Working to Wander: Finding Remote Jobs on the Road

By: Kayla Tuala

THE JOB IS out there. You know, the job you’ve been daydreaming about? The one that would give you the freedom and ability to work from the road? It’s out there—you just have to find the right fit.

Josh and I have heard so many stories from people who knew for a long time that they wanted to be nomads, but for us, it was never actually in our plans—it just sort of happened over time. After we got married in 2017, we lived in Dallas while I was going through graduate school for speech-language pathology.

During those years, I learned about travel therapy. It works the same way travel nursing does—facilities with a need for a speech therapist partner with contracting agencies to hire people to fill the need. This leads to job openings all over the country. I was born and raised in Texas, and Josh spent most of his life there, too. We wanted to experience living in other states, but we weren’t sure how to go about it. When we learned about travel therapy, we knew we had to go for it!

Our first year, we took off to Naples, Florida, to experience life by the beach. The following year, we went for a big change and headed to Las Vegas. Our two year-long placements were incredible, but they left us wanting more. When COVID caused us, and so many others, to have to work remotely for a while, we started wondering if we could work remotely full time. This would give us the opportunity to explore as much as we wanted, and at a much faster pace.

This idea quickly evolved from a thought to plans as we began hashing out the details of our new adventure. We spent months looking at options and debating ideas, but we ultimately purchased a truck and travel trailer to travel across the United States.

No, I did not tell that part of the story out of order. We sold our cars, moved out of our home, and bought a truck and trailer before we secured remote jobs. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this was a bold leap of faith or a lack of sensibility on our part.

Josh’s degree is in business, so he began looking for remote sales work. He had sales experience, but wanted to improve his skills. He applied for jobs he was overqualified for as well as those he was a bit under-qualified for. This process was not easy—although the pandemic opened a lot of companies to the idea of hiring remote employees, the majority of remote job listings came with the caveat that they were only remote until the company returned to the office. Sometimes this was not made clear until interviews were done and a job offer was made. Yes, it was as frustrating as it sounds.

However, Josh remained diligent and eventually found the right match. He got a sales job with Yelp and sells advertising space for small businesses to promote themselves. His days are now filled mostly with cold-calling. I have to give him props here, because sales jobs come with a lot of rejection. He handles it incredibly well and has seen a lot of success already.

My transition to remote work was easier. During my speech therapy contract in Las Vegas, I was working for the school district, and the district allowed any students whose families did not feel comfortable with in-person school to participate in remote learning the whole year. This meant they also needed some staff members to be fully remote, and I was one of those staff members. I never expected to fall in love with virtual speech therapy, but I certainly did.

Based on that year, we had expected the school district to want some employees to be remote again the following year, but this was not the case—they informed me that if I wanted to stay on, I would have to work in person. This really didn’t fit with our new game plan. I reached out to my contracting agency, and they began searching for a virtual speech therapy contract for me. I began interviewing for some jobs, and a school district in Delaware—a state I had never been to—won me over.

I currently conduct speech therapy over Zoom, and it works better than you might think! The students sign on to our sessions from their schools, and I administer therapy for speech sounds, language, social skills, stuttering, and more. I have found that speech students are sometimes more focused over the computer than they are in person. This has led to incredible progress toward their therapy goals.

So, this means we now have one sales representative and one speech therapist working in the same trailer. Oh, and one very opinionated dog. Needless to say, 40 hours a week, there is a lot of talking going on in our little space. We had a feeling this would be the case when we were shopping for our trailer, so we made sure to get one that had several closing doors inside.

Josh works at a desk in the bedroom, and I work in the living area at the dinette. We both wear noise-canceling headsets, and so far we haven’t had any issues working at the same time, although I’m sure it sounds like there is a lot going on in our trailer to our neighbors at campgrounds.

Working full time does limit our ability to explore, but we can’t help but focus on how many more opportunities we’ve had this year because of our remote work. We wouldn’t trade these past six months of experiences for anything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kayla and Josh are high school sweethearts who are now traveling across the United States full time. They share the day-to-day realities of full-time travel on their Instagram @tualabears