Life on the road and on the EdgE.
Photo by: Roy Wimmer-Jaglom
By Hannah Nicole Parker
It has always been a dream of mine to be able to travel and work at the same time, whilst still pursuing what I love the most - skydiving. I was planning on quitting my job as a skydiving instructor at Skydive Dubai to follow my dreams of becoming a load organizer and a job opportunity arose as a content creator at The EdgE Agency. This would allow me to work anywhere in the world whilst still skydiving. It was the perfect opportunity to help me on my journey.
One of the biggest and most obvious advantages with working remotely, is the ever-changing environment of my ‘office’. This not only gives me the flexibility to travel (and the luxury of choosing where I live!) but also greatly enhances my creativity, by being in so many different working environments. Meeting new people and really immersing myself in the skydiving world has allowed me to expand my creativity like I was never expecting and open my mind to the upsides of living this lifestyle. I have also enjoyed how working in social media has encouraged me to keep learning new skills, such as video editing and photography.
Photo by: konwentphoto
Of course, it has not been without the occasional struggle, "living the dream" can sometimes have its challenges. Having decided to spend some time in Empuriabrava, I had landed into Barcelona, a couple of hours train away from my final destination. After having no sleep the night before from a very early flight, I found myself in the middle of pandemic chaos in the airport, carrying my entire life in 35kg and struggling to figure out how to take a train. In the next 5 hours, I had run up and down escalators, had train doors comically close on me and getting on and off about 45,204 trains. Once I had finally worked out which train to take, I sat down in the air-conditioned cabin feeling like a queen. I got my laptop out to do some work that I had neglected during the travel nightmare and I promptly dropped it straight on the floor, smashing the screen. In good news, it appeared at least the laptop was still working, but as I picked it up, I cut my finger on the glass of the broken screen and started bleeding everywhere. On a train. In the middle of a pandemic. At this point I had to laugh at the ridiculousness, as the ticket master came over to tell me I had the wrong ticket and needed to pay a fine. In my head I told myself "life is a journey and not a destination", but boy was I looking forward to this destination. Once I arrived, I was welcomed with a cold beer and everything was awesome. Traveling isn’t always a walk in the park!
Photo by: My sister
Ultimately, the most incredible thing about this work is the feeling of freedom that I have. As long as I can get the work done, I no longer have to say no to certain events, or scrape every last day of holiday I have together to be where I want to be. As cliche as it sounds, it really does feel like I am on one big holiday sometimes, just with a social media obsession ;). A normal day for me can vary greatly from stealing WiFi from various cafes, DZ’s and wind tunnels, to writing blog posts on the beach. I may have to sometimes juggle jumping with deadlines and I may have to work all day Sunday in order to do something awesome on Monday. But mostly I feel lucky that working at The EdgeE enables me to continue doing what I love and focus my energy on skydiving.