Travels in the Riel World

Have you ever dreamed about being location independent? That is, to be able to live and work from wherever you choose in the world? It’s a topic that is growing in popularity, as evidenced by this Location Independent website, or even by the number of hits the term generates in a Google search. Andy Hayes is a strong proponent of location independence, and he just wrote a nice article about the concept for Brazen Careerist.

Here is some of what he has to say about what location independence is and isn’t:

This is not about being an endless nomadic; it’s about finding a working style that suits you. This is not about entrepreneurialism; while owning your own business makes it quite easier, you can still roam a bit more freely while working for someone else…

The common feature of people working towards location independence is that they’re working on a life that works for them, not the other way around. Just because you are setup to work from the road doesn’t mean you travel 100%; I myself tend to alternate between periods on the road and then stints back at home base here in the UK. Yes – another myth – I have a home base, like many other location independent professionals do. You don’t have to live out of a suitcase if you don’t want to.

There are as many ways to be location independent as there are ways to be a 9-to-5’er (does anybody really work nine to five anyway?). Think about the characteristics or attributes of the life that you want, then find ways to make that happen.

Check out his full story here. By the way, Andy also runs the Sharing Travel Experiences website and a while back he ran an online interview with me. If you somehow missed that, you should check it out.

You’ve likely heard of the book “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World,” by Eric Weiner. And you may have heard about the Himalayan country of Bhutan and its goal of measuring and improving something called Gross National Happiness. What do these things have in common? Well, apart from the fact that Weiner visited and wrote about Bhutan in his book (which is a fun read, by the way), the author just penned an article for World Hum discussing the spread of the Gross National Happiness concept to larger and more developed countries.

People travel. We know that. Stuff travels, too, of course. So do germs. Less obvious is the fact that ideas also travel. They don’t always travel well, and their on-time performance is no better than your average U.S. airline. But, still, travel they do—and often in expected ways.

Take French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recently proposed “happiness index.” The traditional measure of a nation’s wealth, Gross Domestic Product, is woefully inadequate, Sarkozy declared, and promptly ordered French bureaucrats to take into account factors such as quality of life, the environment and (gasp!) vacation time. What the world needs, Sarkozy said in so many words, is not Gross National Product but Gross National Happiness.

Hmmm, this sounds familiar. As you may know, Bhutan, a geopolitical speck tucked away in the Himalayas, adopted exactly that policy—Gross National Happiness—back in the 1970s…

Call it the trickle-up theory of ideas. Big ideas often start in small nations. For instance,  the wildly successful practice of micro-lending was born not in London or Tokyo but rural Bangladesh. Why? Necessity, yes. But another reason, I think, is that small, off-the-map countries have less to lose. If Bhutan proposes something like Gross National Happiness people might snicker but they’re not likely to think of any less of Bhutan. Partly, this is because they had never thought of Bhutan at all. And partly it’s because we expect global outliers to come up with wacky ideas.

So I’m glad that Bhutanese happiness has traveled to France. Let’s hope the journey doesn’t end there.

In his article, Weiner makes a good case for the relevance of happiness as a measuring stick for policymakers, and he traces its spread from the Himalayas to the West. It may be quite a while before an idea like this catches on in the U.S., but it’s an intriguing concept and, in any case, Weiner is an engaging writer when discussing the world we live in.

That’s a philosophy that John Bardos tries to take to heart and live by. There are a lot of people out there who have taken the risk to travel, to make a career break, or to live a so-called unconventional life. John is one of them. He runs a blog called Jet Set Citizen, about “lifestyle design at the intersection of work, play and travel.” There is a great interview with him online at Business Backpacker.

How did you know you didn’t fit in to conventional society?

There is no reason why we should drive on the right side of the road or the left. The idea of getting a job and working at one company until retirement is only about three generations old and it is already dead. The concept of retiring at age 65 was created in 1935 with the Social Security Act in the U.S. Even that has to change because of the increase in average lifespans. Everything around us is just an idea. If you realize that, then it is easier to see that there is no set plan for life and we are free to do whatever we want.

Encouraging words you would pass on to readers: If you could have had someone there when you took the leap of faith, what would you have needed to hear the most?

