Account 
Reservations 
Support 
Meet Our #LandingLife Contest Winners: Becca, John, and Patty
Back in December, we announced the winners of our #LandingLife contest, offering a once-in-a-life opportunity for winners to live with us for one year, rent-free. Our judges were immediately charmed by Becca’s desire to travel for a year with her new husband, John, after their honeymoon was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, you can’t go wrong when you have an adorable dog named Patty along for the ride!
We’ll be hearing a lot more from Becca on Landing Life throughout the year, so we sat down with her to learn more about her background and her travel plans for the next 12 months. Here we go!
Q: Tell us more about you, John, and Patty!
Becca: I work in the corporate marketing world and am a writer on the side. I have been a ghostwriter for the past four and a half years, which is how I’ve grown my TikTok following, and I’m also about a third of the way through writing my debut novel. Outside of work, I love working out, so I’m very excited about living in Landings with gyms in them. I’m also a big coffee person.
And usually, I’m a big travel person, but obviously not so much over the past couple of years.
John has a day job working for Reverb, a music tech company, and also plays bass in a band for a musician named Nathan Graham. We have been together for just over eight years and married for less than one. We were supposed to get married in 2020 but had to push the wedding back to 2021, and we had a big Italian and Greek honeymoon planned that didn’t end up happening. So we were always planning on spending at least a portion of 2022 traveling and working remotely.
Our dog, Patty, will also join us on our trip. She’s a rescue dog, even though she looks like a designer dog we spent way too much money on. She was actually a surrender at the sheriff’s office in John’s parents’ hometown and cost just $80. We like to remind her of that all the time: “You were $80 and now you live this life! How great is it to be you?”
She’s a very well-traveled dog. We drove halfway to North Carolina to meet John’s parents and pick her up, then we took her out to southwest Utah with us a month after we got her. We had already booked the trip, so we just had to hope she was good in the car! Fortunately, she’s so chill. All she wants to do is curl up on my feet or on my lap and stick her head into fast-food bags.
Q: What are your travel plans while living with Landing this year?
Becca: Our plan is to start in Los Angeles, where John will play some shows with Nathan. Then, we’re planning on spending our free week with Landing in Austin in March and will head to Milwaukee next summer. I’m in a wedding there at the end of August, so we’re going to spend some time there visiting friends and family and hiking. There are also a ton of music festivals in Wisconsin over the summer.
But outside of that, we really don’t know where we’re heading. We know we want to use all four cities Landing is offering us, but we’re not sure what the other two spots will be. We’re interested in experimenting with other cities that aren’t quite as big as Chicago. We also need to be close to a city, if not inside of one, because John’s work as a musician is very contingent on being close to venues.
I’m such a planner that it’s weird to me that we only have to give a month’s notice and pick out where we’re going next. It’s overwhelming how many options we have! But we’re just going to feel it out as we go. It’s definitely a test of my ability to be flexible, but it’s nice to know that I’m rooted in a good system. There’s going to be an apartment for us that fills our needs, lets us have Patty, and lets us work remotely. It’s not like I’m booking a place that has a hard stop and then we’re kicked out.
Q: What kinds of factors are important to you in the cities you choose?
Becca: I personally want to be closer to hiking. Los Angeles isn’t a huge hiking place, but there are some that I can get to. Weather is also a big factor. Walking outside right now in Chicago is miserable—Patty hates her boots and doesn’t want to put them on, then picks up her little paws when we’re outside so we have to carry her. So I want to escape that for a little bit!
As I mentioned before, coffee and working out are our two biggest hobbies. I sort of hate this about us, because when I talk about us, I’m like, “Are we a stereotype?” Not the musician husband and the writer wife who love coffee! Gross! I have heard this story before!
But really, we take our coffee very seriously. John has been trying to decide which elements of our coffee setup are coming with us on the road. The coffee scene in southern California and Milwaukee are both really good.
Also, on a less fun note, we’re just so uncertain about what the COVID situation is right now. We were really hopeful back in June when we got married, and now it’s just more question marks. We’ll want to head to cities that take precautions seriously so we’ll feel safe.
Stay tuned for more from Becca, John, and Patty!
Be sure to visit Landing Life over the next year to check in with Becca, John, and Patty’s adventures, from recommendations of things to do in their new cities to what it’s like living as a digital nomad. We can’t wait to see where they decide to head next!
Related Articles
