The Month Of The Southwest USA: October 2021 Recap

by A Purple Life, posted in Early Retirement, Early Retirement Updates, Film, Finance, Fitness, Food, Hobbies, Keto, Musings, Net Worth Update, Spending, Travel
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Ok, seriously – where did 2021 go? 2022 is 2 months away and I still feel like I’m mentally in 2020. Life is weird 🙂 . Luckily not all of October was a strange time loop though. We finally got to do something that’s been on my retirement bucket list: Travel around the Southwest to see pretty things! So let’s see what I got up to in October:

I Visited Beautiful Places!

Finally the faster part of our nomad travels began! My Mom met us in the Southwest and we got to explore some beautiful places. Here were my favorites:

If you want to see a play-by-play of my explorations and all the hidden gems I found along the way check out my Instagram.

I Went To The Largest Hot Air Balloon Festival In The World!

The original reason we chose to go to the Southwest in the fall (besides to escape the incoming rain and chill that would take over the Northeast) was to go to the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Festival! It’s the biggest in the world and this year had 588 balloons taking off and floating around ABQ.

It was super cool to go and also just to be in the area during the week this was happening since you can see the balloon from all over the city. We also decided to go up in one during the festival at sunrise, which was gorgeous:

I Stayed In An Adobe!

That’s this thing:

Adobe houses are usually built from stone, cement or seashells and builders create the adobe walls by stacking earthen bricks on top of each other. They’re also often at least partially underground to keep them cool in the hot southwestern climate. One of the Airbnbs we stayed in was an adobe and I was shocked with how much light it got and how cool it was in temperature – half underground for the win!

My partner loved staying in it so much that he joked about buying one. I told him I’m willing to rent it from him and can provide character references 😉 . After that Airbnb stay, our other Airbnbs have been similar with their construction in the southwest, but have not been partially underground. It’s been fun to see how construction is so different in other climates.

I Lived In The Phoenix Airport (and now Santa Fe)

We had a bit of a travel saga this month 🙂 . Personally I’m surprised it’s taken us a full year to have a travel hiccup – this was a long time coming. Basically, we accidentally flew on the day when this happened: Regional carrier SkyWest cancels 700 U.S. flights over technical woes: SkyWest provides regional service for key operators such as American Airlines, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

And now I know more about airline subsidiaries than I ever did before 🙂 . In real time what happened was that I originally booked a 12pm flight from Phoenix, AZ to Santa Fe, NM. We got an email a few weeks ago saying that the flight was now at 3pm – cool, whatever.

Then when we were on our way to the airport, I got an alert (I use the free app TripCase to keep track of my itineraries and get alerts for changes) that our flight was delayed to 3:30 – cool, still no big deal. Well, then the fun began. We didn’t start boarding when our tickets claimed we would and the airline rep said there was a computer issue that needed to be resolved. So the flight was delayed another 30 minutes. After those 30 minutes were up, it was delayed another 40 minutes…and after those 40 minutes it was cancelled 🙂 .

We got in line to talk to someone about changing our flight and at the same time I noticed that the American Airlines app would let me change my flight right on there – so we did, to the next flight to Santa Fe that took off 3 hours from then. We got some food and went to chill at our new gate.

My main takeaways with all of this was basically shock that I was so calm. If this had happened when I was working, I would be freaking out about missing work the next day or losing a day in Santa Fe, but instead we figured out backup plans and got through it. When I was working and things like this happened, I would be on edge the whole time and instead, I just did what I would have been doing while comfortable at home: writing and watching some videos. NBD.

Anyway, back to the saga because of course it’s not over 😉 . The boarding time at our new gate passed. As did the time we were supposed to take off. Then the flight was delayed. And then delayed again. My partner and I discussed what to do because apparently all the flights to Santa Fe or ABQ the next day were fully booked, so if this flight didn’t work out we were stuck in Phoenix at least another full day.

I knew that my beloved Chase Sapphire Preferred Card would pay out $500 for a hotel, food and transit in the event we had to stay the night, but after that we were on our own because hilariously, the friend we had come to visit in Phoenix was in the hospital having a baby so we weren’t sure if we would be able to go back to her house while she was away 🙂 . What a perfect storm.

