This is a tale of my planned and unplanned travel since 2021, an ongoing digital nomad experience I have documented only on Bluesky with captioned photos, and named The Long Roundabout for reasons that will become obvious.
A planned emigration
A little over four years ago, anticipating a migration to Italy, I put my possessions in storage and hit the road. The first three years of grant-funded World Historical Gazetteer development had just ended, and I anticipated co-authoring more grant applications with my colleague Ruth Mostern, while continuing some WHG work on a very part-time basis with modest support from our Dutch partners at the time and some internal sources at Pitt. Already at "retirement age" I imagined that if no further support for WHG was forthcoming I would find a relaxed lifestyle in Italy and look for occasional contracts in Europe. Covid-19 was still rampant, with vaccine certificates and masks required everywhere. I set out for Italy to scout cities and neighborhoods, by a circuitous route as per usual.
Hitting the road, then a roadblock
My first stop was Uzbekistan for 10 days or so, visiting a friend now working and living in Tashkent. He led another friend and me around the major sites in Tashkent, Kiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. From there it was Vienna for a short visit with colleagues and friends in a place I'd grown very fond of, then Paris to pick up a long-term rental car for the remainder of the 90 days allotted by Schengen rules. From Paris I drove to Zurich, touching base with a friend there, then Bern to visit the Paul Klee Zentrum museum (yet again). Next it was south through the Alps—luckily with no snow—to my first candidate city, Pavia, and some great pizza with a friend from nearby Milan. Pavia was foggy (the norm I learned) but the scale and feel of the place felt good and I learned the neighborhoods. My airbnb hosts said they would be glad to help me get settled in Pavia when the time came.
From there I made my way to Lecce for a month-long stay, my first time in Puglia, with brief stops in some familiar places: Firenze, Siena, and Ascoli Piceno. On the return drive north to Paris I stopped in Pavia again, then overnight at a hotel Napoleon had slept at in lovely Auxerre. With my Schengen budget spent, I returned to Denver and holidays with family, planning to put together my immigration papers for Italy, having settled on Pavia. It was then I discovered belatedly that Italy's tax burden made that plan an impossibility. Drat!
Staying mobile
With my possessions in storage and plans already set for future travel—California visiting relatives, Pittsburgh to help compose a new NEH grant proposal with my WHG teammates, a World History Association conference in Bilbao—I decided to keep moving and let the question ride of where if not Italy to ultimately land. Spain and Portugal were possibilities, so I followed up the grant-writing charrette and the Bilbao conference with a long road trip to those countries. Toledo was a long-shot but nothing else stuck.
August, 2022 brought a new contract for WHG work from the KNAW group in the Netherlands, and I stopped in Vienna for several weeks to do that work. Then, with another KNAW contract in place and my 90-day Schengen budget spent I went to Zagreb to work on that. A few months break followed, with visits to Georgia (Tbilisi, Kutaisi, etc.) and Chiang Mai, Thailand, then a return to the Denver for holidays.
WHG gets an NEH renewal!
In January, 2023 the WHG team learned we had been awarded a new quite large NEH grant(!), so I was Pittsburgh-boound again to plan the way forward. During this interval, I was invited by an old friend/colleague to come to Vienna for six months, where he had just become chair of the Geography and Regional Research Department at University of Vienna. From a desk on-campus and a great flat in Döbling, So in March 2023 I continued my half-time contract work on WHG extensions, staged an international hackathon for WHG contributions, and met often with my friend and his students to discuss possible collaborations. The question of where to settle was being continually deferred, as it was very clear that I could be very productive working as a digital nomad, and the periodic change of scenery was exhilerating—albeit tiring at times.
Why stop now?
The digital nomad lifestyle combined travel with very productive work periods and conferences and meetings with colleagues in interesting locales. Most of the following year was split between Vienna, the UK, and Turkey, with occasional breaks to the US for family visits. A major Version 3 release was the goal, and with the help of a new developer on the team, Stephen Gadd, we launched V3 in July 2024—a year and a half into the three year NEH grant. Stephen was ow willing and more than able to take over my WHG roles, and so he did. And I "semi-retired" once again, after seven years at the WHG technical helm.
Semi-retirement and GLOS
Never one to stay idle, I began scratching a long-time itch to investigate the distribution of global folklore concepts and motifs, and to use that opportunity to investigate the latest AI methodologies. I had been using ChatGPT exclusively for coding help for several months, but the potential for NLP work with text embeddings beckoned. I conceived a personal project I called Geographic Lens on Stories (GLOS), and spent the next year plus devoted to that, working from Vienna and Thailand with side trips to Japan and Vietnam. GLOS is now paused, and details about it live in a few blog posts (here, here, and here), and on the Github site. A couple of early tools live on a pilot site, glos.kgeographer.org.
Onward
In Spring of 2025, ready to settle again, I made a valiant effort to gain residency in Vienna, but was thwarted at the last minute by Austria's very stringent health insurance requirements. At this writing I am looking closely into a little-known and very promising pathway for immigration and residency in the Netherlands. With GLOS paused for the moment I back in the US and preparing to "hang out a shingle" and seek an occasional interesting contract or two, working on a DH projects. In any event, The Long Roundabout will almost certainly come to an end mid-2026 after a fruitful and unexpectedly long run as a true digital nomad. My long-time abbreviated research agenda "Computing Place" might now be amended to "Computing Place, in Places."
NB
This post was authored by me alone, however a chatbot was enlisted to check spelling and punctuation.
kgeographer Karl Grossner, PhD