Journey of a Lifetime, The Nomad Cruise
Yesterday Nomad Cruise 6 was announced by the organizer Johannes Voelkner, so I figured that would be perfect day to talk about the nomad cruise for day 8 of my 90 day content challenge. Not sure if I mentioned yet that I’m working on a 90 day content creation challenge, but the goal is to get one of these posts out every day for the next 90 days; so far I’ve made it through post 8 here. But back to the nomad cruise.
So what is the Nomad Cruise? Well in the summer of 2015, a friend of mine, Johannes found a good deal on a cross Atlantic journey from Europe to South America. He has been what most of us consider a “digital nomad” for several years, living around the world while building his company Web Work Travel.
At the time, Europe was getting colder so he decided that it was time to head south of the equator. When he found this deal for a Pullmantur cruise, he figured he couldn’t pass it up. Two weeks at sea, all inclusive food, alcohol, accommodation and entertainment. Not only that, it was about the same price as a the flight, not a bad deal!
He posted about the cruise in a few Facebook groups that he was a part of, mostly ones that cater to location independent workers, and the response amazing. On that first cruise, the turn out was around 100 other cruises; at this point he figured, hey, there might be something here.
The response to the first cruise turned out so well that the following year, Johnannes decided to lead another trip; this time even bigger and turn it into a conference at sea. I had seen an advertisement for the cruise on Facebook and thought this would be a great way to introduce myself to the nomad community and get to Europe.
So in late May of 2016, I boarded a flight from Washington D.C. to Cartegena, Colombia for Nomad Cruise 2. It was definitely a bit scary to enter into this new life, but I knew that I soon would be around 200 other people that were on a similar journey and was excited for the adventure.
We boarded the Pullmantur Monach on May 28th and set sail for a two week journey across the Atlantic. Those two weeks were super memorable, it was the start of a new journey and I met so many other interesting people that had their own location independent business or had been traveling the world with their laptop and creating a lifestyle that wasn’t even possible even just 5 or 10 years earlier.
During my first Nomad Cruise journey, I started expanding on a hobby that I had been interested in since I was about 16 but never took that seriously, photography. At the time I had about 250 Instagram followers, but I quickly learned some techniques from others onboard about how they grew their following. One of the girls on the cruise, Barbara, told me how she had grown from around 1000 to 18,000 followers in 18 months, I so I wondered, hmm, maybe I can do this too.
I started posting consistently and working on my editing skills, all while traveling with just an iPhone 6s at the time! It paid off by the end of that summer where I had grown to about 6000 followers just 4 or 5 months later. I don’t worry about the number of followers I have so much anymore, but what did happen was that my Instagram profile started to become a great portfolio of my photography work which I still use to this day, I’ve upgraded the camera a bit though :)
On that first cruise, I also started learning more about videography. I had seen people like Casey Neistat and Christian LeBlanc creating these YouTube videos that were super engaging and saw how they told awesome stories, so I wanted to learn how to do that too.
I partnered up on the cruise with another film maker Anne von Petersdorff and we decided to create the first, and I think only, Digital Nomad Mockumentary. We took 3 days out of the cruise to make the film and wanted to debut it at the closing ceremony before we disembarked in Europe.
The first day was casting and writing the script, we cast Freddie as our digital nomad researcher and the 3 of us started writing a script. The second day was filming, and the third day was editing. It was a pretty crazy few days but the end result we were super happy with and everyone loved it at the closing ceremony. Check it out below.
About a year passed and I was back in Europe during the summer of 2017; by this time Nomad Cruise 3 and 4 had already happened which I missed, but the timing worked out for me to make it on Nomad Cruise 5 which would be my transportation back across the Atlantic Ocean.
This time we embarked from Las Palmas in the Canary islands with 260 other nomad cruisers. The first 7 days were full of conferences, meet-ups, food and some good parties. We had people sharing all sorts of skills with each other including writing, photography, story telling, digital marketing, you name it. I also had the opportunity to lead some acroyoga classes each day which quickly became the talk of the ship.
The second 7 days we arrived in the Caribbean and had island days on St. Kitts, Curacao, and Aruba which made for some amazing drone shots! We spent those days exploring the islands, swimming, and meeting the locals.
By the end of the cruise, many of us had become very good friends and had plans to meet up again in different parts of the world. I just returned from Bali where I had met a few nomad cruisers while I was there.
Check out Lucas’s cinematic video of our Journey Across the Atlantic, it’s amazing.
The next nomad cruise is happening in April! We will be sailing through the Mediterranean which is a departure from our previous cross Atlantic crossing journeys and I think will make for a super exciting trip. If you want to join us, you can apply here, hope to see you on the ship, you won’t regret it!