After 9 hours in the airport, our second flight was finally able to leave. I was shocked personally 🙂 . On the plane the dude sitting next to my partner mentioned that it would be almost impossible to get a taxi or Uber at this time of night in Santa Fe (we were landing just after midnight local time). I shrugged it off thinking that the airport is close to downtown and people would be out and about on a Thursday night – right?

I was wrong 🙂 . We arrived at Santa Fe airport and I was shocked to see…it’s as big as someone’s house. There were no Ubers, Lyfts or taxis to be found. There was a tiny rental car desk that had closed for the night. I (semi-jokingly) scoped out a possible bench to sleep on if we didn’t want to walk the 3.5 hours with our luggage to our Airbnb.

Then, something surprising happened. One of the airline workers that was going home offered us a ride and even asked for less than Uber or Lyft were trying to charge. I accepted because my partner was with me and we could probably take him if this went south (yes I’m a pessimist…).

So, we headed into the night in this stranger’s car. It turns out he’s a good dude who always sees people getting stranded late at night and offers to take them home since it’s on his way. We gave him almost double the amount he requested and collapsed at our Airbnb. Phew! In addition to loving how I now react in unfortunate travel situations, I was also so glad that I could just chill, sleep in and recover from our brief stint of airport living…meanwhile my partner had to get up to work less than 8 hours later 🙁 .

But that was our travel saga! Since then we’re been enjoying living in Santa Fe, NM and having a slower experience of the southwest after the travel whirlwind we just went through with my Mom (I’m still trying to help her understand the definition of Slow Travel 😉 ).

I Changed Travel Plans

I’ve discovered one problem with my beloved habit of booking travel way in advance: if I want to change plans on the fly, it can be difficult. And no, of course this doesn’t make me want to change my neurotic booking in advance ways 😉 . In the end, after some spontaneous opportunities presented themselves we were able to fit them in and during the process, I learned some interesting things, such as:

  1. Airbnb allows you to change your reservation dates at any time after booking – it goes to the host for approval, but in my experience so far, they’ve always approved it and then we get credited the money back if we’re shortening our stay for example
  2. Like all airlines, Southwest is legally obligated to allow any booked ticket to be cancelled within 24 hours for a full cash refund. However, I didn’t realize that one of Southwest’s touted benefits is that they never charge a change or cancellation fee – you can just change or cancel a flight for credit at any time. That’s a huge difference from the $150 change fees I was seeing with other airlines (though I know some other airlines have suspended change fees because of covid)
  3. Even if American Airlines says your ticket is non-refundable you can still get a travel credit when cancelling a flight that you can use for future travel with them without any restrictions that I can see. You can just use it as cash with that airline basically

I promised to keep y’all updated on where we’ll be in case any of you want to meet up. So here are the broad strokes of our 2022:

January: Upstate New York
February: Phuket, Thailand
March: Either NY or GA
April: Merida, Mexico
May: Merida, Mexico
June: Seattle, WA
July: Seattle, WA
August: New Hampshire
September: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
October: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
November: Buenos Aires, Argentina
December: Upstate New York

I Learned My Computer Is Horribly Out Of Date

So I don’t update anything on my computer immediately. I used to and it usually bricked it in some way. So since then I’ve waited – and apparently I’ve now waited so long that my Mac OS is no longer supported and can’t easily update to the newest OS. Oops!

I ran into an issue on October 1 where reputable websites like Wikipedia, were giving me a popup saying I can’t visit the website because it’s not secure. Luckily, the internet isn’t just for yelling at each other – it’s also for helping each other! And my partner found this awesome reddit post that explained how to fix the issue. Apparently I’m not the only one who hadn’t updated my OS. Maybe I’ll learn something from this situation….probably not though 🙂 .

I Read 7 Non-Fiction Books

This month I read:

  1. Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
  2. On Writing by Stephen King
  3. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt
  4. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  5. Everything Is F*cked: A Book about Hope by Mark Manson
  6. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
  7. Slow Jogging: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Have Fun with Science-Based, Natural Running by Hiroaki Tanaka & Magdalena Jackowska

So far this year I’ve read 41 non-fiction books out of the 52 I’m aiming for. DAMN! That’s a lot of knowledge 🙂 . The above 7 were what I got up to during our southwest travels and at this point, I’m feeling pretty confident that I can achieve this 52 in 52 goal. November will be busy with NaNoWriMo, but December should be really chill. We’ll also be in bitterly cold upstate New York so there won’t be any walks, nature or birds to distract me 🙂 .

