The flight I booked to leave
I’d booked my flight home before Budapest ever really had a chance. Two weeks out, flexible date, and I’ll be honest, I’d only had the foresight to make it flexible because some part of me already suspected I might bail. By that point I’d been on the road for a couple of months, and when I got to Budapest it just felt like all the others: I was tired, I was lonely, and I was pretty much ready to give up and go home.
I didn’t, obviously, or there’d be no story here. I’m writing this years later from the city that ended up becoming my home, married to a woman I met a few weeks after I’d decided to quit, having built a few things here that I’m genuinely proud of. So really this is the story of how the move I almost walked away from turned into the best thing I’ve ever done, and why I think the whole thing came down to saying yes to something I never planned for.
Never quite home
I’m from a small town out in the countryside somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester, and for years I did the sensible version of getting on in life: moving from town to town, then eventually to Manchester itself, which was about the closest thing to home I ever really found in England. I liked it there. I had a great job, some great friends, and no obvious reason to go anywhere. And then an opportunity just fell into my lap, and, ironically, I tried to get rid of it.
I’d applied for what I thought was a bit of contract work as a Magento developer, and on the call it turned out to be a full-time job. So I basically tried to end the conversation there and then. I told the founder I actually already had a job, that I’d thought this was a contract, and that we shouldn’t waste each other’s time. And he just said, “Well, hold on a minute, let’s talk about it anyway. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t.” So I said fine, sure, let’s talk for a bit, fully expecting to not like it at all.
The job was pretty much the same thing I was already doing, on the same salary, and there was only one real difference, but it was the one that mattered: they didn’t care where in the world I worked from, as long as I got the job done and was generally around and contactable when they needed me.
And that made me stop and think, because travelling had never been the plan. I’d never had any ambition to be a nomad. But once the door was open, I realised I couldn’t not take it, because I knew I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what those travels and those experiences might have been like. It was one of those moments where I just didn’t want to be left wondering “what if”, and it felt like a chance I had to take. So, cue an emotional goodbye to the job, the friends and the family I loved, and off I went.
Doing it wrong
Here’s the bit people leave out of these stories: at first, I was doing it completely wrong.
I still had a full-time job, so I couldn’t travel the way everyone else was travelling. I did this slow version of it instead, sort of slow-nomading: one weekend to relocate somewhere new across Europe by train or a cheap flight, then a week to work and explore a bit in the evenings, then a weekend to actually have some fun, and then I’d do the whole thing again in the next city.
And I was doing all of it from hostels, which I think was really the problem. My cadence was two weeks in a place, but everyone else in the hostel was on a three-day cadence at most, because they were travelling and I was working, so I was permanently out of rhythm with every single person around me. I never had a clue who I’d still know by Friday, or the week after, and even the conversations started to feel repetitive and thin, the same two questions on a loop: where did you come from, where are you going next. After a couple of months and a few cities of that, I just got really, properly lonely. So I gave up, and I booked the flight home.
The switch
After I’d booked that flight and more or less admitted defeat, I called my best friend back home to tell him. His name’s Frank, and he basically told me I was doing it all wrong and that I should live life differently.
Stop trying to be a nomad, he said. Get out of the hostels, get yourself into an Airbnb, and actually try life as an expat instead of just passing through everywhere. So the very next day I moved out into an Airbnb, and that same night I went along to an expat event, where I met a friend I’m still close with to this day, along with a whole group of other people I clicked with almost straight away. And from that moment on it was honestly like a switch flipping. I just loved Budapest. I loved the life here.
I loved it so much, in fact, that I never really caught that flight home, at least not the way I’d meant to. That flexible date turned out to be the best decision I’d made in months, because I ended up rearranging it twice, each time pushing it further into the future, as one month here quietly turned into two and then more. All in, I spent about four months living here as a nomad before I properly made up my mind. And when I finally did take the flight, it wasn’t to leave at all: it was to go home, sell everything I didn’t need, and come straight back, because I’d just signed the lease on my first flat in Budapest and decided to commit for good.
Somewhere in those early months I also met a woman I was completely fascinated by, and she became my friend, and then after six months of being best friends she eventually became my wife. By then I’d well and truly realised I’d found my people, and honestly, I’d found my home. There’s something about Budapest, and about Hungary, that just fits me in a way the UK never did, for whatever the reason is, and I’ve long since stopped trying to work out exactly what it is. I do miss the UK, and I miss my family and my friends there. But the honest truth is I was never as happy there as I’ve been here.
Where I actually grew up
I was 26 when I moved to Budapest, so I was technically an adult, but I really do think I grew up here and became the person I am today.
