Still Adventuring!

Seasons greetings through the Covid Haze! We hope you and yours are staying healthy, had a great Thanksgiving (if you’re in the States or Canada) and are looking forward to the December holidays and the new year. Sayonara 2020! Can’t get you in the rearview mirror fast enough.

2020 started off with a bang for us. We celebrated new years eve in Melbourne, Australia and spent the first week of January enjoying epic coastal scenes touring The Great Ocean Road....

Then, in rapid succession, we hit Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.....

We were on a roll – but – we knew our travels might soon be coming to an end, or at least a pause. We had tickets in our possession to fly home in early March. Our plan was to visit family and friends and then take some time to take stock of our situation and figure out what we would do for the balance of 2020 and beyond. Back in October 2019, due to some events I’ll cover later, we realized our “window of opportunity” for living the nomadic life we have lived over the past 2-years might be starting to close on us. And then, in March 2020, the pandemic slammed that window shut - HARD!

Like almost everyone else across the globe, we haven’t traveled since March. Does that mean our adventures have ended? Absolutely not! Adventure awaits all around you if you just look for it. There are still many, many places on this big planet we live on that we intend to see someday. But, even without travel, there are adventurous things to be done all around us, without having to travel long distances. In fact, if you think about it, we are living through an adventure of enormous proportions right now. This pandemic is changing the world. Granted, it’s not the most pleasant experience, but it is, without doubt, an adventure. Here is the definition I found for adventure when I Googled it online:

“An experience or activity that is unusual and exciting, and is typically hazardous.”

Based on that definition, I think the pandemic qualifies as an adventure. I think we would all agree it has been an experience, to say the least. It is definitely unusual – none of us have lived through something like this before. And, while many of us are going stir crazy during quarantines and social distancing, it has been exciting. More often than not, it has been exciting in a bad way: frustration with an inept government (federal, state and/or local), fear for one’s health or the health of a loved one, the loss of income, etc. etc. But, at times it has been exciting in a good way: “Restaurants are opening!”, “I can get my hair done!”, “I got my assistance check!”, etc. Hopefully soon, we’ll experience the ultimate excitement – “THE VACCINE IS READY!!!!”. And, finally, there is no question that the pandemic is hazardous. Navigating through the pandemic has been, and continues to be, an adventure.

But our current adventure doesn’t end with the pandemic (at least not here in the States). Throw in the worst racial tensions since the 1960’s, catastrophic wild fires and storms, along with a Presidential election during one of the most politically divisive times in American history, and I think we can all agree that, indeed, we ARE on an adventure!

While most adventures seem to be over too soon, we are all ready for our current pandemic-driven adventure to be over. One thing the pandemic has provided most of us with, is downtime. So, I thought I would utilize some of that downtime to field some of the questions we often receive about how we managed to drop everything and travel the world for 2-years. But before I do that, I thought I would cover how our travels came to a grinding halt back in February.

Flash back to 2017 when we began planning out our change in lifestyle. At that time, we had a “window of opportunity” to travel the globe (more on this window later). The window was just too good to pass up, and we went for it. But life comes at you fast – in good ways and bad – and by late 2019 we realized our “window” was closing. Our daughter had become engaged and a very close family member got a very tough health diagnosis. So, in December, 2019 while at a house sit in Melbourne, Australia, we decided we would head home in March 2020 to take stock of things and, maybe, hit the pause button on our travels.

We got a killer deal on flights home. We purchased flights from Xiamen airlines for March 5 to fly from Bangkok, Thailand to Los Angeles with a layover in Xiamen, China for under $200 each!! We were pretty stoked. At the time (mid-December), nobody knew what Covid 19 was. Remember, the outbreak did not start until that same month (Dec ’19) and the WHO didn’t draw any real attention to it until it called it an “outbreak” (far less severe than a pandemic) on Jan 30, 2020.

