Chris and Debbi's Adventure

The list of decisions that must be made before beginning a year of full-time travel includes everything from where to go to how and how to get there to what to pack and how much to spend. But one of the biggest decisions is deciding what you do (or do not) leave behind. What will you come back to? For a decade, Chris and I have lived in the house his parents built more than 50 years ago. We meant it to be a short term stay while we cared for his father in declining health. But his father died just weeks before our planned move, and we spent the next year in transition as we cleared out 50 years of accumulated possessions, updated the home and pared down our own belongings. Somehow five years passed as we both changed jobs, lost more family members and spent several months traveling each year when we took up house and pet sitting. Then…Covid. Finally, in 2023 we began to seriously plan for lifestyle in retirement. What type of home did we really want and where did we want it to be? ...

Chris and I have always enjoyed traveling but actually didn’t do much during the first 20 years of our marriage. Too busy working and raising a family, too little money, too limited vacation time. We took a few family vacations, accompanied each other on a few work trips and took some long weekend trips to a family reunion or wedding. But in 2016 our youngest daughter spent a semester studying in Cuzco, Peru. She planned a two-week tour of the country at the end of her studies for us and her boyfriend. The trip included the Sacred Valley, Nazca Lines and, of course, Machu Pichu. Travel to South America had not been anything we had ever envisioned, but we found the country fascinating, the logistics manageable and the cultural differences not at all overwhelming. We followed it up the next year with a trip to Portugal, where we met a couple from New Zealand who introduced us to the concept of house and pet sitting. We were immediately intrigued with the idea of trading free acc...