Miguel Piñas Rodríguez and Ignacio Nieto Carvajal are a couple who travel the world together and work remotely along the way.
At the beginning of 2020, Nieto Carvajal and Piñas Rodríguez were in Croatia. Within a couple of weeks, they’d moved on to Serbia.
They were hoping to travel to Canada that spring, and then head through the US and on to South America.
Then Covid-19 hit Europe.
“When we were in Serbia, everything kind of started to explode,” recalls Nieto Carvajal.
The couple moved to Bulgaria in late February, around the time Italy had become the European epicenter for coronavirus. They recall officials at Bulgarian customs assuming they were Italian, and initially refusing to let them in, before learning they were Spanish and ushering them through.
A week after they arrived in Bulgaria, many European countries closed their borders and went into lockdown. Nieto Carvajal and Piñas Rodríguez ended up in Bulgaria for almost a year.
“We decided to wait until at least we were vaccinated and everything was more stable,” says Nieto Carvajal.
He adds that the pandemic underlined a consequence of the digital nomad lifestyle they’d been hitherto unaware of: As they weren’t permanent residents in Bulgaria, they couldn’t get vaccinated right away.
But by spring 2021, they had their shots and headed to Turkey, then Spain for a long-awaited reunion with their family and on to Estonia for the next leg of their adventure.
