Spawned by the pandemic, digital nomads are redefining ‘home’
In February, Marc Fischer heard worrying information from his business contacts at the country’s top medical schools. There could soon be a pandemic disrupting the United States, he recalls being told, and life was about to change dramatically.
Mr. Fischer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Dogtown Media, a mobile app development company, decided that he needed to react quickly. First, he called his employees and told them that he was shutting down Dogtown’s Los Angeles office, and that everyone should work remotely for the foreseeable future.
Then he went to Airbnb and booked a remote ranch house near Joshua Tree National Park in the Southern California desert. He and his girlfriend, Caroline Berezina, moved to the house in March. And they haven’t been home since – at least not if “home” means the pricey Marina del Rey apartment they shared before the pandemic. Instead, after three months amid the pinyon pine and magical rock formations of the high desert, Mr. Fischer returned to Los Angeles briefly, gave the keys back to his landlord, transferred his furniture into a storage unit, and, as he puts it, “took off on the open road.”
“We’ve been going strong ever since,” he says. “We have covered 3,000 miles of distance since June.”
In recent months, Mr. Fischer has lived in a home overlooking the mountains in Taos, New Mexico. He stayed for a month in the Colorado Rockies. He went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Whitefish, Montana; and rural Idaho. He makes sure each home has fast internet, is within an hour of a national park, and within a half-hour of grocery stores. And he doesn’t see any reason to settle in one place – at least not now.
“It’s been a very