Anyway, standouts in the above books for me included Work Won’t Love You Back – it’s a fascinating book that I think people who pursue FIRE would love because it goes into the history of all kinds of work in America. I learned a shitton from it and it made me think, which is always a plus. I also greatly enjoyed Slow Jogging – I hadn’t really heard of this technique before, outside of my partner telling me about it, but it’s the method I’ve been using for my new running hobby.

Overall, it was a great month of books! If you’re curious about what I’m reading and my ratings of these books, I have a Goodreads account you can check out here.

I wrote 4 posts!

In case you missed it, I published the below posts in October:

  1. 1 Year Of Early Retirement: Spending, Accidental Income, What’s Changed And What’s Next?
  2. Should I Stop Blogging?
  3. I Recorded Everything I Did Every Hour For A Year: Here’s What Retirees Do All Day!
  4. The Month Of City Hopping: Early Retirement Month 12 (September 2021)

In addition to the fun in those comments sections, a NYC ad agency reached out on behalf of a financial client asking me to do a sponsored post and possibly paid Instagram stuff for them. I’ve never had a sponsored post on this site and I doubt I ever will so I said no. It was a cool situation though since that used to be me in my previous job (reaching out to ‘influencers’ on behalf of a client) and now I’m the talent turning people down.

I also promised to update y’all and I’m happy to report: The Female Invest saga is finally over! I sent them an invoice on August 19 with a link to my PayPal, they said they wanted to use a bank instead and then on October 8 after way too much back and forth…they decided to use PayPal…my original suggestion 🙂 .

Whatever. I’m glad it’s over and will most likely just be turning down these kinds of opportunities in the future because emailing back and forth about the minutiae of giving me money does not feel like a good use of my time when there are National Parks to explore 😉 . Another benefit of FI was learning that my dislike of having to answer emails is greater than the joy of getting money I don’t need.

I Hung Out With People!

This was a social heavy month. In addition to my Mom joining my partner and I on these adventures, I also got to see some friends I haven’t in a while. I was able to stay with a friend I made during high school for a few days, finally meet All Options Considered in person after 3 years of friendship and have coffee with a reader when I got to Santa Fe.

In addition to all that, I kept up my 2 weekly video chat appointments, my bi-weekly ex-colleague call and had this lovely interaction:

It was amazing to see people after so long, but I am also quite tired from both traveling way faster than we ever have before and seeing more people than I’m used to, so I’m very much looking forward to laying low in November and recharging in beautiful Santa Fe 🙂 .

Physical

Sleep

Finally a change to my sleep that isn’t boring and positive 🙂 ! It’s been all rainbows and unicorns since I left work a year ago aka BORING! So I’m happy to tell you, my sleep got worse this month! As the seasons turned to fall and we started traveling around the southwest, my asthma started flaring up something fierce.

Obviously this is not the best time to have respiratory issues, so after I coughed my brains out one morning, my partner asked me to go to urgent care (always the voice of reason that one…) so we went. After meeting with a healthcare professional, I got new instructions for when to use my inhaler and also got some steroids to combat the windy, dusty southwest along with my flu shot!

 

Previously, I would have trouble breathing while laying down, so sleeping fitfully was impossible, but it’s improved a lot since my visit to urgent care, which is awesome. Who knew I would miss breathing eh 😉 ? Anyway, I’ve decided to start charting my sleep to have a fun visual of how it’s changed instead of just writing about it so here it is:

Food

Despite traveling around everywhere, I kept it keto during this month! I also went back to calorie counting after having gained a bit last month. This month I lost 2.5″ around my waist, which is sweet. Going back to keto was surprisingly easy when we were going places that are known for their natural beauty, not their food 🙂 . I was even able to keep it up on the road:

Now we’ve been in Santa Fe for about a week and I’ve stuck with it even though this place apparently does have amazing food. I’m planning to try all of it the last week or two we’re here before heading to Austin for Thanksgiving (which will not be keto – gimme that mac n cheese!) Still, I’m happy I’ve been able to find a balance between maintaining my weight so I don’t have to buy new clothes and trying new food.

