The Bird Has Landed

Something monumental happened eight days ago. If you’ve been following me on Virtually in America, you know that for the past three years and three months, I’ve been a digital nomad. From El Calafate, Argentina up the western hemisphere to Banff, Canada and bouncing over to places like Montenegro and Vietnam, I’ve been all over the globe.

But on January 5th, I took possession of a new home in Albuquerque. If you read my other blog, I talk there about why I’m transitioning out of nomadism, but here, I’ll talk about why Albuquerque and why this house.

First, I’ve been casually looking at houses for well over a year. When Covid starting winding down in 2022 and people were really going out normally again, hanging with friends, attending concerts, theater, book clubs, all the things, I started getting a tiny itch to return to normal life too. Not enough to totally give up nomading, but the idea started building momentum in the back of my head and I began to look at every place I visited through a lens of “would I want to move here?”.

Back in 2021, I enjoyed Tucson very much, but I had serious reservations about buying there because of the lack of water (which made me wonder if my investment would be worthless in the future) and because the short term rental market is flooded for five months out of the year when it’s extremely hot (which would really limit the income potential from any place I buy). I quite enjoy Boise as well and visited twice in the last two years. It’s got amazing trails in all directions and great access to outdoor recreation. But it’s really cold in the winter and it feels really remote.

And I loved northwest Arkansas. That area has almost everything I want. An incredible trail running community with great people and epic trails all over the state; it’s not crowded; the influence of the Waltons in Bentonville and the university in Fayetteville mean that there is tons of art and culture and interesting shows; there are lots of book clubs and writing groups; and people are so, so friendly. I began looking at houses in northwest Arkansas seriously in March 2023.

Except there was one big complication. I had met my partner Joe, who lives in Santa Fe. We were just getting to know each other in 2023, him visiting me on my travels and me visiting him in New Mexico. If I bought a house in northwest Arkansas and committed to life there, that would be the end of us. And I felt the connection was too strong to want to throw it away.

So I kept nomading, but for the reasons outlined in my other blog, I was getting more and more frustrated with the lifestyle and really wanted to buy my own place. And when I came to Albuquerque at the end of October, I did it with a serious intention of deciding if it was a place I could settle down. Clearly it was, because here’s me holding the keys to my new house!

Since northwest Arkansas has been where I’d thought I’d settle for over a year now, let’s do a little side-by-side comparison of the things that matter to me.

Parameters	Albuquerque (ABQ)	Northwest Arkansas (NWA)
Outdoor Access. Equal = ABQ has more trails overall and more wild trails and better high elevation opportunities, but NWA has better groomed trails that are just so much fun and so easily accessible from everywhere in the towns.	x	x
Airport. ABQ has 9 carriers going to 28 destinations. Plus the drive to Denver is 2.5 hours shorter than it is from NWA, in case I want to fly out of there and go up a day or two early and hang out with friends.. NWA (the airport is XNA) has 6 carriers to 22 destinations,.	x
Book Clubs. Equal	x	x
Writing Groups. Equal	x	x
People. So close to equal in terms of individuals I’ve spent time with, but southern hospitality is hard to beat, so I have to give this one to NWA. There’s some amount of snootiness in the New Mexico restaurant and coffeeshop scene you just don’t have in NWA.		x
Crowding. Equal – Both metros areas and states as a whole are not overcrowded.	x	x
Location. ABQ is closer to the west, where I plan to do all of my continued nomading.	x
Wild Animals. ABQ has mountain lions, my mortal enemies. Yes, I’m aware they found one crossing Arkansas recently, but I still felt much safer trail running out there than I ever will here.		x
Weather. Tough one! ABQ is sunnier and weather-drama free. NWA has tornados and flooding. But ABQ is high elevation with colder (though sunny) winters. I like both arid climates (ABQ) and humidity (NWA). I don’t know! I guess ABQ for all the sun and no tornados.	x
Socio/Economic. ABQ is the nearly the worst performing state in so many measures, but NWA really isn’t much better. There is some opportunity in NM with all the national labs and tech salaries are slightly higher.	x	x
Crime. ABQ is hard core. NWA is a blissful paradise.		x
Politics. New Mexico has a Democratic governor while still having plenty of Republican voters. And they once had a Libertarian governor. NWA has the despicable Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and while NWA is more blue than the rest of the state, it’s still a very red state.	x
Housing. Equal in terms of how much pricing has gone up during Covid, how able I am to find places I like, and how much investment potential I have out of a purchase.	x	x
Dating. Okay, obviously I’m with Joe and want to continue being with Joe for a long, long time. But hypothetically, if I were single, ABQ wins out of sheer population size and because NWA people are so religious and pop out a bunch of kids early. Prospects there are grim, as I already know from previous visits.	x
Cultural Events. Equal	x	x

As you can see, Albuquerque, which was never on my list of possible new home until the last few months, wins by a hair.

So now you know why Albuquerque, but why the house I chose?

• A sunroom
• A garage (to put my car in when I travel), shed, and basement
• A fireplace
• A whole section of the house I can rent out, and possibility in the future to turn the house into a duplex investment property
• An epic backyard with lots of covered, usable space, including the most darling benches beneath a huge tree
• Gorgeous landscaping (which I will totally pay someone else to take care of)
• A Japanese toilet
• Trendy neighborhood with easy access to I-25
• No HOA

What are things I like in a home that I had to sacrifice for my non-negotiables?

• New Mexico styling inside (vigas, saltillo tile, kiva, etc)
• Skylights (I got one tiny one in the bathroom)
• A toilet closet or half-wall next to the toilet to separate it from the bathtub more
• A window in the bathroom
• Trail access within walking/running distance. I looked at houses on the far east side of the city along the trails, but trails are the only thing there. Absolutely everything else I do in Albuquerque is along the I-25 corridor, so buying out by the trails would have added 15 minutes (each way) to my drive for book clubs, writing groups, the gym, the climbing guy…etc. Everything.

So even though I moved out of Boulder in October 2020, I have now really moved out. I’ll be getting a new driver’s license, library card, voter registration, doctor. When I returned from Portugal at the beginning of this month, I flew into Denver and picked up a box truck and moved all my stuff out of my storage units and took it down to New Mexico. I really and truly no longer live in Boulder.

Over the last year three and a half years, every time I’ve gone to the Front Range to visit friends or take care of my condo or medical appointments or fly out of DIA, I’ve recoiled a bit. I’ve had this involuntary response of slight repulsion that I was back in Boulder or Denver. I think it was my body’s way of manifesting sadness or anger that everything had changed, that the incredible life I had in Boulder from 2017 to 2020 was gone forever. I loved my life at that time – the good friends I had, the happy hours, the runs with beer and tacos after, the girl vacations, my job, my writing group, all the dates and dating tales we shared, publishing short stories, becoming athletic, buying my first place, and, of course, Trotsky. I really did have the time of my life in Colorado. And so since I started this nomad journey with a song, I’ll end with one as well. So long, Colorado!