How We Kick-Started Our Part-Time Roving Retirement

How We Kick-Started Our Part-Time Roving Retirement
By Dennis Ritchie

In August 2014, my wife Linda and I took a trip from our home in Fort Lauderdale on Florida's east coast to the city of Naples, on Florida's west coast, to visit our friend, Vera. While Linda and Vera were catching up, I found a couple of copies of International Living magazine on the coffee table and began reading.

At that moment, our lives changed forever. I'd never heard of International Livingmagazine before but was soon turning page after page. It was addictive. I started commenting on what I was reading and my wife sounded interested. Vera said we could take the issues home with us.

Back in Fort Lauderdale, Linda and I read them from cover to cover and decided to subscribe to see what else this magazine was saying about world travel. The more we read, the more we began looking forward to our own jet-setting adventures.

At that point, I was already retired and Linda was planning to retire in 2015, so we put our home up for sale. Linda wanted to move to Naples where her two children and three grandchildren live, so we bought a pre-construction condo there. But, it wouldn't be ready until November 2016...and we sold our Fort Lauderdale home in December 2015. With all of our furniture in a warehouse, we were officially homeless.

Oh my, what to do?

After devouring IL every month, the answer was simple: Travel!

We left the U.S. in January 2016 and set off for Thailand, living on the paradise island of Phuket for two months. After a brief trip back to Florida we set off once more, this time on a 13-day ship repositioning cruise, which brought us to Italy.

From there we went to Paris, Croatia, Prague, and on to Budapest. By then our condo was ready, so we returned to the U.S. Besides, Europe was getting too cold for a couple of warm-weather South Floridians.

Those 10 months of travel fired our desire to travel more. A chance meeting with a rental agent gave us an idea. Why not rent our condo out during the winter and travel?

So, in January 2018, we did just that, setting off for Penang in Malaysia, Koh Samui in Thailand, and Nha Trang in Vietnam.

Dennis and Linda spent three months exploring the expat havens of Penang, Koh Samui, and Nha Trang.

Arriving back home in April 2018, we started to make plans for travel the following year. We really liked Southeast Asia but the travel time was long, so we decided to look closer to home, exploring Panama, Ecuador, and Colombia—a lot less flying time.

As winter 2020 approached, we rented out our condo again, this time for four months. I know I said it's a long way to Southeast Asia...but who cares? We like it so much, it's where we are. We're spending three months in Penang, then two weeks in Cambodia, and two weeks in Sri Lanka.

We're especially excited about Sri Lanka as the only part of the globe we haven't covered is the area from Egypt to Southeast Asia. When leaving Sri Lanka, we will travel westward, through either Paris or London, and then back to Florida. At that point we can say that we have circumnavigated the globe.