Exercise

New section alert! To see all the southwest beautiful-ness I mentioned above, we often had to use our bodies to get there – and that meant hiking 🙂 . We found this really helpful website AllTrails to understand what we were getting into beforehand.

I also kept up my new running habit! I’m still using the free JustRun app to do a run/walk/run approach that’s basically a couch to 5K program. I’ve completed 5/9 weeks and finished my first run with no walking segments (a whole 20 minutes at 7200 elevation)…and it was easy??? Like WTF – it’s almost like this app’s training program knows what it’s doing 😉 .

I could barely run one minute straight a month ago so I am seriously shocked by this progress. I also used to say I’d rather get shots than run (I don’t love needles…), but I’ve been looking forward to every run I do this past month. It’s SUPER weird 🙂 , but I hope that feeling continues because I don’t have time in my life for things I dread.

Anyway, moving around so much this month to drastically different elevations while doing this challenge has been fascinating as well. In one day we would go from 0 elevation to 5,000 feet to 6,000 feet, back to 0 elevation and now 7200 feet. I hope this makes my lungs stronger in the long run because right now it just feels like the runs I used to do easily are harder because there’s less oxygen. This is something I didn’t consider when walking or running in different locations as a nomad :).

Also just a heads up that I usually post a picture of my running views after each training day on my Instagram stories to keep me motivated – so head over there if you want to see things like this 3x a week:

Singing

Exploring the Southwest was basically one big road trip so I spent a lot of it belting the greats. I’m getting better at engaging my diaphragm while sitting as a result, which is awesome. One day I will go to a karaoke bar again and I’ll be so ready!

Learning

So it’s time for my favorite segment: Fun Facts Nobody Asked For! Here’s what I learned and explored this month:

Location

Time Zones

My friend asked me to confirm what time we were video chatting and I literally couldn’t because I was so fucking confused by southwestern time zones. I mean look at this shit:

We were staying in Arizona near the border of NM, UT and the Navajo Nation so my phone was changing times constantly and I simply gave up 🙂 . I had no idea that there was this weird little vortex in the US where time is basically meaningless.

New Mexico

Here are some fun things I learned about New Mexico:

  • As I mentioned above, they have the biggest balloon festival in the world with 588 balloons
  • One of the reasons the balloon festival is in ABQ is because “The Albuquerque Box” – this allows a balloon to basically take off and land in the same place because there are high winds from the south and low winds from the north.
From The Science Behind The Albuquerque Box
  • Here’s how hot air balloons work:
  • I also learned that you can’t steer a hot air balloon – YIKES! They have no built-in mechanism for steering or propulsion and instead use the speed and direction of the wind to move. At different altitudes, wind speed and direction change so pilots place the balloon at different altitudes at certain times in the flight to change the direction of the flight path.
  • ABQ has volcanoes! They’re called the Three Sisters and they are apparently a classic and rare example of a “fissure eruption”. In fissure eruptions magma rises along thin cracks in the Earth’s crust, which is unlike most volcanoes where magma rises through a vertical central vent. The fissure here is over 5 miles long and very long cracks like these can create a row of aligned eruption craters that are all active at the same time. Such eruptions create “curtains of fire” like those that happen today at Kilauea in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

