How ‘digital nomad’ from Bothell is funding 12-year voyage around the world

How do you see the world if you don’t have deep pockets?

A man from Bothell has figured out a way to fund his dream of traveling around the world by working online remotely from the exotic locations he visits.

Aaron Freed, who phoned into KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show from Scotland, calls himself a nomad, or “digital nomad,” if you want to factor in the means by which he’s keeping his travels funded.

After ending up in Tunisia flat broke, Freed says he began working for a friend’s company back home doing marketing for them remotely.

“By word of mouth I was able to turn that into something more substantial over the last couple years.”

Instead of having to rely on odd jobs to keep his trip going, Freed says he’s been able to fund his movement pretty much entirely with money he’s earned online as a marketing and business consultant.

The former Air Force Major says his itch to travel was ignited after his 2005 discharge under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell which was followed by a few years trying his hand at being a barista, entrepreneur and real estate investor in Seattle, which in 2008, served only to wipe him out.

“I found myself without any stories to tell and seeming like a broken record. I think as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Ambition is the last refuge of failure.’ So I dreamed up an ambitious scheme to get myself to Beirut.”

His travels began on a motorcycle, making his way first across to the Olympic Peninsula, then up to Alaska, then all the way down to Florida. Florida is where he ditched the bike for a mode of transit that would take him across the Atlantic.

“I finally found a PhD Australian audiologist who played the dijurido in Miami who was going to be sailing to the Bahamas and he was gracious enough to take me,” says Freed. “That was the first of 22 boats that I’ve hitched so far.”

Originally, he intended to stop in Beirut, but he says one night in the middle of the Atlantic he decided to make it a longer journey.

“I decided this is something I’d like to keep doing. So I decided I would make it all the way around. Now I’m three and half years into that with about nine to go.”

He’s not rushing his trip. He just cycled across the UK, and his plans include riding a bike from Cairo to South Africa.

“I won’t be the first. There have been many who have gone before me,” he says of the bicycle journey across Africa that he anticipates will take a year. Then it will be sailing to Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.

So what will he do when his 12-year, round-the-world journey concludes?

He says his future ambitions include pursuing a philosophy degree, maybe entering politics, and also, perhaps, becoming the sticky toffee pudding king of the U.S.

“I’ve found my dream dessert,” he says, “and I need to bring it to the United States.”