We are Simon Fairbairn and Erin McNeaney, a British couple who spent 14 years travelling full-time as digital nomads.
We now have a home base in England, but we still travel frequently and make our living as travel bloggers.
Erin writes in-depth travel guides to help you plan your perfect trip to both popular and off-the-beaten-track destinations.
We only write about places we’ve actually visited—no AI is used here!
Simon focuses on making travel videos for our newly relaunched YouTube channel.
We love hiking, beaches, lakes, small towns, and Disney parks worldwide (Tokyo is the best!).
You’ll often find us hunting down the best vegetarian food, speciality coffee (Simon), and green tea (Erin).
Our favourite countries are Japan, Italy, and New Zealand.
On our Start Here page, you can find our recommended posts to get you started, or if you have a destination in mind, check out our Destinations page.
Our Newsletter
The best way to stay up to date on our latest travels is by subscribing to our email newsletter. We share tips and experiences there that you won’t find anywhere else.
About Erin McNeaney
Erin had wanderlust from a young age and always dreamed of travelling the world.
After she finished her English degree at Liverpool University, she spent a month in Florence studying Italian, then volunteered as an English teacher and worked at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka.
In 2008, she dragged Simon out of his tiny comfort zone convinced Simon to follow her around the world.
Clearly, a year wasn’t enough.
Before travelling she worked as a refugee arts coordinator in Manchester and organised the annual Exodus Festival, which celebrated the diverse cultures within refugee communities.
Erin can speak (some) Spanish and Italian, and she loves running, yoga, reading, hiking, standup paddleboarding, and cold water swimming (preferably with a sauna afterwards).
She handles all our travel planning and most of the blog’s writing and photography.
Erin has written for the Matador Network, Nomador, Nomadic Matt, and The Planet D. You can find her post archive here.
About Simon Fairbairn
Simon studied popular music at Salford University (and played Glastonbury Festival) before working in a law centre.
Once we began travelling, he started a web design business and developed iOS apps (the popular Trail Wallet travel budget app retired after 10 years in 2022).
He now focuses on the technical side of this website and edits our YouTube videos.
He’s learning to speak Japanese and play piano. He loves drawing and video games, and he’s obsessed with brewing the perfect pour-over.
See Simon’s illustrations and deep dives into cinema and adventure game history on his Instagram and personal blog.
How We Became Digital Nomads
In 2008, we spent a year travelling around India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the South Pacific, and the US, and we experienced more that year than in the previous ten.
We met some wonderful people, saw some amazing places, and did some incredible things. It was awe-inspiring and beautiful and frustrating and scary and exciting – it was everything but dull.
On our return to the UK, we found it very difficult to get back into the routine we’d left behind.
So we decided to head off again, but this time we left for good. We sold everything we owned, quit our jobs, and headed out to play dice with destiny.
Our Nomadic Years
We left the UK on 1st March 2010 with a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro.
We spent the first year in South America and since then have visited Asia, Europe, Africa, Central and North America, the Middle East, and Oceania.
We’ve had countless incredible experiences over the years.
Highlights include getting up close to lions and leopards on safari in South Africa, climbing huge sand dunes and kayaking with baby seals in Namibia, learning to sail a yacht in Malaysia, riding a hot air balloon ride over otherworldly Cappadocia in Turkey, falling in love with Japan, eating our way around Italy and working it off with a hike up an active volcano, snorkelling with turtles in Mexico (and releasing baby turtles into the sea), staying in an overwater bungalow in the Maldives, visiting most of the Disney parks in the world, running a half-marathon in California wine country, and so much more!
Nomadic life was amazing, but travel gets exhausting, so in 2024 we set up a home base in England.
We still travel frequently, but it’s nice having a home to return to between adventures. It helps that we now have the freedom to work on what we want and travel when we want.
Press
We have been featured in The Guardian (a few times), the Huffington Post, and The Globe and Mail.
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