The only real risk in life is dying or getting sick before you have a chance to do the things you want. When you start getting older and more and more of your friends and family get sick or die and you lose energy and motivation, you really start to understand how short life is. I don’t want to sound like a parent telling his children how tough life was in the past, but it is all true.

We live in a time of great affluence and opportunity. It is easy and cheap to travel around the world, start new businesses and even become famous if we are willing to put in the work and are able to commit our energies to a single focus. The greatest times in my life have been when I didn’t have much money, didn’t have many possessions and was working insane hours to accomplish something. The “good life” is not an easy life. Easy makes us fat and lazy.  Even if you completely fail, there are unlimited opportunities to start again. Our parents never had these opportunities. Our grandparents couldn’t even imagine this level of wealth and choice. There is no excuse for not attempting great things in life. The only barrier is our own fears, which are generally unfounded, and our unwillingness to do the work required.

Check out the entire interview with John. It’s good stuff.

On Monday I wrote about an online interview with me in which I talked about my view of sabbaticals and some of the reasons that my wife and I had decided to take a career break in order to travel. Well, here is a nice follow-up to that post: an article by Sherry Ott that details 10 good reasons for taking a career break. Here are two of them:

Retirement Doesn’t Always Reward You with the Time or Ability to Travel - Have you ever really thought about the person you will be when you are 65? What will your health be like, what will your sense of adventure be like, and most importantly, will your health be able to support your sense of adventure?

What activities are you saving for your retirement - bungy jumping in New Zealand, climbing mountains in Nepal, hiking the Great Wall of China, or horseback riding in Mongolia? Will these things really be possible at retirement age? We spend all of our life waiting, waiting, waiting…until we are free from the shackles of work. However what if when we are unshackled, we can’t do it? Consider taking a mini-retirement now, while you know you can trek the Inca Trail.  If people can have a mid-life crisis, then why can’t you have a mid-life retirement?

Cure your Hurry Sickness and Return to Simplicity - Many Americans are plagued by ‘Hurry Sickness’.  The more we speed up, the less we can slow down. Not only do we multi-task at work but we multi-task our leisure time as well - watching TV and surfing the web, or working out on the elliptical and reading a magazine. We are no longer capable of simply doing one thing and being happy about it.

This has also made us a very impatient society – some may even say rude. How many times have you pressed the “door close” on the elevator, even though someone else is trying to get on? And how often do you catch yourself tapping your foot and huffing away while standing in line for something? We always seem to be in a rush to get nowhere fast.

A traveling career break will force you to slow down and learn to be patient again. As you immerse yourself into other cultures you will observe simplicity and patience that Americans have somehow lost. Sure it can be a frustrating experience letting go of how you expect things to get done, but it will open up your eyes to how the rest of the world operates. In the process you will actually have time to take it all in and appreciate a new, simpler way of doing things.

See the entire article for eight more reasons to consider a sabbatical.

If you’re interested in knowing more about my travel experiences or my book, you might want to check out an online interview with me that was just published by Andy Hayes, who is a traveler, writer and photographer himself and who publishes the excellent Sharing Experiences blog. Here are my answers to two of his questions, dealing with our decision to take time off to travel and my view of life sabbaticals:

You started your world-wide travels with (and I quote) “deciding to take a chance in life”. Could you give us a little background into that decision-making process?

Well, my wife and I were both over 30-years-old and entrenched in our work lives when we decided to take our first round-the-world trip. Frankly, we weren’t sure we were ready to stop everything in order to do this and then re-start our lives when the trip was over. We also had to get over the normal doubts over how others would perceive our decision. In the end, though, we also didn’t want to go through life knowing we had passed up an opportunity to have an adventure together and to do some long-term travel.

The way we dealt with it was for my wife to ask for a leave of absence from work. Her employer was gracious in granting her the leave and keeping her job open. Since I was already making a transition to being self-employed, it was easier for me to manage the time off. Of course, by not stopping work completely we didn’t have as much time available to travel as we could have had by simply quitting altogether. Our trips were measured in months, rather than years. I have to say, if Twitter had been around a few years earlier and I’d been introduced to all of these other amazing people who were managing long-term travel between jobs, then our outlook might have been different.

Still, it was a good compromise given where we were in our lives. And it did have an unseen benefit, in that we began looking at our travels in a particular way – not as an open-ended adventure, but rather as a sabbatical that would be limited in time but that would have a lasting influence on our lives.