During February, Covid 19 started to get real. China locked down Wuhan. The outbreak dominated the news, especially where we were, in southeast Asia, because (A) we were right next door to China and (B) the literally millions of Chinese tourists that were expected to visit during Chinese New Year were MIA. The economic fallout was starting to hurt the countries we were visiting like Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and, especially, Thailand. As the seriousness and the spread of the virus grew, we kept a wary eye on it. At first, we weren’t too worried, but as things got worse, we did start to get a little concerned – less for our health and more that our killer sub-$200 tickets home were in jeopardy. Still, Wuhan was around 650 miles (1,000KM) away from Xiamen (about the same distance as L.A. to Salt Lake City), so we thought we were OK. And on the positive side, we were enjoying major tourist sites, like Ha Long Bay in Vietnam and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where crowds were only about 30% of their normal size thanks to the lack of Chinese tourists.

And then, on Feb 18th, while we were at our house sit in Phuket, Thailand, it happened- we received the following email:

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No reply Dear passenger HARTZELL/GREGORY FRANK MR,HARTZELL/JANNE GRAM MRS your ticket number is 7312170228976-77,we are sorry to inform you that your flight MF854 on MAR05,2020,from BANGKOK(SUVARNABHUMI) to XIAMEN has been cancelled due to Public Security. .Please notice that flight changes could lead to miss-transfer.You might contact your original ticketing agency for change or refund.Warm Reminder: For group booking, please always refer to rule of group ticket.For more information,you might call Xiamen Airlines service hotline on 95557(mainland China), 0065-6-3297566(Singapore),0031(0)8000 205888(Amsterdam),1800995557(Sydney,Melbourne),0063-2-6263666(Philippines),18557895557(Canada),18446295557(America),0086-592-2226666(Other Countries and Regions).You can also visit www.facebook.com/xiamenairlines for the latest news. Thank you for flying with Xiamen Airlines!此航班调整信息为系统自动发送，无需回复 尊敬的HARTZELL/GREGORY FRANK MR,HARTZELL/JANNE GRAM MRS贵宾,您购买的机票票号为7312170228976-77,您好!非常抱歉地通知您:由于公共安全原因,您乘坐的2020年03月05日曼谷飞往厦门的MF854航班已取消.此次航班调整可能影响您的前后航班衔接,您可通过厦航自助平台( http://t.cn/EJt0OMy )查询航班动态、自助改期、退票,人工客服请拨打厦航热线95557-3,境外请拨打0086-592-2226666.团体客票退改需参照团体旅客客票使用规则执行,感谢您选乘厦门航空.

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Our flights were cancelled! Damn! Now we had a decision to make. Should we just go home now or stick it out through early March? It was Feb 18th and our current sit was scheduled to end just three days later, on the 21st. Maybe we should just fly home on the 22nd? This was the last sit we had scheduled, so we wouldn’t be leaving anybody in a bad position. The spread of the virus was starting to get real and we were fielding calls/emails from family in the U.S. and Denmark that were concerned about us. But we had already booked flights and hotels for travel to Bangkok, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai. We really wanted to see those places. And remember (if you read the Thailand blog) we were a bit miserable in Phuket – we didn’t want our travels to end this way. We had a great final 10 days or so planned out in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai that promised cooler weather, beautiful sites and a relaxed atmosphere to end our trip on a real high note.

We decided to continue our travels. We bought tickets for March 6 from JAL/American for Bangkok to Los Angeles with a layover in Tokyo. Cost: over $800 bucks each – ouch!

Over the next few days in late February, things kept escalating relative to the virus. It was starting to spread outside of China. Europe was starting to get hit. Airlines were starting to cancel flights to specific cities or entire countries. We watched as things developed and tried not to worry about it. But things continued to escalate, including an outbreak in Japan – where we were supposed to fly through. Uh oh. It was now late Feb and our flights home were so close – we just needed to make it a few more days. We decided we were gonna’ stick it out. But then the dominos started falling. Flights to/from Italy and Japan were starting to get shut down by U.S. carriers like United. American, who we were flying with, hadn’t done anything yet – we thought we would be OK.

Like most Americans, we still didn’t realize just how bad things were going to get. We arrived in Chiang Mai, our last city, on the afternoon of Feb 28. I was really watching developments as they related to flight cancelations. I still thought we were OK. Our flights were only 6 days away. I thought, there was no way American was going to cancel our flights with less than a weeks’ notice– the hits they would have to take from a customer satisfaction perspective would just be too huge.