  • New Mexico has dinosaur bones! Apparently the dinosaur Coelophysis is New Mexico’s State Fossil (I didn’t know states had state fossils…) and one was found in 1947 at Ghost Ranch in Rio Arriba County. New Mexico is apparently famous as a place where people have made several important dinosaur discoveries. Major finds in the state include Coryphodon, the huge ground sloth Nothrotherium, Triassic Coelophysis bonebeds, bonebeds of Triassic amphibians and the huge sauropod formerly known as Seismosaurus. (Also apparently a bonebed is a large group of fossilized bones and teeth from multiple individuals – I’m learning so much!)
  • ABQ is hella high! Albuquerque has an elevation of 5,312 (while being flat, which is weird to me 🙂 ). It’s one of the highest elevations of any major city in the US and actually ranges from 4,900 feet above sea level near the Rio Grande to over 6,700 feet in the foothill areas.
  • Santa Fe and ABQ are now some of the biggest film locations outside of LA! They’re calling it ‘Tamalewood’ and major studios, including Netflix and NBC, are leaving California in favor of New Mexico to take advantage of the 35% tax incentive. They’ve built studios in Albuquerque in the last year and signed production deals for the next decade for shows like Stranger Things.
  • It’s legal for women to go topless in New Mexico as of 2019 😉 …that’s very good to know because I was changing my shirt outside a grocery store and worried about a public indecency charge. Other states where you can be topless include Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma – who knew?!
  • One way gardens have been adapted for the dry southwest weather by using drip gardening irrigation systems, which I had never seen before – they apparently help less water evaporate compared to watering the plants yourself.
From GrowOrganic
  • We drove along US Highway 66 (also known as “Route 66”) and I wondered why this is the only highway I’ve heard of as a landmark. Apparently it’s significant because it was the nation’s first all-weather highway linking Chicago to Los Angeles…which did not answer my question 🙂 . It’s not the oldest or longest road so I’m not sure what the big deal is. If y’all know please tell me!

Natural Beauty

Here’s what I learned about some of the cool places we visited:

  • The 80 foot Blue Hole is one of the most popular dive destinations in the US for scuba diving and training. It’s an artesian well and a cenóte that was once used as a fish hatchery.
  • The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and has a depth of over a mile (6,093 feet)! There are almost two billion years of Earth’s geological history exposed there as a result of the Colorado River and its tributaries cutting through layer after layer of rock.
  • Antelope Canyon’s beauty is the result of millennia of weather extremes and was formed over thousands of years of flash flooding of an intermittent creek running through it. This now makes sense why if it rains significantly 40 miles away, they evacuate the canyon 🙂 luckily on the (rainy) day we went, there wasn’t enough rain for an evacuation to have to happen. We were told on our tour that water comes through 40-50 mph and that it floods the canyon meters above where our heads would be – scary!!
  • Horseshoe Bend was formed by water following the path of least resistance. The cliffs around it are made of Navajo Sandstone, which is a particularly dense type of sandstone and in the process of erosion, the sandstone acted as a natural barrier, which forced the water to make a sharp bend in the river through softer rocks. Also, the Colorado River that circles the bend is 1,000 feet down and always 40 degrees. Burrr!
  • Bryce Canyon is famous for having the most hoodoos (aka irregular columns of rock) in the world. They’re formed from a combination of extreme temperature changes and water erosion.
  • There’s a reason all these gorgeous Canyons like the “Grand Canyon”, Zion and Bryce are relatively near each other: it’s called The Grand Staircase! It’s the world’s most complete sequence of rocks formed over vast time spans from sediments built up in lakes, inland seas, swamps, deserts and forests. From the Grand Canyon at the bottom, through Zion National Park in the middle,to Bryce Canyon National Park near the top of the staircase, this rock record recounts a history of 525 million years. Usually sequences are interrupted, but in the Grand Staircase there are very few gaps to mess up the sequence.

Astronomy

In general I love that I can drop everything and rush outside if something cool is happening in the sky. For example:

This also happens if a nice looking sunset (or sunrise – if I’m awake 😉 ) happens. Instead of being so self-absorbed or focused on work or adulting, I can just go with the flow and see the beauty our world has to offer and I’m so grateful for that 🙂 . Anyway, here are the cool things I saw in the sky this month by location:

Albuquerque, NM

There is surprisingly little light pollution in Albuquerque and we were able to see Jupiter, Saturn and Venus along with new (to me) constellations that I want to learn: Canus Major (including the super bright Sirius), Orion (including the bright Betelgeuse), Cancer, Ursa Major (aka The Big Dipper), Pisces, Gemini

Also the moon was a Waning Crescent while we were in ABQ and it looked like a cheshire cat smile, which made me once again look into why the moon is sometimes lit from the bottom and sometimes from the side: It depends on the season and your latitude! Apparently this is called a wet moon or cheshire moon when it’s like this – well named on the last one!

