) rapids and taking a boat out at night to see caimans. Both were fun – sitting in the rapids provided a natural spa, and we spotted a bunch of itty bitty caimans. (Still creepy, with those teeth…) And in the midst of all these activities, we treated ourselves to an even more welcome drink, at the bar! Also, the food was excellent. We asked a lot of questions and learned a lot about Surinamese cooking. (Even in the jungle, we are who we are!) The people at Knini Paati were extraordinarily friendly. Many of them were talented too: we enjoyed their music and dancing most nights. For us, one of the highlights of the trip was visiting Nieuw Aurora, a Maroon village on the river. Maroons are the descendants of slaves, kidnapped and brought from Africa to work the plantations. Some of the slaves escaped, and because of the surrounding jungle, and support from indigenous people, they were able to hide, and to establish villages, where their descendants still live today. Nieuw Aurora is the best known village in the area, so many tourists visit. Still, we enjoyed seeing how boats are built, speaking to villagers, and being shown their church, primary school, medical centre (pretty impressive!) and a small airstrip. It was an added bonus that our guide was a native of the village! The children displayed wild enthusiasm for us, grabbing our hands and – in several cases – shinnying up and clasping our necks, as if we were a tree being climbed. (Alas, we don’t have photos since the villagers do not like to be photographed.) We also met the village captain, who runs a store. We learned that part of the village is traditionally animist and polygamous, and the other part is Christian. The village church is Moravian, built to replace a wooden one destroyed by a flood. But the part of the trip that suited us the best was relaxing in hammocks and looking at all the wildlife: lizards, birds, bats, frogs, bugs. We even had a monkey invasion on our last morning there! All too soon, alas, we had to get back into the boats and leave Knini Paati to return to Paramaribo. But what fantastic memories of the people and the place! To make sure you don’t miss a single moment of meandering, minimalist, magic, sign up for our fortnightly newsletter!
- We Swing About in the Guianese Jungle: Part IWe take to the trees, visiting Brownsberg Nature Reserve and Ston Island, two sites in Suriname (part of the Amazon rainforest)
- We Visit Paramaribo, the Pretty Capital of SurinameWe’re in the Guianas, this time in Paramaribo, Suriname. We did a lot of exploring in between trips in the jungle: here’s what we found!
- Fifteen Things You Didn’t Know About the GuianasWe’re here to fill in the embarrassing gaps in your knowledge about the three Guianas, the smallest bits of South America!