We’re Susan and Hale, mid-life travelers, originally from the US who set out in 2019 to travel the world and subsequently spent 3+ years in New Zealand, took a year detour back to the states, and have now been bopping around between Europe, the US and Australia. While we created this site primarily to share our travel stories with our family and friends, we hope that anyone planning longer-term travel finds it useful. (But we’re terrible at updating it, sorry!)
We are avid fans of new experiences, seeing new-to-us parts of the world, learning about various cultures, meeting interesting people, hiking beautiful places, walking and biking new trails (Susan), and kitesurfing, surfing and wing-foiling anywhere there’s water (Hale.)
We are advocates of slow travel, career breaks, financial frugality, early retirement, taking calculated risks and anything you can do to live a life less ordinary.
Our first big adventure (of this journey anyway!) was a trip to New Zealand. We planned six months of weekly stays to see as much as possible of this incredible country. We have documented our itinerary and tales here in case you wish to follow.
Of course, then COVID appeared. We were incredibly fortunate to be in this country where the Team of 5 Million did an incredible job eliminating the virus and keeping it out while the rest of the world suffered. We very happily embraced our luck and stayed for three years in Aotearoa. You can read more about that here.
At the end of 2022, we hit a bump in the road with a cancer diagnosis so were temporarily sidelined from international travel while we faced that. You can read more about the impact of a cancer diagnosis on us as nomads here.
In 2023, we got back to world travel, enjoying seeing the sights, walking the trails and tasting the tapas of Portugal and Spain. We need to be back in the states every few months for oncology visits, so have been mixing it up with shoulder seasons visiting family or on the Oregon coast, a winter living slow in Portugal, touring Ireland in spring, and summers split up with one of us wing-foiling in the Columbia Gorge while the other is hiking in the southern hemisphere. (Bet you can guess who is where!)
And if you want a bit more background on us, you can find that here.
Enjoy…and we hope this inspires you to make your own travel dreams come true.