As covered in the Thailand blog post, we enjoyed our first evening in Chiang Mai. The next morning, Feb 29th, we had a wonderful, relaxing morning. We strolled through the city enjoying the relatively cool morning air. We dipped in and out of a few few temples with a breakfast at a charming local restaurant thrown in along the way. As the morning hours waned, I got a haircut, before returning to our hotel to take a break from the afternoon sun. We got back to our room around noon/12:30. I fired up my laptop to see what was going on and BOOM! I read that American, the airline we were booked on to get home, cancelled all flights in and out of Italy, with not only less than a weeks’ notice but, with less than 48 hours notice! It was Feb 29th and our flight out of Bangkok through Tokyo was on March 6th AND things were getting worse in Tokyo as far as the virus was concerned. It was time to bust a move. I read the news of the flights out of Italy being cancelled around 12:30 – less than 3 hours later we were at 25,000ft on a flight to Bangkok, where we would spend the night and then catch an early fight the next morning to Tokyo and then on to Los Angeles.

It was quite a fire drill. We booked new flights in about 15 minutes (thank you to American Airlines for not charging change fees). Packed in 5 minutes. After about only 2 minutes of debate with the hotel manager, we decided not to spend any more time trying to get a refund for the several days stay that we had already paid for and grabbed a cab to the airport. We even forgot one of our cameras in our hotel room. We just needed to get OUT. Our well laid out plan for a final few relaxing days in Thailand went up in smoke and we touched down at LAX on the afternoon of March 1st, 2020. What happened next is a story for another time and place. Suffice to say we went through all of the trials and tribulations that everyone else in America went through- and is still going through, but we had the added complications of having no home, no cars, no health insurance and no jobs.

In the summer of 2018 we sold our home of 17 years. The place where we brought up our two children and made a lot of friends. Since then, we have been a LOT of places and seen a LOT of things. It has been a whirlwind of trains, planes and automobiles (and buses, and taxis, and Uber and GRAB and boats and tuk tuks). Here is a chronological list of all of the places we visited:

- 6-weeks in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, México

- Tucson, AZ

- Sedona, AZ (looking after a very amusing parrot)

- Tucson, AZ

- Winslow, AZ, USA (yes, we stood on the corner)

- Cedar Crest, NM, USA

- Abiquiu, NM, USA

- Williams, AZ, USA

- Scottsdale, AZ, USA

- 1-month in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, México (the "pipeline" of México)

- Manhattan Beach, CA, USA

- Chandler, AZ, USA

- 3-months in various parts of Panamá

- Evans, GA, USA

- Manhattan Beach, CA, USA

- Chandler, AZ, USA

- 1-month in Cedar Crest, NM, USA

- Chandler, AZ, USA

- 2-months in Ojén, Andalusia, Spain

- 10-days in Denmark

- 3-months in New Zealand

- 3-months in Australia

- Singapore

- 1-month in Vietnam

- Cambodia

- Laos

- 1-month in Thailand

Stretched across all of those locations were around 25 house sits where we cared for around 30 dogs, 10 cats, numerous tropical fish and 2 birds.

During our travels, when we would tell people what we were doing, they would have a lot of questions. Most of the people would generally fall into 2 camps. Those that asked questions more relative to HOW we were doing it and those that asked questions more relative to WHY we were doing it. It didn’t matter if it was a friend we have had for decades or someone we just met; they could just as easily fall into either of these categories. Even with family – they could fall into the “how camp” or the “why camp”. We have been lucky to have very supportive friends and family but, even among them, you could tell some of them were thinking to themselves that we just might be a bit crazy to do what we were doing.

Even now, when I speak to a friend or family member, that I’ve had at least 2 or 3 previous conversations with, they always come up with more questions the next time I see them. So, given that I have time on my hands due to the pandemic, I thought it would make sense to make an effort to let you, our friends and family (and anyone else that may be interested), better understand what we were doing and why. The way I will accomplish this, is by covering what I call the “W Questions”:

- What?

- Why?

- When?

- Where?

- Who?

- hoW?

NOTE: The below section was largely written over a year ago, with a few current additions. It was written while we were on a long bus ride in New Zealand- much of it in the dark. That is why it is written in the present, instead of the past tense.

