About vagabonds
Connie and John at Machu Pichu
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . . In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum.” John Steinbeck, “Travels With Charley”
We are old folks, especially compared to most of the World Nomads journalists. Connie turned 60, gracefully, in February and I just past (gasp!) the "will you still feed me, will you still need me?" age of 64? We stopped working eight years ago, voluntarily I might add, not as a result of the US economy. And a great decision it was!
Since we retired in 2003,
we have been away from home over half the time. And we have been outside the US for more than three of those years; that’s
37 countries on six continents. People tell us, “Oh, we would love to travel the way you do.” But they are not being totally honest. Travel to them is a two-week holiday at an
upscale US-style hotel, an all-inclusive resort or a cruise. For us it's living in a thatch-roofed hut in a Ugandan rain forest, 6 months tent camping around Australia or moving from one $18 hotel to another for months on
end in SE Asia. We have spent Christmas at a kibbutz in
Israel, Thanksgiving in Oman and a birthday on a rickety bus in the Andes.
Oh, we have lived it up at times – a safari in Tanzania, a
Nile cruise, the Galapagos Islands – but we’ve always done it independently ... and affordably. Now we are selling our house in Colorado and heading out to explore the world for five or ten years ... or as long as we remain healthy. We will have no house, no car, not even an address. Hell, we don't even own a cell phone! So follow along and see what happens. And if you want to meet up somewhere on the road, just drop us a note.
First stop, Europe.
Oh, and you can check out our past trips at journals.worldnomads.com/fieldnotes (South America) and journals.worldnomads.com/seesea (Southeast Asia)
John Maginness and Connie Lintz john17connie@gmail.com
PS It's now July, 2012 and we are back in London. Fifteen months and 21 months into the trip and we're still going strong.
My Travel Map:
