Where do we stay?

Long stays

For long stays (which we count as 28 days or more) (yes, we make the rules) we usually stay in Airbnbs which must have a washing machine and a decent kitchen to be considered. This has been a mix of houses, apartments, holiday cottages, granny flats, and sheds in people’s back gardens.

We pick these places based on where we want to explore for a while, often for around 4 to 6 weeks – which gives us multiple weekends to have a look at the area.

The main thing with the long stays is to book as early as possible – especially if the stay covers any time during the school holidays. Accommodation during School Holidays is always booked up many months in advance, and during these times if we don’t want to pay a fortune, we have to book at least three months ahead and in not very popular places – eg. not near the ocean anywhere and not near anything that tourists want to look at.

Outside of the school holidays it’s not usually too hard to find somewhere good to stay – there are often good deals on holiday rentals in the off-season, and often there is also a significant discount for a stay of 28 days or more. In cities, there are quite a few granny flats in out-of-the-way suburbs that are good value.

Short stays

These are a mix of Airbnbs and hotels / motels – usually in places where we just want to have a quick look, or in towns which are pretty small and so don’t really have anywhere suitable for a longer stay.

Sometimes we will also stay a week or two somewhere cheap but not very exciting / popular. This allows us to have a bit of a rest from all the walking and other tourist behaviour that we engage in on most weekends. It also helps to keep the budget on track.

Transit stays

To cover any long distances between our stays, we break the drive into multiple days – always with less than eight hours of driving in a day. We do these long drives mostly on weekends so that we don’t need to take any time off work for a driving day.

For these stays we pretty much always stay in the cheapest motel in the area that doesn’t look absolutely awful (yes, a fine balancing act…)

On these long driving days, we carry sandwiches for lunch, and a ‘coffee box’ with ground coffee and a thermos of hot water so that we can make our own coffee when we want to. We only drive a maximum of two hours at once without a food/drink/leg stretch/toilet break.

Friends’ places

Sometimes when we visit friends it’s on the way to or from somewhere, and we stay with them as part of the ‘official Jazz Nomads journey’. These stays are included in this website. If we are staying nearby on a long stay then we sometimes go to visit friends for a weekend and leave all our stuff behind. These stays are not part of the ‘official Jazz Nomads journey’ and are not included on this website. Yes, there are ‘official rules’ for this website…