It is all Segovia’s fault. We fell under the Spanish city’s spell with a glimpse of the Roman aqueduct and a fairy-tale castle said to be the inspiration for Disney’s Snow White Queen’s castle. One or both of us said, “I could live here,” and an idea was planted.

As the years ticked by, we kept encouraging ourselves to do something daring. We first talked of moving to Spain or Portugal, then changed to “let’s travel all of Europe.” We started weighing the pros and cons of quitting jobs to travel. We started estimating expenses, income, and outgo.

Finally, it came down to two well-worn phrases: the time was right, and life is short. And so in late November 2018 we quit our jobs and embarked on a year (more or less) of travel in Europe.

On the personal side, our two great kids are grown and happy and fully support our adventures. We are not, however, independently wealthy. We have been blessed with some steady income from a family property sale, and we are renting our North Carolina home and are clearing a little bit each month on the mortgage. My car is paid for, and my husband sold his much beloved Volkswagen GTI just before we left. So financially it is working. We can do this and just about break even. We are calling this our gap year, and we will need to find new jobs once the traveling life is over.

A third factor in deciding to travel now instead of after retirement was the fact we are in good health at the age of 59. Advertisers might convince us that 50 is the new 40. Huzzah! But there’s no getting around how old 60 sounds. And being realists, we want to be able to climb any twisty, steep castle or cathedral steps we may desire. But in our late 60s and 70s, will we be able? We didn’t want to wait to find out.

I heard a man on an airplane talk about a tour he’d been on. He said it was irritating to have to wait for all the old people to catch up. Valid complaint. We didn’t want to be in either of those sets of shoes, so we mostly have shunned tour groups, and are doing our own thing.
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Deciding Where to Go

Hoping to pack light and not be bogged down with heavy winter clothes, we chose to start our journey in southern Portugal and Spain, enjoying warmish winter weather, less crowds, and beautiful Christmas decorations.

While in Seville, we began thinking of home, missing our two dogs, our kids, and our house. We looked into house-sitting assignments in Europe as a way to save money, live somewhere more homey, get our pet fix, and still enjoy the traveling life. We joined Mind My House, created a profile, and added a new element to our travel. Now, deciding ‘where to next’ has depended a few times on whether we had a free place to stay, while caring for someone’s pets.

Deciding where to go has also been driven by inexpensive airfares. Our itinerary after spending a couple of weeks in Italy was heavily influenced by cheap flights from Bologna to Montenegro, from Montenegro to Budapest, and from Budapest to Stockholm.

Curse You Schengen!

Having never attempted to travel a calendar year in Europe, we had a lot of planning to do. The first hurdle we came across was the “Schengen agreement,” which stipulates that non-EU passport holders can only spend 90 days in mainland Europe in a 180-day period. Our plan had been to start in Portugal and travel counterclockwise through Europe: Spain, France, Italy, Greece, etc., sometimes visiting two or more smaller countries a month. But Schengen put a stop to that.

So, the plan had to be altered. We would now have to keep a close count on our travel days, consider places not really on the list, all to keep from overstaying our time in Europe and possibly being labeled as illegal aliens. I should point out that U.K. countries are NOT part of Schengen, and we decided this would be the bulk of our non-Schengen travel. We also started looking for other non-Schengen locations to visit, such as Cyprus and some of the Balkan countries.

Weather was another obstacle. One perk of winter travel is that the crowds at traditional tourist sites, such as the Roman Colosseum or the Parthenon in Athens, are much smaller. The downside is that it is COLD, and a lot of businesses shut down for the season. Taking our cue from the Greek Island of Paros, where just about everything was closed when we visited in the middle of January, we decided to “shut down” our European travel at the end of our first three months. We had a winter layover in Texas with family for the month of March. This gave us a much-needed break and more time to plan next steps.

 

We thought when we set out to travel most of 2019, that we would have everything booked, paid for and planned out three months in advance. Ha ha ha. Reality is that we are doing good to have things planned out three weeks in advance. And yes, we are still able to get cheap flights and accommodations.

We are primarily using Air BnB for lodging and our rooms vary from $33 to $100 per night, usually landing at the $50 mark. Scouting locations, reading reviews, and checking for public transit have all been a lot more time consuming than we imagined. Location would not matter as much if you wanted to rent a car at each spot, but we are trying to conserve money. Public buses and regional trains are often the best bet, at least in large-sized European cities.

We aim our travel stories at the 50+ traveler, our contemporaries. The places we’ve gone, are going, we pick with the “view” in mind. We are not so much about “doing” everything there is to do in a place, but more about “seeing” all the beauty of oceans, mountains, meadows, rivers, architecture, what all.

We also know that very few people will go about travel in the same manner we are. That’s okay. As my husband says, “we do what we want”, and you should too. My hope is that in sharing some of our process, others will be inspired to try something new, travel somewhere different, change jobs, etc. It starts with an idea…