Jon offers some insightful answers to Karen's questions about travel and our work from anywhere lifestyle. But first, the best thing that happened to Jon last week: freezer boots! The covid clampdown is coming to Scotland, but first, Karen wants answers from Jon to these questions: What was your first international trip? Highlights? When did you realize travel was important to you? Or What about you makes you wired for travel — and/or exploring new territory? Where have we been in our travels that you most want to return? Has your bucket list of potential locations changed in recent years? Wh ..read more

We're transitioning! No more podcast episodes with just Jon and Karen droning on and on. Moving forward, episodes of From Sumplace New will feature guest interviews. To help prepare you for this new format, we're sharing an interview we did with podcast host Erica Boucher for her All Ways Evolving podcast last October. Erica, too, wants to move into a long-term, ongoing-travel lifestyle, so she has questions about how we got to where we are and how we make it work. If you've been listening to our podcast, you will have heard some of this before, but Erica goes a little deeper with some insigh ..read more

Despite the pandemic limiting our full-speed ahead travel mindset, we're grateful we can move around (a little) and experience new things. One thing we've learned over the past two-plus years is how rewarding long-term travel is. In so many ways. We discuss a few of these in E38 of From Sumplace New: No end date or feeling of finality.  No pressure to have an amazing time in a concentrated period.  Revisit coffee shops and restaurants and get to know the staff — and even forge friendships. Experience more of the day to day rhythms of the local community — more immersive and integrat ..read more

It's hard to believe we started this podcast just weeks before the pandemic struck, and here we are 41 episodes later and we're still in pandemic-ville. *sigh* We're going to take a break from podcasting for the rest of 2020 so we can come back refreshed for 2021 with a new vision for the podcast! Listen in to learn more. We're excited about what's next for the podcast and the new year, and we hope you are, too — it just has to be better than 2020! Here's wishing all of our friends around the world a wonderful holiday season and a very happy new year! Follow us on Instagram: @SumplaceNew Fol ..read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has the entire world adapting to change. For this episode of "From Sumplace New," we thought it was the ideal time to discuss the importance of being flexible and open-minded while traveling abroad. There's so much information on this subject that we decided to split the episode into two bit-sized morsels instead of a marathon podcast. At the start of the episode, we describe our current lockdown situation in Bariloche, Argentina, how were handling it and how we're not! We also discuss the cultural rhythms (or culture shocks, as some may say) of countries we've visited s ..read more

For episode 14 of "From Sumplace New," Jon interviews Karen about her journey toward minimalism — the challenge of being a clothing and decor aesthete who had to whittle down her stuff before hitting the road with the just the basics. The obstacles were plenty and the struggles real, but the transition was well worth it. In the end, Jon may be more surprised by the outcome than Karen! What was harder, getting rid of an apartment full of furniture and accessories or paring down a wardrobe? We highly recommend discovering The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus, when you're ..read more

Nearly four days of travel: 16.5-hour car ride, 32.5-hour layover, 13.5-hour flight, 13-hour layover, 2-hour flight. It absolutely could have been a royal pain in the ass (but only the car ride was a literal pain in the ass). After a ton of research and preparation, we knew we did everything possible to make our journey from Bariloche to Buenos Aires to Amsterdam to Edinburgh as stress-free as possible. The rest was in the hands of the travel gods — would we stay healthy before leaving Argentina, would we be stopped by Argentina province police during our drive, would we get dinged for being i ..read more

What started as a short Q&A session, wound up including an update on covid restrictions that make sense and work brilliantly in Edinburgh, a follow up on last week's episode with Alex's response and appreciation, and Karen's Edinburgh shopping binge and renewed love affair with Amazon (after a two-year break). The big three questions we've been asked in the past month: After two years in Spanish speaking countries, how good is your Spanish? What’s it like now that you’re in an English speaking country? Where to next? So much of what we do today is totally dictated by the pandemic. Unfort ..read more

After providing our "Locked down in Bariloche, Argentina update" (there appears to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel!), we unveil — with a twist — what we love and hate about being isolated for 44 days and counting. The twist: We didn't share our respective points of view until we recorded the episode. Some are similar and some are quite different. Bottom line: We're jonesing to get out of this friggin' apartment and back to our travel lifestyle! Click here to watch our YouTube live event with fellow ongoing travelers to learn if they hunkered down or fled the countries they were ..read more

On January 31, 2019 — a day many people were glad had arrived due to the crappy year 2019 turned out to be (if we only knew what was coming our way!) — Jon had his brand new smart phone stolen in a busy street market in Santiago, Chile. Not swiped from a table or picked from his pocket, but grabbed and wrestled from his hands. How did this happen, and why was it his fault? In Jon's words: complacency and stupidity. Listen to Episode 12 of From Sumplace New to learn how an easily avoidable situation manifested into the perfect swipe job for petty thieves. Seriously, it was a dumb-ass move by Jo ..read more