One doesn’t come to embrace an adventure such as this without weighing the downsides. We spent a weekend in our college town reconnecting with friends, some we hadn’t seen in many years. It was so good to share time together again, and it isn’t easy to think about leaving such people and places behind, but we are not leaving, we are going someplace different. To me there is a rather significant difference between the two. Besides, we will be bringing them all with us, at least in our memories and hearts.

When we first discussed the plan to downsize and travel, we established a loose target date to have the house ready to put on the market. Since the house might sell quickly, we also realized that we needed to be ready regarding the move details, that is we need to decide where to live, research apartment options, visa application, travel insurance and insurance options, banking arrangements, as well as create a reasonable budget including income streams, etc., etc., etc.

Chris and I work fairly well together, as long as we aren’t sharing the same task. So while he is purging the garage and attic, I am working on the to-do list and budget. He is the artistic one, writing entries for the blog, and taking photographs, I am the project manager and Excel spreadsheet master. Now if I can only get him to work on the items in the listed order!

A venture such as this has many facets. The biggest considerations are related to preparing and selling our home and possessions. This is no easy task for several reasons. First it is a beautiful home in a great neighborhood, and it means even more to us because we rebuilt after a fire in 2003. Second, is what to do with everything we have replaced and accumulated over the past ten years. Our realtor assured us the house would move quickly considering the improvements made during the rebuild. But there is a lot of work yet to be done.

Jeannie and I have always enjoyed traveling. We are now both retired, our health is still good and we are financially secure. Retirement has made the prospect of longer adventures even more inviting. The only thing that might hold us back is the responsibility, maintenance, and expense of our home and all our stuff. Easy, we could downsize our possessions into storage, sell the house and cars, we could take a small apartment almost anywhere. The big question would be “Where?” when we considered the bigger picture, we realized that we could go almost anywhere in the world!