📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - Why movement matters more than distance, and why 2026 is about remembering what works.

• The Suite: Casa San Carlos in Periera, Colombia

• The Deep Dive: On quiet, novelty, and the neurological case for leaving your usual Tuesday

• The Stream: A mystery that does the traveling for you: Wake Up Dead Man

• The Gear: A small brass object that changed how I work

🪟 The Suite - Casa San Carlos (Pereira, Colombia)

Quiet is a strange thing. You don't miss it while it's gone. You forget it entirely, until the moment it returns and reminds you what's been missing.

That's what I noticed first at Casa San Carlos. Not the view or the greenery, but the absence of noise I'd grown accustomed to explaining away. It sits outside Pereira in Colombia's Eje Cafetero, close enough to the airport to feel effortless, far enough into green that the city's low-level hum simply doesn't follow you.

The climate is familiar if you know Medellín (eternal spring territory) but the energy is different. Thicker jungle. Fewer inputs. Nothing competing for your attention.

I almost skipped breakfast. I always skip hotel breakfasts. But the coffee was excellent, and in the Coffee Region, that's not a bonus, it's a baseline.

Sitting there with the mountains in front of me, I had the quiet realization that this is what I'd been building toward all year without fully remembering it: conditions that let your mind reset without effort.

Casa San Carlos isn't trying to impress you. There's a pool, a hot tub, endless green, but none of it demands participation.

The real luxury is the absence of pressure. Nothing to optimize. Nothing to perform. Just space to think, rest, and let novelty do its quiet neurological work.

I slept deeply, the kind of sleep that doesn't feel like recovery so much as recalibration, and woke up without urgency for the first time in a while.

This is not a hotel you rush through. It's a place you let recalibrate you.

Who it's for: anyone who wants a short stay that actually changes how rested and clear they feel when they leave.

Book your stay: Casa San Carlos

🤿 The Deep Dive

THERE’S A PARTICULAR IRONY in spending an entire year building a newsletter called “A Texas Nomad” while barely leaving my studio in Medellín, Colombia. Sure, there is a season for all things, and 2025 has been my season to build and build. Be it LEGO, life, or all in between.

While many of you were out there living your best nomad life, digital or analog, or planning it, I was in here. Newsletter architect. Voice guide. Modular molding. And of course, writing. Endlessly. Happily, but endlessly.

The kind of deep work that would make Cal Newport proud.

But something shifted last week in Pereira, Colombia.

I stepped out of the airport into air that felt basically the same. Pereira and Medellín are both eternal spring chickens. But it was different. The jungle was thicker. The bed was endless. The atmosphere was… quiet. For the first time in a while, I woke up wondering if I’d been drugged. Maybe not a feeling you want in Medellín, for other reasons, but in Pereira, I sure enjoyed it.

I went to breakfast, something I never do at hotels. It was lovely. The coffee was excellent. This wasn’t something new or because I had been reincarnated with new life and love, it was because the coffee was excellent. Pereira is in the Eje Cafetero region of Colombia, which is the world’s coffee mecca.

Somewhere between the mountain views and the quiet hum of a city I’d never seen before, I remembered: Oh right, this is why I started this whole thing.

Movement is medicine, whether it’s reps at the gym, walks through the park, or one of those red Indiana Jones lines bleeding across a map.

What I had forgotten while building ATN in 2025, your brain doesn’t actually care if you're eating tiramisu in Florence or trying your first Nashville hot chicken. Novelty is novelty. Harvard research confirms that traveling to new places enhances brain plasticity by exposing you to novel experiences.

University of Pittsburgh neuroscientist Paul Nussbaum found that new environments stimulate dendrite production. Essentially, your brain starts growing new connections just because you showed up somewhere unfamiliar.

And here is the democratizing part: it doesn’t have to be expensive or far. Research suggests that even simple environmental enrichment, say, taking a different route to work, learning to cook Moroccan food in your own kitchen, camping somewhere two hours away, can stimulate the same neuroplasticity.

The nomad life isn’t reserved for trust fund kids with Rimowa luggage.

It’s available to anyone willing to say yes to something new.

(Before you screenshot this for your group chat on polyamory: when neuroscience talks about novelty keeping the brain sharp, it applies to places and experiences, not partners. Research shows that exploring depth with one person through shared novel experiences is more cognitively rewarding than the shallow novelty of many. Sorry, your hall pass is for Yellowstone, not Tinder.)

So here is my pitch for 2026: plan something. Anything.

