The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, encounters, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them. They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns.
The book is finished. The Nomad is out in the world now, closed between two covers — but the life it came from never stopped moving. These pages are what keeps happening after the last page. Stay tuned. The road is still unfolding.
Scroll all the way down to see what people are saying about The Nomad.
Behind our house in Rohrbach, Heidelberg, Germany, there was a courtyard with no fences. Beyond it, fields, nobody’s, that we treated as ours. We climbed, invented, argued, disappeared for hours. Nobody managed us. There was no boredom, because boredom needs a lack of freedom, and we had plenty of that.
I didn’t know then that this was the shape of the thing I’d spend the rest of my life finding my way back to.
Not the freedom of having no limits. The freedom of choosing my own.
Here is what it actually gives me, now.
It gives me presence. When nobody’s schedule owns my Tuesdays, I can stop, properly, wherever the day asks me to. Sit with a grandmother in Janwaar for an hour with nowhere else to be. Notice the light. Finish a thought instead of parking it for later.
It gives me clarity about what’s mine to carry. I can walk away from an arrangement, a role, a version of myself that stopped being true — without needing anyone’s permission, without owing an explanation. That’s not selfishness. It’s the opposite. It means what I do give, I give clean. No leverage attached, nothing held back as a bargaining chip. In Janwaar I learned that trust only grows when generosity isn’t secretly a transaction. Freedom is what lets generosity stay generous.
It gives me steadiness. Not calm, exactly — more like ballast. I take things less personally now. I hold life with a looser grip. When plans unravel, I’ve learned to pause, breathe, stay curious, rather than let the disruption decide my mood for me.
And it gives me a kind of usefulness I didn’t expect. People in Janwaar, in Telč, in classrooms — they don’t need me to have all the answers. They need someone who isn’t performing for an audience, isn’t protecting a reputation, isn’t quietly negotiating for approval. Freedom is what makes me actually available to them, instead of available to my own image.
None of this arrived free of charge.
There’s little money most months. I walk alone more than most people would choose to, and some evenings that aloneness has real weight. I don’t dress it up as noble. And by every conventional measure, this isn’t a rich life.
But rich was never about money. As a child in that fenceless courtyard, I owned nothing and nobody managed us, and still I was rich — rich in possibilities, which is the only kind of rich that actually counts. That hasn’t changed. Two bags, a motorbike, a dog for company sometimes. It should feel like lack. Mostly it feels like shedding a skin that had grown too tight.
And through all of it, one thing hasn’t moved: my will stays mine. The bank balance doesn’t get a vote. The lonely evening doesn’t get a vote. Nobody’s idea of a sensible life gets to make my decisions for me.
Freedom, done properly, doesn’t roar. It whispers. Even a whisper needs a frame — the way a jazz band needs someone to set the key before anyone can improvise. Mine has shape: the walking, the writing, the villages, the people I return to, the ones I’ve let go of.
I’m not finished with it. That’s where I am now.
>>> This story — and others like it — live in The Nomad.
5 out of 5 stars 125 Countries… and Still Counting (Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2026)
Disclosure: I worked on this book.
Knowing Ulrike for 40 years, I’d heard most of these stories before, told to me directly by Ulrike. But reading them together, laid out in one continuous flow, was something else — and there are just as many equally astonishing ones that didn’t make it into this book (maybe in another one?). And yes, more than once I found myself thinking, “is this really true?” It always was.
What strikes me most is that Ulrike never exaggerates or embellishes. If anything, she under-states things — for lack of a better word. That matters, because this isn’t really a book about “travel”, or “adventure.” It’s a book about attention to the larger issues, and their details: about stepping back from ego and actually seeing, feeling, grasping what’s happening around you and inside you — and then acting on it. That pattern, repeated over and over across a life, is what led her to more than 125 countries.
What also stayed with me is the sheer specificity she remembers. Small, specific, fascinating — the kind of texture that makes the stories feel lived rather than told. Often, I caught myself with goosebumps.
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5 out of 5 stars A Life Earned in Full (Reviewed in Germany on May 25, 2026)
I have known Ulrike Reinhard for twenty years. I thought I understood her fairly well. Then I read this book and realised I had only ever been watching the surface of something much deeper.
The Nomad is not a travel memoir, though it crosses continents. It is not a success story, though success appears in abundance. It is something rarer: a sustained act of honest looking — at a life, at the invisible forces that shaped it, and at the long, uneven process of stepping beyond them. Reading it, I kept encountering a woman I recognised and details I had never known. That combination is unsettling in the best possible way.
What struck me most was not the courage of her choices — the departures, the years in a rural Indian village, the nomadic life without a fixed address — but her willingness to examine them. She writes about a quality I have always sensed in her without being able to name: a deep thoughtfulness. She does not simply live her life and report on it afterwards. She lives it while looking at it clearly, and that clarity, earned slowly and at real cost, is what makes this book worth reading.
I watched many of these transformations from the outside and thought I understood them. I did not. The book corrects that gently but thoroughly. What looked like boldness was discernment. What looked like restlessness was a sustained refusal to mistake ease for alignment. That distinction — and the discipline it takes to hold it over a lifetime — left an impression on me that I am still processing.
She ends the book not with a conclusion but with a pause. “I’m not finished. That’s where I am now.” After twenty years of watching this person move through the world, that is the most convincing thing she could have said.
I knew Ulrike Reinhard. I know her better now. For anyone who thought they already did — read this book.