Is it too late to have a gap year in your late 50s? To take back some time from our day to day working life to travel – unplanned, unescorted, unfettered? To take that leap? It was a defining year – liberating, challenging, humbling, scary. It was many things, but it wasn’t a holiday.

I’m not a travel writer, or maybe I am.  I won’t document the how-to details and recommend things to do or see.  Other people are already doing that.     What I will do is tell you our story, what it was that moved us, how they made us feel, people we met.  How we came to be there and what we did wrong, although “wrong” is a strong word here, maybe “differently” would be better. 

We had made a couple of trips in the recent past, and enjoyed them immensely, but we wanted more, we didn’t want just a holiday.  We wanted to travel.  More than a paddle at the shoreline, we wanted full-on immersion.  To live in these places, to shop there, cook our food, walk the streets at night and early in the morning, when it felt real.

Could we do this?   As time went by, “what we could” conversations gave way to “how we could” ….

I’m not writing for a search engine.  I’m hoping to re-live, in some small way, a huge chapter in our lives, and maybe you’d like to read about it too.  I hope you enjoy it.