People ask how I work remotely while traveling full-time. They imagine a laptop on a beach, a coffee shop in a charming village, maybe a co-working space with mountain views. And sometimes it is those things. But more often, it's me on a Zoom call in a Walmart parking lot because the campsite WiFi went down, with Calvin visible in the background assembling a LEGO spaceship and Millie yelling "DADDY!" at increasing volume.
That's the real version. And surprisingly, it works.
The setup
Colletta runs on 940 watts of solar and 800 amp-hours of lithium batteries. We have a cellular booster, a satellite internet backup, and enough power to run multiple devices all day. I engineered this system with the kind of obsessive attention to detail that makes me decent at my job and occasionally exhausting at dinner. Carol's words, not mine.
I work in tech strategy and product management, the kind of work that lives in Google Docs and video calls. Carol manages the creative side of Colletta & Co.: the content, the community, the vision. We split the day. Mornings are for focused work (whoever needs it most gets priority), afternoons are for the kids, evenings are for catching up on whatever fell through the cracks.
It's not a perfect system. Some days the work wins. Some days the kids win. Most days, nobody wins entirely but everyone gets enough.
What the corporate world doesn't understand
I spent years in offices. The kind with free snacks and foosball tables and motivational posters about teamwork. Good companies, good people. But the implicit deal was always the same: give us your best hours and we'll give you enough money to enjoy the leftovers.
Working from the road inverts that equation. My best hours go to my family. My second-best hours, still sharp, still productive, but wrapped around hike breaks and the occasional roadside emergency, go to work. And here's the thing the corporate world doesn't want to hear: my output hasn't suffered. If anything, it's improved. Constraints breed creativity.
The hard parts
Time zones are a nightmare. We've lived in Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, and Hawaii time, sometimes switching twice in a week. My calendar is a war zone of overlapping availability.
Connectivity is still the biggest challenge. Cell coverage in the American West is shockingly bad. We've had to skip entire national parks because I had a presentation the next day and couldn't guarantee signal. It's a real trade-off: the most beautiful places are usually the least connected ones.
And there's the guilt. Always the guilt. When I'm working, I feel guilty about not being with the kids. When I'm with the kids, I feel guilty about the email I haven't answered. Carol feels the same way. We've gotten better at naming it, which doesn't make it go away but at least makes it less lonely.
Why it's worth it
Last Tuesday, I finished a big deliverable at noon and we drove to the coast. We were on the beach by 2pm. Calvin found a tide pool with starfish and spent an hour cataloguing every creature in it. Millie built a sand castle and then destroyed it with great ceremony. Carol and I sat in camp chairs and watched the sun drop lower.
In my old life, that Tuesday would have ended at 6pm with a commute home and reheated leftovers. The beach would have been a weekend activity, weather permitting, after errands and chores and all the other things that fill up "free time."
I don't call it work-life balance anymore. Balance implies two things pulling against each other. What we have is more like harmony. Imperfect, sometimes discordant, but unmistakably ours.
If you're thinking about working remotely while traveling, the honest advice is this: it's harder than you think and better than you imagine. Do it anyway.
