If you aren’t familiar with MultiBasing you can read more about it on my wiki. It’s a term I coined a few years back to try and describe a lifestyle that a few friends and I were increasingly inching towards where rather than living in one single place, we frequently traveled between several global locations, all of which were home in one way or another. In an essence we had multiple bases. Initially there was a lot of discussion about how to enable more of this but over the years it’s become more of a descriptive term for things we were already doing. Some more than others of course.

I haven’t created a flawless system where I can all travel without ever packing a bag, but I’ve used things like urban caching to take a few steps in that direction. I don’t have my own place in any number of cities that I can just jump into when I arrive, but I have friends and hooks that enable something similar with a minimal amount of notice. And I definitely make a habit of repeat visits to the same cities so I get to know them as well as I would a city I lived in full time.

I mention this because my last post about long term travel plays into this heavily. In the same way the old idea was you have one place you live and you go visit others, and I want to tweak it to reflect a more accurate idea (for some) that you live several places and rotate between them, that travel doesn’t have to be a once in a lifetime excursion, it doesn’t have to be something you plan years and years for, it doesn’t have to be this mystical thing that only happens once and a while, but rather it’s something you do all the time and becomes second nature. Being on the road used to mean going away from your family and friends, hopefully for a short period of time and then returning home. If I’m on the road more of the year than I’m at home, and if my family is with me, and I have friends in all the places I’m going to, then what really does the whole concept of home mean?

This is something I’ve spent a lot of the last several years thinking about and as I continue to stumble across who are thinking about it, and doing it (some professionally) I think it’s something worth exploring more. As I mentioned in the last post the family and I are about to head out for most of the rest of the year bouncing between a handful of cities. I know this is going to help me develop the idea more and I’m trying to think of the best way to run with that. I’ll obviously be writing but maybe I need to be thinking of that writing as part of a larger book-type project. And what about video, it seems like we could create an interesting weekly series talking about where we were, how we got there, what we were up to, and cool things we found along the way. More stuff to chew on, but it’s exciting (to me at least) when I realize that these things all tie together.

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