What?

Short Answer: We are traveling the globe.

Long Answer: We have completely changed the way we live. We transitioned from a typical American middle-class lifestyle where we had long term jobs, a house (and mortgage), 2 cars, and some nice possessions, to a nomadic lifestyle where we are living out of a suitcase and changing locations, on average, about once per month.

Why?

Short Answer: Why not? It’s exciting! It’s enlightening! It’s interesting! It’s an adventure!

Long Answer: I could write an entire blog (or more) on this subject, but I’ll do my best to be brief and succinct. For starters, I have always wanted to live in a foreign country. For as long as I can remember, I have found other cultures and places fascinating. At the risk of dating myself, I remember loving to flip through the pages of encyclopedias and look at pictures of unusual people and locations. A month-long trip in my teens, through 7 countries in western Europe, had a great impact on me and fed the fire to see more places and learn more about cultures that differed from my own. I followed the interest to earn a bachelor degree in International Studies with a minor in Spanish.

Janne had similar desires. She will tell you that she loves Denmark, and it will always be home. At the same time, she always felt it was too small and she wanted to explore the world. Thankfully, she did just that, or we would never have met. In the mid 1980’s she went to Switzerland to be a nanny. While there, for over a year, she became friends with 2 girls from Manhattan Beach, friends of mine, that were also working as nannies. About a year after they had all returned home from Switzerland, Janne decided to come over from Denmark, to visit her friends in California and the rest, as they say, is history. Janne and I have been together ever since.

So much for being brief and succinct. I just spent 2 paragraphs telling you that we both love to travel and experience new places and cultures. But that is not the only answer to Why? Another big reason is that we were in a rut. As I put it in the below excerpt from the “About” page of this website:

“For the most part, we’re just a normal couple. We are in our early 50’s and we have been married for 27 years and have 2 kids (both now adults). We were living the normal middle-class life in America and it just wasn’t cutting it. We were bored. Our work/life balance was out of whack. We were eating crappy processed foods and watching too much TV. We needed to find something.

So, with a mutual love of travel, interest in different cultures and thirst for being exposed to new experiences, we decided to stop watching marathons of House Hunters International, get off our asses and do something.”

When?

Short Answer: NOW!

Long Answer: The stars aligned. About the same time we began to realize we were in a rut, several other things were occurring that provided us with a “window of opportunity” to go for it! In an effort for brevity, and in no particular order, here are the circumstances that created our opportunity to make a change:

- We became empty nesters.

- We had a 3,700 sq ft home that was just too big for 2 people and it was time to sell.

- We had healthy, independent parents.

- We had no grandchildren that needed spoiling.

- Toshiba shut down the division I worked in and I got a nice severance package.

So, all of these circumstances were in place and it felt like if we were ever going to see this great big world we live in, now was the time.

One other factor had a bearing on our decision to act now. That factor was a solid shared belief that nothing is for sure in this life and you can’t take things for granted – primary among them, your health. If we waited, there was no guarantee that we would be healthy enough to travel in the future. Hell, there was no guarantee we would even be alive by the time retirement age came around. The time was now.

Where?

Short Answer: Everywhere!

Long Answer: Janne and I had traveled a fair amount in our time together. Even before we started this adventure in in 2018, we had already been to Canada, Denmark, UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, The Vatican, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Antigua, Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Costa Rica, México, Iceland and Japan. We have also traveled extensively throughout the U.S. But there are a LOT more places we want to experience.

The Colosseum, Rome Trail riding in Wyoming, USA Monkeys in Costa Rica

Over the years we would often talk about “Where’s next?” or “If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would you want to go?” Our top 10 list has been more or less the same over the years with a slight shuffling of rankings. Her #3 might be my #8 or vice versa, but for the most part, we have been in agreement on where we would want to go. So, these places, that had been on our list for decades, became our target list. Of course, we still can’t just pick up and go wherever we want whenever we want. We have to balance our desires with safety concerns, time of year, cost and availability.