From Wikipedia

Apparently wet moons occur a lot in the tropics (where the Sun and Moon rise and set nearly vertically), but more rarely elsewhere. This explains why I freaked out thinking the world was sideways the first time I saw the moon in Vietnam. It was a wet moon!

Los Cerrillos, NM

We stayed in the middle of nowhere for a bit. There was absolutely no cell service, but the stars were BANGING!!! I could see the Milky Way, which is my main criteria to see if someplace has no light pollution. It was so gorgeous!

Bryce Canyon

Sadly, we didn’t spend the night at Bryce and learned that I need to go back because apparently the high elevation, clear dry air and lack of light pollution make Bryce Canyon one of Earth’s darkest places! On moonless nights, the Milky Way apparently looks like a huge silver rainbow from horizon to horizon and Venus and Jupiter are so bright they create shadows. I gotta see that!

Hunter’s Full Moon

This month’s full moon was called the Hunter’s Moon and it was the first Full Moon to follow the Harvest Moon. This moon’s name comes from the fact that this is apparently the perfect time for hunting because animals start to gain weight before winter and come out to find crop residues on recently cleaned fields and can be easily seen by hunters.

Fauna

Here are the animals I identified by location:

New Mexico

Southwestern Fence Lizard, field ants (careful – they bite!), crayfish (seen in the river coming off the Blue Hole), mule deer ( in Grand Canyon National Park), desert cottontail rabbit

What a cutie! (From Wikipedia)

My only regret from this trip was that I looked away from the road for one second while my Mom was driving and she saw a huge tarantula! I’ve never seen one outside of a museum – sigh, maybe one day 🙂 .

Flora

I found a cool website to help with this endeavor called Wikispecies. Anyway, here are the plants I identified by location:

New Mexico

Bastardsage (awesome name for this type of buckwheat), desert prickly pear, texas prickly pear, tree cholla, stenocereus queretaroensis, saguaro cactus

Arizona

Lantanas, indian blanket, agave colorata (from Mexico!), Great mullein

Look at this weird plant! (Great mullein from Wikipedia)

Birds

This month I realized that identifying birds is like going through a criminal line up – and it can be difficult for the same reasons since humans are horrible at remembering things like that 🙂 . Anyway, here are the birds I was able to identify by location:

New Mexico

Say’s Phoebe, Rock Pigeon, Canyon Towhee, White-Winged Dove, Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, Bushtit (LOL), Northern Flicker, Mourning Dove, Lesser Goldfinch, Dickcissel, Chihuahuan Raven, Lark Sparrow, Red-Tailed Hawk, Curve-Billed Thrasher, Dark_Eyed Junco, House Finch, Cassin’s Finch, Red Crossbill, Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay, Common Raven, Black-Chinned Hummingbird, Cassin’s Sparrow, Rufous-Crowned Sparrow

The Grand Canyon

Brewer’s Blackbird, Gilded Flicker, Stellar’s Jay

Bryce Canyon

Clark’s Nutcracker, Stellar’s Jay

Arizona

Anna’s Hummingbird, Costa’s Hummingbird, Orange-Crowned Warbler, Curve-Billed Thrasher, Abert’s Towhee, Killdeer, Gila Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Beryline Hummingbird, Gambel’s Quail

Look at this hilarious dude! (Gambel’s Quail from Wikipedia)

Random Shit

  • My friend told me about Delta 8, which is a hemp product and similar to CBD (so kind of like weed without the THC, which won’t get you high) and it’s totally legal…I’m gonna be looking into this 😉 .
  • When  a plane says they’re flying 30,000 feet, that’s 30,000 feet above sea level and not above the land below you. This may sound obvious, but I didn’t realize this until after our hot air balloon pilot said we’re going to 7,000 feet and people freaked. ABQ is already at 5,000 elevation so we were ‘only’ going 2,000 feet above the ground
  • SUV apparently means “sport utility vehicle”…I never thought about it 🙂 . The more you know!