You also refer to the term “life sabbatical.” What does that phrase mean to you?

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that our trips were not open-ended encouraged us to view the experience as a sabbatical. Academic sabbaticals stem from the notion that there is value in taking time away from the everyday rigors of a job in order to rest, reflect or conduct research. The goal is to return to work with renewed energy and ideas. And the word sabbatical derives from the word Sabbath, with every seventh day meant to be devoted to family time and contemplation.

So I took to calling our trip a “life sabbatical” because it seemed to imbue it with more meaning than if I simply looked at it as a travel adventure. It helped us to view our journey as a way to learn about ourselves and the world, while also recharging our energies for the next phase of our lives. I actually think it would be a great thing if more people were able to schedule these “mini-retirements” periodically through life. Not only can we not bank on being able to fulfill all of our travel dreams during the traditional retirement years, but this time away from work really does give us an opportunity to recharge and even re-evaluate where we are in our lives and careers.

See the entire interview for my answers to a number of other questions. While you’re there you should also browse through his collection of interviews with other travelers and writers.

It does seem that more and more people these days are turning themselves into some version of a digital nomad. In a basic sense, this could simply be an individual who is disconnected from an office and prefers to do much of his or her work in local coffeeshops or other WiFi hotspots. But there are also a growing number of people who are either moving abroad to a cheaper and more exotic locale, or even ditching a home base altogether and running businesses from the road. These men and women are living a life that would have been unimaginable in previous decades, but which is now possible because of new technologies and the globally interconnected world in which we live.

Mike Elgan recently penned an article for Computerworld about this very trend:

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? “Telecommute” from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go “mainstream”?

I was asked to be interviewed last week by the producers of something called the Ideas Project, a Nokia-sponsored site that explores what the “big ideas” are for the future of communications. I could have talked about anything, but I chose to address what I think will be the single trend that will do the most to change how people work: The location-independent digital nomad trend…

A perfect storm of micro-trends are colliding before our very eyes to facilitate the lifestyle of traveling while working, and working while traveling. These include the usual suspects, such as the declining price of electronics and bandwidth and of an increasingly globalized economy. But they also include trends that don’t seem that obvious.

The biggest of these is that the technologies, products and services that digital nomads use to work while traveling are themselves becoming popular among everybody, even those who never travel…It will get to the point where the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.

I love that line: “the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.” Do you have any experiences with the digital nomad lifestyle, or do you know someone who does? What are your thoughts?

Where are the fittest people in the United States? We’re talking about a city, here. not an Olympic training village. I bet you’re not guessing Washington, D.C., are you? Home to all those politicians and government bureaucrats. And yet, according to a recent American Fitness Index study that was released by the American College of Sports Medicine, residents of the nation’s capital are in fact among the most fit in the country. The D.C. area finished first among 45 metropolitan areas.

The study ranked the cities on 30 measures, ranging from the cardiovascular disease death rate to the percent of residents who bike or walk to work. Forbes.com published an overview of the results.

According to the index, Washington, D.C., residents are healthier than other Americans for a number of reasons. They have increased access to farmers’ markets, at 13 per 1 million residents, compared to a national average of 11. Fewer residents smoke and have diabetes, and nearly 90% have health insurance compared to a national average of 86%.

Still, Thompson was surprised to see the city rank first for the second consecutive year. “[It] is not mentioned in discussions of cities that have a strong fitness orientation,” he says. But the data demonstrated only a handful of weaknesses, most of them having to do with the limited number of recreational facilities.

Well, if Washington, D.C., was an unexpected contender, some of the other top cities are not as much of a surprise. The rest of the top 10 are: Minneapolis, Denver, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Austin and Virginia Beach. You can check out the entire list of 45 ranked metropolitan areas, or see a Forbes slide show of the cities.

What does it all mean in the end? Well, obviously, you can be fit anywhere. It’s a personal lifestyle choice. But this list does give you an idea of which regions care more about issues of health and lifestyle and thereby provide access to a more fitness friendly infrastructure. Just as with the list of bike-friendly cities that I recently covered, it’s one more piece of information if you’re looking to live in a place that shares some of your lifestyle values.