You may be thinking- “availability?”. Let me explain what I mean by that by jumping ahead and covering part of the answer to the “hoW?” question. One of the main reasons we are able to travel as we do is because we are house sitting. House sitting is when you look after someone’s home and pets while they go away on holiday or leave their home for an extended period of time. I wanted to briefly explain house sitting here because it is a key component to answering the “Where?” question. In general, if there are no house sits “available” in a specific area, then we likely won’t be visiting that area. There are exceptions, of course. For example, after we landed the house sit in Ojén, Spain we tried hard to find another sit in Barcelona that preceded or followed it. We struck out and decided to just get an AirBnB and be “normal tourists” for a few days. Same thing happened in New Zealand, there was no way we were going to go all the way to New Zealand and not visit the sparsely populated, but incredibly beautiful, south end of the southern island (Queenstown, Te Anau and Milford Sound). So, to a large degree, the “Where?” question is answered based on identifying where we want to go AND finding, applying for and securing an available house sit.

Who?:

Short Answer: Janne & Greg

Long Answer: We have met some really interesting and unique people during our travels. Of course, we met the home owners that we were house sitting for. But we also met other people. Some were locals in the area. Others were people we did business with (teachers, restaurant owners, gardeners, etc.) that later became friends. And of course, some of the relationships we miss the most are the ones we developed with the animals that we cared for along the way. Many of them stole a piece of our heart and we genuinely miss them to this day.

hoW?

Short Answer: Reset your priorities, grow a pair and get organized.

Long Answer: The answer to the hoW? question is the longest answer by far. And it is the answer that people have the most interest in. It is long because there are 2 components to the answer: psychological and financial.

Let’s address the psychological component to the answer first. I believe pretty much anyone that WANTS to, can do what we are doing if (1) they have the courage and (2) they are not tied down because of poor health. Don’t get me wrong, I know not everyone would WANT to do what we are doing. When we lived in Omaha, NE for 6-years, we met people who had never been on an airplane or seen the ocean. That surprised us. What completely blew us away was that some of those same people had no desire to get on an airplane or see the ocean or visit another country.

There are certainly valid reasons for not wanting to travel the world for an extended period of time. It can be exhausting. Perhaps you're the type of person that just can’t be happy for an extended period of time away from home and/or family and/or friends. But if you WANT to take time to travel the world, you can do this. You just need to do 2 things: reprioritize what is important to you (in a nutshell: accumulating memories instead of things) and have the courage to actually do it. Oh, and one other thing: you need to be open minded and be willing to change your plans and priorities as circumstances dictate.

Moving on to the financial component of the answer to the hoW? question, our original plan was not to travel the globe and do house sits. Our original plan was to move to México where I would teach English in a classroom setting. While we were preparing to head to México, I earned a 100 hour certificate to teach English as a foreign language. I also earned an additional 40 hour certificate to teach Business English. I had never taught before so, in order to get some experience, I signed up as a substitute teacher in our local school district in Phoenix and tried teaching classes in elementary school, high school and special ed. But our plan to live in México and teach in a classroom environment evolved. I realized I could make more money teaching online than I could in a classroom, plus I could make my own hours and I could teach from anywhere in the world. Then we realized with house sitting, we could avoid rent and utility bills and car expenses and….. You get the idea. Combine the house sitting with teaching online, and we realized we could go pretty much anywhere in the world as long as we could find a house sit at a place that had halfway decent internet. How cool is that! Where is that list of the top 10 places we want to visit? ¡Vamonos!

Teaching online alone is not going to provide enough income unless you do it 40+ hours a week. We bolster our teaching income by supplementing it with passive investment income and by tapping into retirement funds. I know many of you may be thinking “Whoa! No way! That’s a road block I can’t get past. I can’t mortgage my future and I don’t have the luxury of passive investment income“. You actually probably can do this, if you own a house and have some form of a 401K or IRA. Hear me out on this one.

Regarding tapping into your retirement funds. Normally, when you take money out of a 401K or an IRA before retirement age, you are going to face heavy taxation, however, there is a way around this. It is called a ”72T”. With a 72T you can tap into retirement income early. You set an amount, in our case $900/mo, and then you will receive a payment for that amount until you reach the age of 59 ½ or 65 – whichever comes first – without tax penalties. I should point out that the 72T only applies to American citizens – those of you reading this that live in other countries will have to explore what options for early retirement income may be available to you.

