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Travel after fifty, when the kids have gone.
In February 2015 we sold everything we owned, stepped off the corporate hamster wheel and went looking for a different sort of life. One of us was in his fifties. The other was still approaching, and would like that on the record. Six years and six continents later, this is what we learned, and what we wish somebody had told us before we went.
- Six years on the road, across six continents
- Forty seven house sits and 125 weeks of free accommodation
- 381 animals looked after, from Balinese rescue dogs to Oregon chickens
This is written for one particular person
You are somewhere in your fifties or sixties. The kids have their own front doors now and the house has gone quiet. You have watched friends book the same all-inclusive for the fourth year running and thought, quietly, that there must be more to it than this.
You do not need marble bathrooms. You would rather not wreck the place you are visiting. And the thing actually stopping you is not money or nerve, it is that you do not personally know a single soul who has done it.
Now you do. Two of them.
The four things everybody asks us
Could we actually afford it?
We travelled for six years on a budget meant for two people staying at home. The trick was not being rich. It was housesitting. Forty seven sits and 125 weeks of free accommodation, in exchange for feeding somebody’s cat and watering their tomatoes.
Accommodation is the biggest line in any travel budget. Take it to nearly nothing and the whole sum changes.
Read the complete housesitting guide
Are we too old for this?
We walked the Camino de Santiago. Steve did it with a knee that has had more operations than Elizabeth Taylor had marriages. We hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, climbed Wayna Picchu, kayaked in Abel Tasman and rode a motorbike round the Thakhek Loop in Laos.
Your age is not the obstacle. Being unfit is, and that is fixable. If anything the years help: you have patience, you are not trying to impress anybody, and you have finally worked out what you enjoy.
What about the house, the car, all of it?
We sold the lot. That is not the only way to do it and it is not a recommendation. Plenty of people rent theirs out, or go for six months rather than six years.
What we would say is this: the stuff was heavier than we realised. Getting rid of it was the hardest week and the best decision.
Does it get lonely?
Sometimes. But you meet more people in a month of travelling than in a year at home, and a surprising number of them are your age doing the same thing. The over-fifty traveller is far more common than the brochures suggest. You just do not see them on Instagram.
Where to start reading
If you want the practical side first:
- Housesitting: the complete guide, how it works and which platforms are worth paying for
- Resources, everything we actually used
- Want to ride an elephant? Read this first
If you would rather just go somewhere:
- Europe, including the Camino, Iceland in winter and the Italian hilltop towns
- South America, six countries, the Inca Trail and the salt flats
- Asia, Myanmar before the crowds, Laos by motorbike, Borneo’s orangutans
- Pacific, six weeks and 3,800 km round New Zealand in a 1975 VW Kombi
- North America, national parks, housesits and Burning Man
The honest bit
It was not all sunsets. We had a car window smashed in Argentina, a fortnight of illness in Bolivia, and The Tardis packed up 3,800 km into a road trip. We missed people. We got tired of living out of a bag.
We would still do it again tomorrow.
The single thing we hear most from people our age is “we always meant to”. That is the sentence this whole site exists to argue with.