Because if you look back at the story so far, I was mostly just reacting. I’d managed to build myself a decent enough career, but it was all a bit haphazard and luck-based, more a run of chances I happened to say yes to than a life I was actually steering. What changed that was the people. Nearly everyone I was meeting in the city was start-up minded and entrepreneurial: they were building things, making things happen. My wife especially, who despite being just 19 when I met her had already started multiple businesses and was a genuine force. Being around people like that started to shift how I thought about my own life.
It kicked off a self-development journey that honestly hasn’t really stopped since. One of the first books I read was Mind Hacking: How to Control Your Mind, and it gave an example that really landed with me. In the story that is your life, are you just the actor, improvising and reacting to whatever’s in front of you, doing the best job you can but always just responding? Or are you the director, planning out the episode? Or the writer, shaping the whole season? Or maybe even the showrunner, thinking two or three seasons ahead? At the time I was very obviously just the actor, purely improvising, and I knew I wanted to be much further along than that.
It took years, and it took a lot of quiet, unglamorous work: meditation practice, habit tracking, several years of slowly growing up. But for the first time in my life I genuinely feel like I’m planning a conscious direction for myself, rather than just reacting to whatever lands, and pretty much everything good has grown out of that one shift. It’s why I built StillMind, the meditation app that came straight out of my own practice, and HabitCycles, which is really six years of my own habit tracking finally written down. I’ve got a home and a family, and I’ve built products I’m proud of that make people’s lives a bit better, and for the first time I feel like I’m actually providing some real value to the world.
Budapest Hikers, and my first real product
The clearest example of the city just quietly building my life for me is, of all things, a hiking group.
Budapest has loads of different sides to it, and when I was younger here I mostly knew the social one, which is fair, because it’s one of the most social party cities in the world. I could go out on almost any night of the week with no plan and nobody to meet, and still find not just an interesting meetup but a group of genuinely welcoming people happy to talk, and I’ve honestly never had that anywhere else.
But it’s also one of the most beautiful and active cities I know, the sort of place where there are always people running on Margaret Island, off on bike trips, or hiking around the city and further out into Hungary. And that’s the side I spend most of my time on these days: I love hiking, I love trail running, and I love being out in nature with other people. The people are friendly, the weather’s great, especially compared to the north west of England, and honestly that’s a big part of why I’m still here.
One of the businesses my wife founded, back before she was my wife, was called Budapest Hikers, and it’s one of the things we first bonded over. I actually met her by turning up to one of the hikes she was organising, and, being a young British bloke, I’d typically been out the night before, so I arrived just about on time and a tiny bit hungover. But I was instantly shocked by her the moment I saw her. I knew I had to talk to her at some point, and since she was obviously flat out organising the whole thing, I waited for my moment and made sure I got her contact details so we could talk properly afterwards.
Before long I’d started helping her run it, and it needed the help: when we met it was a free event, but 150 people were turning up and squashing onto two buses, with one very stressed founder trying to hold it all together. She knew exactly where she wanted to take it, and I had some web experience, so I helped her build a proper web presence and wire it up to take payments upfront online, instead of collecting cash in person on the day, which meant she could actually book coaches in advance and run it as a real, organised business.
We ran that hiking group together for several years, and it grew into one of the biggest hiking communities in Budapest. We made amazing friends and amazing memories, and it’s genuinely one of the shining-light memories of my whole time here.
It also, almost by accident, led to my first real product success. To take those payments I needed to build an integration with OTP’s SimplePay, because they had a payment gateway but nothing to connect it to WordPress, so I built the plugin myself. It ended up selling for several years and became the market-leading solution, right up until I decided to retire it once Stripe came into the market and revenue started dropping, which, for the record, is a decision I’ve since come to regret. But the part that matters here is where it all came from: a hiking group, in a city I’d very nearly left, run by a woman I very nearly never met.
The boldest thing I ever did
Funnily enough, when I was leaving England, loads of people told me how much they envied it. “Oh, I just wish I had that opportunity,” they’d say, or “it’d be so cool if I could go abroad too and get a remote job like that.” So a couple of months later, when the company I’d joined started looking for new people, I went back to those exact same people and offered them the opportunity. And their excuses were, honestly, fascinating. One of them was “oh, no, I just got a new hamster.” Another was “it’d be really good, but the timing isn’t quite right just now, so maybe next time.” In the end, nobody else took it, which surprised me at the time.
Now I think it’s the whole point. The opportunity was never the rare part. Being brave enough to actually take it was.
So this is where I’ve ended up: a little boy from a small town in the UK who took a bold, slightly reckless step, went out into the world, did it wrong for a while, nearly gave up, listened to a good friend at exactly the right moment, and stayed. That one yes gave me a home, a wife, a family, a group of friends, and the first real belief that I could direct my own life instead of just improvising it. You can see where the rest of it went if you’re curious. I don’t lie awake wondering “what if” anymore, and honestly, when I stop and think about it, it’s all pretty cool.