Regarding the “passive investment income”. This comes from the money you make from the sale of your house. When all was said and done, we cleared six figures after we sold our house and paid off the balance of the mortgage. We then invested this money, along with all the money we made from selling our cars and most of our other possessions, in a way that could provide “passive income” (i.e.- dividend bearing stocks). I’m not going to go into detail here but you can buy stocks that pay their owners dividends. These dividends can be spent on anything you want and can provide you with income. I’m over simplifying here but, basically, you buy stocks that will pay you dividends, instead of buying stocks that you think will go up in value. Best case, of course, is you buy stocks that will both pay dividends AND go up in value. I’m not smart enough to know which stocks those are, so I hired a financial advisor to assist me. So far it is working out great. Despite the fact that we are pulling out $1,800 per month from our retirement/investments, our net retirement/investments have grown at a rate faster than $1,800 per month.

If you don’t have enough equity in your home, or you simply don’t want to sell it, an alternative is to look into renting your home and using the funds you receive above and beyond the cost of your mortgage and maintenance as your income. You might not be able to pull $1,800/mo, but you don’t need that much if you travel to places with a lower cost of living. And the good news here is that most of the world’s really interesting places have a cost of living much lower than the U.S. or western/northern Europe.

We manage our budget very, very closely. We have a monthly budget of $3,000. This is composed of the following:

$ 900 from retirement funds (via 72T)

$ 900 from passive income

$ 218 from Janne’s retirement fund

$1,000 from teaching English online

$3,018 TOTAL

Sometimes we have less or more than $3,000/month depending on how much teaching I am able to do. We’ve had 1 or 2 months where I only made a couple hundred bucks in a month. But we’ve also had a couple months where I made well over $2,000 bucks – so it balances out.

$3,000 a month doesn’t sound like much for 2 people to live on but, remember, other than food and transport, we pretty much had no expenses thanks to house sitting. $3,000 a month with no expenses goes a very long way Latin America and SE Asia. It even goes a long way in parts of Europe. We could have stayed in Spain indefinitely on $3,000/month. Some places, like northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, you would be hard-pressed to make it on $3,000/mo. But other places, like in Latin America and SE Asia you could easily get by on $2,000/mo, or less, and then save that extra $1,000 for when you visit the more expensive countries. All in all, we have managed to do all of our traveling for FREE!! Meaning, we did not dip into our personal savings (we did take out $1,800/mo from our retirement/investment funds, but they were growing at a rate faster than that, so our withdraw was more than replenished). If we had skipped just 3 countries: Denmark, New Zealand and Australia in our travels, we would have not only travelled for free – we would have made money!!

Some of you may be thinking, “I don’t have a house and a lot of other stuff to sell, so this won’t work for me”. Not necessarily true- it probably can still work for you. If you line up your house sits correctly (keeping expenses low), teach online for more hours than I did (but still less than 40hrs/week), and avoid the expensive countries, you could clear $2,000/month. That will buy a lot of tacos in México or pad thai in Thailand!

So, there you have it. The story of our hurried escape from Thailand in late February. How life’s continual curve balls, coupled with Covid19, slammed shut our “window of opportunity” to travel the globe (at least temporarily). And how we managed to do what we did for nearly two years - for FREE. Granted, there was an opportunity cost to our travels. We sold our home, so we no longer gain the wealth that comes with home appreciation. If we had kept working our jobs, we would have put a larger amount of funds into our retirement accounts - BUT – we value the memories and experiences of our travels more than the value of how much our financial wealth may have grown – AND – there is no guarantee we would even be around to enjoy that growth in financial wealth as, at literally any moment, something ominous could happen. Our health could deteriorate. We could get in car crash. There could be a global financial depression. War(s) could break out. Or some other unlikely disaster could occur, like, I don’t know, maybe ….. a pandemic.

As it stands now (Nov 2020) it will likely be summer 2021 before we are able to visit another country. I think I can squeeze one more blog out between now and then based on our travels in 2018-2020. Content for that will include more on the people we met along the way, the animals we fell in love with and interesting things that were intentionally or unintentionally left out of prior posts. Until then, stay healthy!