Maybe it’s finally visiting those American national parks that the rest of the world flies across oceans to see. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon…. We forget that these are world-class destinations we’re lucky enough to have in our own backyard.

Maybe it’s a weekend in a city three hours away that you’ve always driven past. Maybe it’s trying every taco truck in your own neighborhood until you find one that changes your life.

It doesn’t matter to the brain if it’s three days or three months, $200 or $20,000. What matters is that you move. That you wake up somewhere that isn’t your usual Tuesday. That you remember what it feels like to be a little lost, a little bit curious, a little bit more alive than you were the week before.

I spent 2025 building the infrastructure for this newsletter. In 2026, I’m getting back out there, and I’m bringing you with me, just like the goldfish. You don’t need to quit your job or buy a one-way ticket (though if that’s your move, godspeed).

But because the version of you that stays curious, that keeps moving, that keeps saying yes to new experiences?

That’s the version worth building a life around.

😏 The Meme

📢 Newsletter News

1. Subscriber Counter: 3,668

🌎 VisaWatch

🇬🇷 Greece is having a moment as a top global retirement destination, supported by its FIP visa and a Digital Nomad Visa that allow long-term living without full residency commitment.

🇪🇸 Spain updated its digital nomad visa income requirements for 2026, raising the monthly threshold to around €2,763 to align with local wage standards. 

🇵🇹 Portugal’s D8 Digital Nomad Visa continues into 2025 with residency of up to two years (renewable), requiring proof of stable income and offering access across the Schengen Area. 

🇭🇷 Croatia has expanded its digital nomad visa, now allowing stays up to 3 years with family reunification options.  

🇨🇾 Cyprus expanded its Digital Nomad Visa in 2025, allowing 12-month stays with renewals and increased permit caps for non-EU freelancers and remote workers. 

🇨🇴 Colombia’s Digital Nomad Visa remains in effect, allowing remote workers to live and work remotely with a two-year stay option under current regulations.

🇹🇭 Thailand’s Destination Thailand Visa is gaining traction as a five-year multiple-entry option attractive to long-stay remote workers.

🇵🇭 The Philippines rolled out its first structured digital nomad visa program, enabling remote work residency of up to two years.  

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Wake Up Dead Man (Netflix)

One of the wonderful things about movies is how they do the traveling for you. This excellent new installment of Rian Johnson's murder mystery series might just be the best crowd-pleaser of the bunch, even if "Glass Onion" remains my personal favorite for its sheer weirdness.

Daniel Craig returns as detective Benoit Blanc, this time investigating a murder at a small Catholic church in upstate New York. When Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin) is killed, young priest Father Jud (Josh O'Connor) becomes the prime suspect. What follows is a deliciously twisty mystery that refuses to be easily solved.

The third entry in the series, following "Knives Out" (2019) and "Glass Onion" (2022), layers a compelling faith-based story beneath the whodunit. The religious are not necessarily good; the good are not necessarily religious. Kind of like real life.

The cast is extraordinary: Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright, join Craig, Brolin, and O'Connor. It's the kind of ensemble that only happens when you have a strong script, proper funding, and a director like Johnson at the helm.

Side note: has anyone else noticed that, since COVID, it seems like all actors have jumped forward in age? Figuring out who some of these A-list actors are now seems to take the detailed eye of a detective.

Now streaming on Netflix, "Wake Up Dead Man" proves Johnson hasn't lost his touch for crafting intelligent, entertaining mysteries that keep you guessing until the end.

⌚ The Gear - Japanese Brass Ruler (16cm)

Some objects don’t try to be timeless. They just plan to stick around.

This brass ruler from Traveler’s Company out of Japan is one of those. Sixteen centimeters. Solid. Uncomplicated. The packaging says: long time use... That feels less like branding and more like instruction.

Brass doesn’t stay shiny. It darkens. It softens. It picks up patina, which is really just evidence of contact. Time, hands, friction. I like that it doesn’t resist this.

I keep it in the back pocket of my Leuchtturm1917 bullet journal. I use it to underline passages I want to come back to, to draw quiet boundaries on a page, or sometimes just to slow my hand down. Writing by hand already does that. This reinforces it.

There’s nothing efficient about it. No upgrades. No notifications. Just weight and repetition. It doesn’t improve the work directly, but it shapes the conditions around it.

That’s what I’m really paying attention to these days. Tools that age. Objects that stay. Things that get better by being used instead of replaced.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

If you enjoyed this, share it.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.