New Mexico Roadtrip: Planning

We love to travel, and that is one of the reasons we are working on financial independence and a lifestyle that affords us the flexibility to work from anywhere, and therefore travel whenever we want to.

This week we are embarking on a 3-week road trip to New Mexico, and this post kicks off a new series about this trip.

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A little over a year ago, our youngest went off to college, and we became empty nesters. In the months following, we travelled to Costa Rica (twice), Los Angeles, Arizona, and the Philippines, and that doesn’t include several road trips back and forth between New York City and Florida, as we officially moved to Florida last December.

Unfortunately, COVID has really put a stop to travel. Besides having most international borders closed, our youngest was unexpectedly living back at home when her campus closed down in February, and then she was of course with us all summer. We have had several planned trips cancelled, including business trips for Caroline to Singapore, San Francisco and Washington DC, and a real estate scouting trip we had planned for Portugal and Spain. The only trips we’ve taken are road trips to New York City to see family, and to Ohio to deal with college matters for our youngest.

Our youngest is back to school again, but only for the fall semester. Her school’s approach to reducing the number of students on campus is to have 1st and 2nd year students on campus in the fall, and juniors and seniors on campus in the spring. In addition, the on campus portion of the fall semester ends at Thanksgiving. It means she is on campus until Thanksgiving, but then will be back home with us again doing remote school in December and for the full spring semester.

Our oldest visited us for a few weeks, and recently went back to New York City, so we now find ourselves with a window of opportunity where we are on our own. It is our last opportunity to travel on our own, because once Thanksgiving hits, we likely won’t be solo again until next August.

Why a road trip to New Mexico?

We have decided to take a road trip to New Mexico. Reasons being:

• While some international destinations are starting to open up again for Americans, including Costa Rica which opens to Florida residents on Oct 15, and all Americans on Nov 1, we just don’t feel comfortable at this time travelling so far. We need to be available in case our youngest needs to be picked up from college if there is an uptick in COVID cases.
• During our time in quarantine, we have enjoyed and gotten used to eating most of our meals at home, reducing our reliance on processed foods, and just generally eating more healthy. A road trip allows us to bring as many things with us as we need, including some of our own food, and even kitchen items we rely on, like a rice cooker. We will mostly stay at AirBNB’s with a kitchen, so we can cook our own food sometimes, and try to eat more healthy.
• We really loved our trip to Arizona last year, and while we would love to go back there, the drive to New Mexico is a bit shorter (3 days of driving each way, instead of 4), and we’ve had Santa Fe on our list of places to go for a long time. Santa Fe is #78 in our list of 100 dream travel destinations!
• Gives us an opportunity to slow travel. Going forward, that is how we want to travel – to not feel so rushed – to live in a place for a short while and more casually explore the location. Since the drive to New Mexico is three full days each way, in an effort to break up the trip, we plan to settle down for a few days in interesting places along the way.

We would like to have taken a longer trip, but given the important presidential election coming up, and with a fear that a mail-in ballot won’t arrive or get counted properly, we need to make sure we are back home before election day!

Planning the trip

The most direct route from our condo in Jacksonville, FL to Albuquerque, NM is 1659 miles. We had a fun time looking at how to make separate routes to get there and back, and identify fun places to stop and stay along the way.

We have prioritized travelling on weekend days when possible, so that on weekdays we can be settled in a place and spend time working. We also need to average 550 miles per day, so needed to identify stopping points that logically break up such a long trip. This is the itinerary we came up with:

• Memphis: 3 nights
• Oklahoma City: 2 nights
• Albuquerque: 7 nights
• Austin: 6 nights

We will stay in AirBNB’s in Memphis, Albuquerque and Austin. Our AirBNB budget is to stay within $100 per night including all taxes and fees. The other criteria we are looking for is a full kitchen, wifi, a big table that can act as a workspace for both of us, good reviews, and a flexible cancellation policy in case we change our plans.

We found great options in Memphis and Albuquerque, so those are booked, but for Austin we didn’t find something just right with a flexible cancellation policy, so we’ll wait to book that until it is a little closer.

How we prepare for travelling in COVID times

We are definitely concerned about travelling during COVID times, but also feel that we’ve learned to take proper precautions in spending the pandemic time in Florida (which has been a bit lax in the COVID guidelines), and in the road trips we’ve already taken in recent months to Ohio and New York.

Here are the specific things we are doing to try and stay safe and healthy:

• We have lots of reusable masks, and wear them anytime we go inside to a space where there are other people
• We keep hand sanitizer in the car, and use it any time we have been into a store or other place where we’ve been touching things
• We travel with Lysol wipes, and will use them to wipe down surfaces we will touch in any hotel or AirBNB we check into
• We bought a cooler that can be used to keep food cold, and we are also bringing some of our own kitchen items and food, so we can cook some of our own meals.
• When we do take a meal from a restaurant, such as on the days we are on the road, we will either ensure the restaurant is not crowded or enforcing social distancing, eat outside, take the food back to the place we are staying, or eat in the car when on the road.
• In New Mexico, the outdoors and the scenery is the destination, so we don’t expect to be touristing to places that are very crowded, and probably not even that many places that are indoors.

Excited about cooking our own meals

It will be interesting to see how this pans out in practice, but going in we plan to cook a lot of our own meals.

On the one hand, one might think, “I’m on vacation, and who wants to cook when on vacation.” But on the other hand, when trying to live a life of slow travel, the trips aren’t really a vacation in the traditional sense. They are more about living your life in a different place, and besides the actual act of travelling, the intent is to keep a consistent routine the rest of the time, which will include some time for leisure, some time for work, and eating well.

We plan to sample a couple of restaurants in the places we visit, and we will spend 6 full days on the road, where we’ll have no choice but to buy food, but we expect quite a few of our meals over the trip to be self-prepared.

We are particularly excited because all 3 of the cities we will be staying at an AirBNB have the same food markets we are accustomed to shopping at in Jacksonville – Trader Joe’s and Sprout’s Farmers Market.

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Slow travel is the way we’d like to do travelling. Instead of needing to rush from place to place, we’d like to travel in a way that allows us to take more time in each place we visit, to see the sites more leisurely, but also to give us the time to be able to work and relax. We are excited to test this out on a small scale over the next 3 weeks.

Let us know if you have any particular suggestions of places to visit in the areas around Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Or even Memphis, Oklahoma City or Austin!