If you’ve ever tried to name a website, you know it’s fraught. It’s like naming a child, except harder, because at least with a child you can wait a few days and hope the right name just…appears. A website demands commitment. Branding. A domain. A logo you will regret for the rest of your natural life. And unlike a child, you can’t just holler out the window at a random guy in a tin-foil hat to see if he has any ideas. (Though, honestly, maybe we should have tried that.)
That’s where Rick and I found ourselves, two adults in our mumblety-mumbleties trying to name the thing that would document the next chapter of our lives—retirement. Well, retirement for Rick. “Lightly working, but in wildly different countries,” for me. Semantics.
Rick’s plan was to start a blog to document our travels (actually, his plan was for me to start a blog). It seemed like a novel idea if you ignore the thousands of other travel blogs that have already been created. We decided on the site before we actually started traveling, but we had big plans. Plans involving flights and backpacks, all based on the fantasy that we’d become better versions of ourselves simply by crossing borders. Super Instagrammable stuff.
The problem was that we couldn’t agree on what to call it. I wanted something that conveyed an air of cultured competence. Something that said, “We appreciate good architecture, eat interesting things, and have sophisticated opinions about artisan salts.” Rick wanted something that was a tidge more accurate, “We sold all our stuff to wander the world with the level of preparation you’d expect from two people who can’t operate the ceiling fans in Airbnbs.”
If I’ve learned anything from my professional life, it’s that the first thing you need for any new project is a logo. And you have to have a name for that. So we sat at the dining table with a legal pad, swearing to each other we’d stay there until inspiration struck. Inspiration, as it turns out, is a coward. It never shows up when you need it.
We sat in uneasy silence for about 3 hours before we came up with an initial idea—Rick and Geoff’s Excellent Adventure. That seemed somehow derivative, though. And we didn’t want Keanu Reeves showing up and going all Wick on us.
But the dam broke and the ideas came fast and furious. Geriatric Globetrotters Gone Wild? Bold, but would likely require at least one of us to take his shirt off in public. So, no. Rick and Geoff’s World of Wonder? That showed promise but neither of us could grow the necessary Victorian handlebar mustaches to pull off the vibe. Silver Foxes and Fanny Packs? We thought about it before we also thought about the most likely search engine results.
Finally, we did what all creatives do when they’re desperate. We went out for a drink.
We went to a beach café up the road, hoping for inspiration. The fish tacos were excellent. The kombucha latte was not. Imagine someone forgot good tea on a patio for three days, then tried to fix the situation with some old oat milk you found at the back of the fridge. A beverage only suitable for people who hate their taste buds. But it did remind us of our mission—to write things down so future travelers might avoid similar mistakes.
Fueled by tacos and moral clarity, we kept brainstorming.
- Golden Gays on the Go
- Dapper Duo’s Daring Departures
- Destination Disasters
No, no, and no. Each name was worse than the one before, and all of them sounded like bad direct-to-DVD movies even Walmart wouldn’t sell.
In a moment of “why not?”, we even enlisted the two cats we were babysitting to help. We scribbled name options on scraps of paper and scattered them around the living room and waited for divine feline guidance. Meowzilla just stared at us without blinking, clearly thinking through the logistics of smothering us in our sleep and eating our faces, leaving our bodies to be discovered by the cleaning lady—which, let’s be honest, would take weeks because we can’t afford a cleaning lady.
Mr. Whiskers hopped over the paper scraps onto the coffee table, knocked over my glass of water, and left the room entirely. Just the sort of help you’d expect from cats. But we dutifully added Wet Carpet Disaster to the list of potentials.
Our rising desperation led us to a Ouija board. That went about as well as you’d imagine. Aside from learning that there are at least two spirits who live in this small condo and they DO NOT LIKE EACH OTHER, it was a mostly fruitless effort. The only legible name that emerged was Sassy Seniors on the Loose, but I’m pretty sure Rick was pushing the planchette. Also, we were trying to build a brand, not a Ted Danson-led CBS sitcom.
Naming something is hard not because words are scarce, but because naming requires you to define what you’re doing before you’ve done it. Before you know what it’s going to feel like to pack up your life, or to land somewhere new, or to discover whether you’re the kind of people who adapt gracefully or the kind who panic when the washing machine has too many buttons. (Foreshadowing—we’re the latter.)
After all that, we landed on Modern Hobos. It made us laugh. It felt loose, unserious, and a little scruffy around the edges—roughly how we expected this whole chapter to go. Only later did we learn there are real distinctions between hobos, tramps, and bums. Hobos travel around looking for work. Tramps travel avoiding it. Bums do neither. So if you want to get all technical about it, I’m a hobo. Rick’s a tramp.
This is all completely different from the distinctions between gypsies, tramps, and thieves, by the way. As I understand it, gypsies may be tramps, but not all tramps are gypsies. Tramps might be thieves, but not all thieves are tramps. And thieves may be gypsies, but not all gypsies are thieves. But if you ask Cher, she’ll tell you they’re all the same. They’re the ones the people of the town would call gypsies, tramps, and thieves. But every night all the men would come around and lay their money down.
We had no idea what the name would become or whether it would make sense in the long run. It was just two words that somehow fit. Two words that said, more or less, This is probably going to be a mess, but it’ll be our mess.
But we finally had something to call it. And that was enough to get started.
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