When my husband and I told people we were selling everything we owned to travel full time, most assumed we were either having a midlife crisis or chasing an early retirement fantasy. The truth is, it was neither. It was something we couldn’t quite explain at the time, only that we felt called to do it.
We were 50-something empty nesters with 35 years of marriage under our belt. We had four grown daughters and nine grandkids, a house we loved, a business we’d built, and a life that, on the surface, looked good. And it was good, even if we felt like something was missing. We had fallen into a rhythm that felt more like repetition. It was like living the same day over and over again.
Then, during COVID, I had a cancer scare. It turned out to be benign, but in the long, terrifying weeks of waiting, everything shifted. All the routines and responsibilities that once felt essential suddenly seemed arbitrary. I realized how easily we could run out of time, and how much of our lives we had spent putting things off. That experience cracked something open in us.
We started asking harder questions. What if we stopped waiting for the right time? What if we actually did the thing we always said we’d do “someday”?
