Los Angeles

My wife and I have already left Los Angeles and moved on to our next destination. I've shared a few stories from LA on my Instagram, and they're saved as Highlights. However, I still have plenty of photos and stories I want to share there."

New Zealand

We're currently living in New Zealand. The plan is to stay here for 8 months until May 2024. We bought a small older van, a Toyota Hiace, and had it rebuilt into a campervan, which now serves as our home. For the first 2,5 months, we resided in Devonport, a part of Auckland, since my wife was working there. Devonport holds a bit of Gilmore Girls' Stars Hollow vibes.

Before Christmas, we relocated to the South Island. For the holiday season, we had the opportunity to house-sit two homes in Christchurch, providing a temporary break from our van life. Afterwards, we embarked on our exploration of the South Island, taking our time to soak in the beauty of the lakes, Castle Hill, the West Coast, Wanaka, Queenstown, Milford Sound, and various Lord of the Rings filming locations. We prefer a slower pace of travel, often spending 2–4 days simply enjoying the van life. During those non-travel days, I'm able to get plenty of work done right from the van.

We met a couple from Poland who are traveling the world and now hitchhiking in New Zealand. Quickly, we became friends and spent a few days traveling together in our van, visiting some LOTR locations and going on trips. After saying goodbye, we unexpectedly encountered them again a few days later while they were hitchhiking on the same road as we drove on. We ended up spending another few days together and visited Mt. Sunday – the home of Edoras from LOTR.

A few days ago, we returned to the North Island and are currently staying in Wellington for about a week. Some of our upcoming destinations include Weta studios in Wellington, Mount Taranaki, Tongariro, and Hobbiton.

Audiobooks & Podcasts

During our road trips around New Zealand, we're hooked on Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall. And when I was out hiking, I've been diving into two books by Derek Sivers – Hell Yeah or No, and How to Live. These three are definitely on my repeat-read list. They inspire me and help me reevaluate or "reset" of what I'm doing or want to do. Btw. I really like when an audiobook is read by the autor. Feels like they're speaking directly to you, it adds that personal authentic touch.

I also enjoyed Joe Rogan podcast episodes with Guy Ritchie, and Naval Ravikant.

Also, we listened to latest episodes of our most favorite Czech podcast Středo/věk, and many episodes of Moviezone podcasts about stories behind or around making of my/our favorite movies like The Thing, Total Recall, Mission Impossible, Batman Begins, Interstellar, Starship Troopers, …

Work

I work from the van with a mobile internet or in a library with WiFi if there is some around, or from McDonalds with WiFi. Working from the van, on the road, is both freeing and challenging. Challenging not only because of the small space (like 4 square meters), but the 12h time-difference with Europe. Calls can be made only in late evenings or early mornings. But on the other side, having the whole day without interuptions, on fresh air, is great.

Regarding kvikymart.com, I'm currently working on three major scopes.

1. Rebradning — The brand itself, a new website, and all the necessary bits for the release of the new brand. After years of work since the initial idea of rebranding, we are getting close to the release. I plan to share more about what we've quietly been building for over 12 years. I'm extremely excited about all of it!
2. New large-scale important features that will solve other agendas of our clients.
3. Release of new already prepared features.

Inspired from concepts and approaches from Derek Sivers, I started working also on my own website. The one you are reading now. I started with simple home page and Now page. The concept of Now page makes a lot of sense to me. Simple idea for remind priorities and slightly share of what's going on around me.

Photos

I'm working on a way to process and share photos more efficiently. I take a lot of them, but I often get stuck when it comes to processing and sharing. Right now, I'm going through

• 3k+ photos from LA,
• 24k+ photos from NZ.

California and Return to Europe

In May, we are going back to California for a 3–4 week-long trip, so we are slowly starting to plan. We are scouting places to visit and saving points in our Google map, etc.

After California, we will return to Czechia for another summer in the row.