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Chronicles of Digital Nomading: San Diego, CA

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    • I'm not sure if I'll ever have an address again. Though, because I hear living in one location is ideal for raising a family, the possibility will always exist. One goal of hopping around to different cities every month was to get a sense of where I would want to settle down if I ever choose to do so. I wanted to start curating a list of potential final destinations.
    • San Diego was the first city we've visited so far that has made it to the potential final destinations list.
    • I spent the month there with a more unique Covilla crew than usual. We stayed for three weeks due to the constraints of leaving after Thanksgiving and returning for Christmas. By the time we left, I was left wanting to do at least another week there.
    • I first will talk about why I loved San Diego, before going into how this trip shaped how I view living in a community and nomading in general.
    • San Diego, California
    • San Diego's perfect weather is its most defining feature. Almost every day was 70 degrees and sunny, not a single degree more or less. I was convinced that clouds were impossible.
    • San Diego is a county made up of a bunch of different areas, not just a city. There's downtown San Diego, but there's also other notable areas that make up the county which include La Jolla, Pacific Beach, and South Park. Our Airbnb was sort of in the arm pit of San Diego, east of downtown and south of South Park. Luckily we had a car to be able to visit each of these areas which I highly recommend.
    • Coronavirus continues to plague the U.S. and as a result, we didn't get to experience any indoor attractions or restaurants. However, there were several outdoor spots that I would recommend checking out.
    • The beaches at La Jolla, Pacific Beach, and Coronado were all beautiful, with the last one being my favorite. The water was still too cold to swim, but the beaches themselves weren't crowded and we spent most of our weekends hanging out at one.
    • _My Brother Danny and I at Pacific Beach_
    • There were two peaks we visited that I'd recommend checking out. First was Mount Soledad in La Jolla which gives you a spectacular view of the rest of the city. The second was the tallest point in San Diego city, Cowles Mountain, which gives you a 360 view of the county.
    • _The peak at Cowles Mountain_
    • My favorite outing had to be taking out a sailboat in San Diego Bay. We were able to watch the sunset over the city sky line while hanging out in the open water.
    • San Diego was a beautiful city to visit. Those who live there joke to go see Los Angeles instead to maintain California's best kept secret. My short stint there gave me the first insight of the type of environment I'd like to be in long term.
    • Community Coliving
    • The group that I travelled with this month had an incredible characteristic: nobody knew the entire group before going to San Diego. This meant that all of us were meeting somebody new.
    • This ended up working out extremely well. Within a week we were all able to gel with one another and spend several nights competitively playing games. I personally saw a comingling of three types of networks from my life come together: family, high school friends, and college friends.
    • It's an interaction I want to experience more as I continue to travel. I love seeing people from different parts of my life hanging out with each other. I've also enjoyed meeting friends of friends the I didn't know before any of these months travelling. Living together in a new city accelerates the time it takes for these new parties to become friends and comfortable with each other too.
    • I predict that as Coronavirus fades over the next year and my friends are required to go back to the office, it will be easier to replicate this interaction. Less people available for any given month leads to us reaching out to more of our respective networks leading to more serendipitous combinations of people.
    • Outlook on Nomading
    • San Diego reaffirmed to me how important weather and environment is to where I live. I want to check out other Southern cities in the even more now. I also have an increased interest in visiting different countries in Central and South America, which will hopefully be easier towards the end of the year.
    • I was also motivated by seeing the houses in La Jolla. It's a wealthy area with the median price clocking in at $3.7 million. One tradeoff I'm making by committing to a nomadic lifestyle for the indefinite future is not investing in a single property that could start building equity. I'm hoping instead to increase the quality of the house I rent each month, to feel that same sense of progress.
    • As 2020 comes to a close, it will be 5 months since deciding to live this lifestyle. I could see at least 5 more years of it. It sometimes feels childish, like when I fill out my mom's apartment address as my own on some bureaucratic form. But it also is challenging in that I have to try to establish a new normal in every place I go.
    • Establishing the new normal in San Diego was challenging as it was the first time I "lived" on the West Coast. By the time I woke up, my inbox was already flooded with East Coast notifications, stealing my attention away from my morning writing habit. I imagine more of these types of challenges as I travel to more unfamiliar places. It will constantly ask of me what aspects of my life that I actually value, and which I could live without.
    • Next up, Stanleytown Virgnia!
Chronicles of Digital Nomading: San Diego, CA