You want to do some extensive, long-term travel, but you just can’t imagine how to pay for it or manage it all. A couple of weeks ago, I referred you to an article by Nora Dunn on how to travel full time for surprisingly little money. Now we have more advice, this time from Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil, aka Canada’s Adventure Couple. They have a bunch of excellent and practical advice in post on their website titled, ”How to Live Your Life to Travel the World.”

People tend to think that we live our lives with no vision of the future and no equity what-so-ever just spending our money until it runs out. Others tend to think that we are independently wealthy, spoiled in the fact that we just have a lot of money. As a matter a fact neither is true.

Here is an overview as to how we live our lives and still manage to take extended trips around the world as part of the middle class demographic.  In the past 10 years, we have traveled to 37 countries. Not on short week long vacations at an all inclusive resorts, but on trips that last for months at a time, where we delve into the culture and live with the people.

Dave and Deb report that they never travel on borrowed money and continue to invest for retirement even while they’re on an extended trip. At home, they keep their expenses to a minimum so they’re able to save for their next journey, and they lodge in inexpensive local guesthouses or even campsites while on the road. If you want some good tips for living the traveling life, please read their entire piece. They’re great advocates for the reality that anyone can do extensive travel if you plan ahead and keep travel costs low.

In the search for the best places to live, many people would look for a city that is considered bike friendly. It suggests, at a minimum, that fitness and environmental values are important to local citizens. And, if you pick the right home, it also means that you could possibly commute to work on a bike, or at least have easy access to bike trails for weekend jaunts. But what cities are the most bike friendly? Hal Amen has put together for Matador Travel a list of 15 urban areas worldwide that are considered friendly to bicyclists.

Not surprisingly, Amsterdam and several other European cities are near the top of the list. He also includes such places as Cape Town, South Africa, and Perth, Australia, as well as a half dozen North American entries. Here is a sampling of his “pedal heavens:”

Amsterdam, Netherlands - The “bicycling capital of Europe” tops many lists—including this one, it seems—as the most bike friendly city anywhere. Safe and extensive route networks, serious governmental promotion, and a bike culture that transcends class boundaries are all reasons why 40% of the city’s traffic moves on two wheels.

Copenhagen, Denmark - In the Danish capital, nearly a third of the workforce gets to the office by bike. By some estimates, that’s more than 1 million kilometers pedaled every day!

Portland, Oregon - … Most people consider the bike capital of the U.S. The only thing as impressive as Portland’s bicycle infrastructure (including a 260-mile network) and commuter stats (almost 10%, the highest in the country) is the camaraderie of its cyclist community.

Boulder, Colorado- Denver’s little hippy bro to the north dedicates 15% of its transportation budget to improving and promoting bicycle travel. Nearly every major roadway has a designated cycling area, and they’ve even instituted a pilot program to get kids biking to school.

See the entire article for descriptions of 11 other bike friendly cities.

Actually, for less than $14,000 per year. That’s what Nora Dunn promises you can do. The self-styled professional hobo, she recently wrote an article on how to travel full time for a whole lot less money than you’d think it would cost. This is how she introduces herself:

I “retired” from the rat race at the tender age of 30 to embrace my life-long dream of traveling the world, before life had a chance to get in the way.

So far, I have frolicked in the Rocky Mountains, fallen off the grid in Hawaii, managed tropical hostels, survived Australia’s worst-ever natural disaster, led eco-treks on Llamas, and nearly froze to death in a camper van. (The traveling life is rarely a dull one.)

I am not rich. I am not a trust child, nor do I have rich parents, a sugar daddy, or a stream of income that allows me to live the high life on the road. Full time travel doesn’t have to be expensive, and after two years on the road, I’ve learned plenty of tricks to travel the world without breaking the bank, and without an end in sight.

In the article, she provides tips on cheap airfare, free accommodations, working while traveling, rethinking travel expenses, and more. It’s chock full of good information. If you have any desire at all to engage in long-term travel, you need to read her story and take notes.

Impossible you say? You need income, you need a home? Actually, there are a surprising number of people who live without the anchor of homes or jobs. They’ve found a way to essentially live on the road. Yes, to be a permanent tourist. Christopher Elliott, in his MSNBC travel column, recently profiled some of these individuals and provided a few tips on how anyone could become “a modern-day nomad.”