Emotional

Music

I’ve continued to intentionally make sure that music is a huge part of my life. It makes me happier and seems to help regulate my emotions. I still listen to the new 1.5 hours of Discovery Weekly music on Spotify every Monday and usually find at least one new favorite song to add to my Liked or Running playlists.

The 1.5 hours of Release Radar on Friday’s has been less successful, but still helpful because it makes me feel connected to the artists I love and keeps me up to date on what they’ve been creating lately (including collaborations with other artists, which I wouldn’t usually know about personally).

Here’s my latest favorite bop that has me dancing while running:

Creativity

Still killing it!!! I only write when I want – be that posts or TV/movie reviews like the below – and it happens all the time. Our road trips were also very interesting because I would be driving for hours looking at gorgeous landscapes and get ideas I wanted to write down as soon as we stopped for a break. It was like my birdwatching or walking in nature time – it lets ideas come to the surface in that quiet mental space 🙂 .

Money

Ok, what the hell is going on with the stock market?! I thought we were headed in a more realistic direction in September (aka down…), but now we’re back to all time highs and I’m hitting new net worth highs as a result. This month my net worth hit $740K for the first time…which feels ridiculous.

On the spending front, I continue to do whatever the fuck I want 😉 :

And shockingly it hasn’t had much of an impact. We have already pre-paid for our rent the rest of the year and so far I’ve spent $17,425.97 in 2021. I can’t imagine I’ll spend $2,500 on eating out in 2 months, but as they say – challenge accepted 😉 . That’s the only way I’ll actually hit my 2021 spending goal of $20,000. It’s looking like I might be a little under despite my best efforts, which I did not expect given my laissez-faire approach to buying whatever I want. I guess being intentional about where we live, which is our largest expense goes a long way.

To finish out this money update with a laugh, I recently had this ridiculous interaction:

Conclusion

And that’s what I got up to in October! It was a wild whirlwind of exploration, learning and travel. The next two months of 2021 should be a lot more chill. We’re living in Santa Fe for the month of November before heading back to Austin, TX to see my stepbrother for Thanksgiving and then going to Upstate New York to finish out the year with family. It’s going to be a love filled time 🙂 .

If you’re interested in the other weekly and monthly retirement updates I’ve written, they’re all here:

Weekly

  1. Early Retirement Week 1: The Freak Out
  2. Early Retirement Week 2: The Vacation
  3. Early Retirement Week 3: The Whiplash
  4. Early Retirement Week 4: The Heartbeat
  5. Early Retirement Week 5: The Election
  6. Early Retirement Week 6: The Trophy
  7. Early Retirement Week 7: The Train
  8. Early Retirement Week 8: The Challenge
  9. Early Retirement Week 9: The Question
  10. Early Retirement Week 10: The Game
  11. Early Retirement Week 11: The Recharge
  12. Early Retirement Week 12: The Holiday

Monthly

  1. The Month Of Rest: Early Retirement Month 4 (January 2021)
  2. The Month Of Birds: Early Retirement Month 5 (February 2021)
  3. The Month of Change: Early Retirement Month 6 (March 2021)
  4. The Month of Atlanta: Early Retirement Month 7 (April 2021)
  5. The Month of Portland, Maine: Early Retirement Month 8 (May 2021)
  6. The Month Of New Hampshire: Early Retirement Month 9 (June 2021)
  7. The Month Of The Northeast: Early Retirement Month 10 (July 2021)
  8. The Month Of New York State: Early Retirement Month 11 (August 2021)
  9. The Month Of City Hopping: Early Retirement Month 12 (September 2021)

How was your month?

33 thoughts on “The Month Of The Southwest USA: October 2021 Recap”

  1. Time well-spent. If we’re talking life experiences, your wealth has skyrocketed! Looking forward to future travels.

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  2. Love these posts! Unfortunately, I’m always trying to read them during my lunch break and instagram is blocked. So It’s kind of a fill-the-blanks situation. lol

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    1. I’m so happy to hear you enjoy them! Workplaces still block websites?!? That sucks. I’m sorry. And lol to the fill in the blank situation. Luckily the posts that are coming up next don’t have any Instagram posts in them so I hope that helps 😉 .