If the thought of living on the road seems appealing, you’ve got company. Who wouldn’t want to spend a few weeks in an exotic place, discovering a new culture, seeing the sights, living like a native, and then moving on to the next destination? …

So what’s the secret to becoming a modern-day nomad? I asked people who were already doing it, and here’s what they said:

1.  Find a reason. Most transients have a portable career that allows them to travel freely. They’re consultants, freelancers or teachers, for example. But there are other ways to make money when you’re nomadic. In 2006, Tiffany Owens and her husband became full-time property caretakers. Both had been frustrated with their former careers — she was a magazine editor and he was a cable installer — and needed a break. “Now, I garden instead of sitting in boardroom meetings,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier.” Check out the newsletter Caretaker Gazettefor caretaking opportunities.

2. Travel extra light.That’s the advice of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.org. He became what he calls “unstuck” about two years ago, spending a month in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and Buenos Aires. “Pack less, and become unattached to possessions,” he says. “And then … pack less.” You’ll be living out of a suitcase for months — literally.

There are a total of nine tips in Elliott’s article. Read the whole thing for the full scoop on being a world nomad.

A planned town in Germany is doing just that. Going carless. All the streets, except for a few, belong solely to pedestrians and bicycles. People are not barred from owning a car, but none of the homes have garages or parking spaces, so homeowners must buy a parking spot in a town garage. The goal is not only to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, but also to create a different quality of life in a walkable community.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.” …

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.

I’m as guilty of anyone of living in a place where I need to drive my car for most errands, but I do love the thought of living somewhere more walkable and not being chained to an automobile. However, for an entire community to go without cars is certainly a big step. What do you think about it?

That’s the goal, at least, that Chris Guillebeau has set for himself. So far he’s up to 107 countries and he’s 30-years-old. He was profiled yesterday by the NY Times.

I had my first international travel experience when I was 6 years old. My mom took me to the Philippines, and I wound up living there for two years. Then, when I was 22, I went to Africa as an aid worker for an international charity group. I was traveling a lot between Africa and Europe. I remember being on a train and having this mad thought that I should visit 100 countries before I was 30 years old.

I did the math. And according to my calculations, it would cost about the same as buying a new sport utility vehicle, about $30,000. A lot of my friends were buying S.U.V.’s, but it just didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend my money learning about new cultures in places like Burma, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Lesotho and the Balkans, places I never thought I would see.

I began my 100-country countdown in 2006, and finished it in 2008. But a strange thing happened. At about country No. 50, I had another eureka moment: “Why stop at 100?” I’m 30 years old now, and my new goal is to visit each country on this planet before I’m 35 years old. Some of my friends think I’m nuts.

One of the problems is that I am running out of places with easy access. It’s not like every country is an Italy or a Mexico. Soon, I’m going to have to start making arrangements to get to Chad, the South Pacific and central Asia.

Read the whole article for insight on some of his travel tips and experiences. You can also check out Chris’ website. artofnonconformity.com, where he not only keeps track of his travels but also pens some fun articles of his own. Some of his pieces include:

- A short collection of unconventional ideas

- Will success follow if you do what you love?

- 9 overrated tourist destinations (and 9 great alternatives)

It’s fun to read and he provides some nice perspectives on life and travel.

Do you know your neighborhood’s walk score?

I recently came across a fascinating website called Walk Score - it ranks America’s most walkable cities and enables you to find the ”walk score” for your own neighborhood. Simply enter your address and it will create a map of all the stores, restaurants, schools, parks and libraries within walking distance of your home and then compute your walk score.

The benefits of living in a walkable environment are fairly obvious, and this is actually a nice follow-up to my last post, “Walk to school, save the planet.” But for what it’s worth, here is how Alan Durning explains the benefits on the Walk Score website:

Compact, walkable communities—the opposite of poorly planned sprawl—are the solution to some of our biggest shared challenges, from childhood obesity to social isolation, from crash deaths to disappearing farmland, from the high price of gas to the architectural blight of strip development.

They’re even one of our most powerful weapons against climate change—they conserve fossil fuels like nobody’s business. (It takes effort to burn gasoline when everything is so close to your front door.) But the main reason to love walkable neighborhoods is their human energy: they’re fun, lively, memorable…not boring.

Here is how they rank 138 “walker’s paradises” - the most walkable neighborhoods in the 40 biggest cities in the U.S. It’s a nice companion piece to Prevention magazine’s own rankings of the best walking cities, which includes such places as Cambridge, MA; Ann Arbor, MI, and Madison, WI, that don’t appear on the Walk Score rankings of larger cities. Between the two, you can come up with a comprehensive list of the best places to live if you enjoy walking and would rather not have to drive everywhere. In the meantime, go to Walk Score and find out how your neighborhood ranks.

That’s the goal these days in Lecco, Italy. Along with combating childhood obesity. It’s a simple idea, really - children who live within a reasonable distance of school should walk there on most days. The children get much needed exercise, the town cuts down on some traffic jams, and the planet gets a very tiny respite from pollution. O.K., so they’re not really saving the planet, but they’re certainly doing their part, and if this could be replicated in town after town in multiple countries then maybe a dent could actually be made in auto emissions. In the meantime, the added exercise and reduced traffic are no small matters for the townspeople of Lecco. The NY Times has the report:

Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school. They set up a piedbus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars…Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.

If you want to be happy, apparently, it helps to be wealthy, to live in a family-oriented community, or to be surrounded by natural beauty. Those are at least some of the conclusions that can be drawn from the recently released study of well-being scores that ranked Americans by state and congressional district. Utah and Hawaii came out on top in this so-called “happiness study,” while West Virginia ranked last among U.S. states.

Looking for happiness — it’s family-friendly communities for some, tropical paradise or the rugged West for others. A survey of Americans’ well-being … gives high marks to Utah, which boasts lots of outdoor recreation for its youthful population. Speaking of outdoor recreation, the islands of Hawaii took second place and Wyoming was third in the poll that rated such variables as mental, physical and economic health.

By the way, if you enjoy topics like this you might also like to read some other recent posts along these lines:

- Do cities have personality traits?

- The geography of the American mind

- The geography of personality

Well, apparently there can be one upside to losing your job in this cratering economy - providing, of course, that you have sufficient savings to fall back on. You can travel. That is exactly what some out of work financial workers are doing these days. They’re lucky, of course, in that they’re more likely to have financial means squirreled away than the average teacher or assembly line worker who finds him or herself among the unemployed. Nevertheless, this Washington Post story caught up with some recently unemployed financiers who, upon realizing there was no current job market for their skills, decided to hit the road.

When Deutsche Bank determined that strategist Rod Manalo was, in the merciless language of hard times, “redundant,” it was an abrupt and humbling end to a seven-year career in finance.

But Manalo, 30, has not been trudging the gray streets of London where he was based looking for work. This week, he was in the sun-drenched Brazilian resort city of Florianopolis, taking surfing lessons and dancing in throbbing nightclubs amid Carnival revelers. That was after he had snowboarded in the Alps, golfed in Florida and prepared for a year-long world journey that he expects will take him to the Amazon, Antarctica, Australia and beyond.

“Decent finance jobs are nonexistent. Few hedge funds and no investment banks are hiring. If I were to find a job, I’d just fear losing it again, would continue to watch markets drop and would expect little or no bonus,” said Manalo, who was fired in December from his position as a vice president in risk arbitrage. Apart from occasionally watching his investments, he said, “I am fully focused on traveling.”

One byproduct of the economic blood bath of the past several months has been a bumper crop of relatively young and wealthy but out-of-work financiers. Unemployment in the financial sector in the United States doubled from 285,000 in January 2008 to 571,000 last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are “pink-slip parties” in New York for the newly untethered to mingle and match. Business school applications have soared for those seeking academic shelter.

But some financial refugees have fanned out around the globe in pursuit of leisure, achievement or to explore something, anything, outside a cubicle’s confines. And if a dozen or so lost souls of finance are any indication, many are finding at least a temporary refuge roaming the globe.

Where would you like to live? If you could be guaranteed a reasonable facsimile of your current job, family situation and network of friends anywhere in the country, where would you choose?

The Pew Research Center did an extensive study on where Americans would like to live, and the top three cities were Denver, San Diego and Seattle.  Next up were Orlando, Tampa and San Francisco. David Brooks wrote a recent column about this study and described what he saw as America’s geographic state of mind.

If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.

These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl.

What do you think? Does it meet your definition of utopia?