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  3. Looks like a gorgeous month of wonderful experiences (with only a few hiccups along the way). Thank you for sharing! 🙂

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  4. Always an entertaining read, Purple! I’m curious what your small amount of liabilities is & if you have any special reason for keeping that around?? (Sorry if you’ve already shared in a previous post somewhere!)

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  5. Hey Purple! Great post, as I expected. I love your southwest pics. I’ve been out there several times thus far and always enjoyed it. I’ve never stayed as long as you have—but someday I hope to!

    I hope you go to Florida at some point so we could meet up. If you’re in Atlanta next year, I might be driving through there (I’m hoping to move and Atlanta is the best place to pick up I-75) so maybe we could meet.

    Speaking of driving, you said you drove a lot this month… did you rent a car? For how long? I know you’ve said you have been living in Airbnbs but I assumed you were car-less.

    Your travels next year look fun. That’s brave of you to go internationally—I’m still too afraid to leave the country, at least at this point!

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    1. Hi Natalie! That’s so sweet – thank you 🙂 . I’ll let you know if I’m in Atlanta. Good luck with your move! Florida is on the list at some point post-pandemic. I’m too scared to go there now, but surprisingly Thailand and Mexico feel fine to me 🙂 . And yeah we rented a car for 2.5 weeks. This is the first time we’ve rented a car in nomad life. We prefer to take trains usually, but they didn’t have them to these remote locations.

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      1. Oh wow, I’m surprised you lasted that long without renting one. But yeah, there definitely aren’t many trains out in the southwest. I forgot to ask in my first comment: are you staying in an Airbnb in Mexico as well?

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        1. I think Route 66 is just famous because of Jack Kerouac’s epic road trip novel/memoir? We found aa very dark pocket to look for the Northern Lights earlier this week it was so lovely to say hello again to all the little stars.

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  6. on that running book: i have been a runner for 40 years now on and off. when i was a teenager i fixed my form to run more naturally akin to barefoot but with shoes on. best move ever. if i were teaching a young or old person that is how i would do it. just do a few of these drills and get that part right first, even if you can only run that way for a minute or two at first. the rest will follow like the karate kid learning to sand the floor or wax the car.

    alltrails is a good app we use in the adirondacks. i’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.

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    1. Running barefoot as in landing on the middle of your foot vs the back or front? If so, that’s what I’m doing!

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  9. You did more in October than I’ve done all year! Dang that work thing that always gets in the way of fun. Love all the photos – we certainly do have some spectacular scenery in this country.

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    1. Haha fair – I did more last month than I did several years while working. And that’s so true – it’s a beautiful country. I didn’t appreciate it’s beauty properly before this year 🙂 .

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  12. Hi Purple,

    Long-time reader, first-time commenter here! Your adventures and explorations are so inspiring!

    The hot air balloon stories reminded me of something cool I thought you might like to know: there is a hot air balloon race every year called the Gordon Bennett Cup. The winning team is the one that travels the farthest from the starting point in any direction withina given time period (I think it’s 72 hours) without touching the ground. But because, as you noted, you can’t steer a hot air balloon, the strategy is all aboard studying the wind patterns and choosing what altitude to fly at to take best advantage of them! I always find it really fun to follow. 😊

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    1. Hi Sarah! Thanks so much for commenting – they give me life 😉 . And oh wow – I didn’t know that!! That’s super cool. I’m going to look it up and add it to my calendar. Thank you!

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  13. This is so amazing!!! I have never been to the southwest and you have me dreaming of road trips once my husband can retire. He is 44 and we hope this happens before 50. I should start a blog or something but he’s very worried about staying anonymous. We LOVE AOC and are currently setting up our second meeting with them. Even after all the books I’ve read, meeting with them was a game changer.
    p.s. Going topless is legal in Minneapolis too. There was even a topless bike ride last year in celebration of the change in law. I had planned to go but it was cold and rainy :-0

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    1. It’s quite a magical place I must say 🙂 . And you can totally start a private journal/blog like I did. No one can see it, but you can still record your thoughts. Just an idea 😉 . That’s so awesome you get to hang with AOC again and that they’re so helpful! And good to know about Minneapolis! I’ve only been there once. I’m sorry the weather got in the way of the fun and hope it’s better this year!

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