Image by Besno Pile from Pixabay Throughout T’s adult life, he had almost always worked in careers where he was required to be outside in the elements for prolonged periods of time. As a young man he didn’t like the heat; he preferred the cold. He found himself telling people that they could always put on more clothes to stay warm but could only take off so many to stay cool. Now, looking back on this and so many other things he thought and did when he was younger, he says he was an idiot. Some frozen toes and fingers (including two toes that stay dark purple all winter), and many cases of mild hypothermia, have drastically changed his view on being cold. (J, however, has never liked the cold, and has always stayed true to her love for the scorching sun!)
We started dreaming about living some place hot many years ago, shortly after we first started travelling. As educated adults, we knew that there were many places in the world that didn’t have the frigid winters we did, but neither of us had ever really understood that! After that inaugural trip to California in January of 2008, we finally discovered it to be true. From then on, any stretch of bad weather made us question why we lived where we lived. We knew we eventually wanted to retire someplace hot, but where and how?
We are both fortunate that we absolutely love everywhere we travel and almost every place we have ever lived. Together we can find the positives about each location, and not fixate on any negatives. We accept places for what they are and try to leave them just a tiny bit better for our having been there. After being bitten by the travel bug, our next few trips were down to southern Florida. Well, in our eyes this was the most beautiful and exotic place we could ever imagine! The people we met were nice, the Everglades were fascinating, and the rest of the nature incredible. We could definitely see ourselves living there. We perused the real estate and dreamt of living in the Florida Keys or on the coastal mainland. We found several small communities we believed we could afford in retirement, and we thought we could even own a boat! After travelling to Florida a few times, we decided to mix it up and take the Girl and the Boy to southeast Texas for a couple of weeks over the 2013 Christmas break. Texas became our new dream! It went back to our rural roots and had access to the beautiful gulf coast. Texas seemed like it ticked a lot of boxes for us. We imagined our retirement in Long Island Village, living in a canal-front home and fishing from our own dock! What could possibly be better?
Long Island Village, Port Isabel, Texas
The first trip outside of continental North America was in 2016 to the town of Cabarete in the Dominican Republic, and this was the next place we fell in love with. It was an exciting trip. Our eyes were opened to a contrasting way of life than we were used to. The pace was slower, families spent more time together, and priorities were different. We learned a lot, and absolutely fell in love with the country, the people, and the climate. We had seen a new way of life that we adored. This was definitely going to be where we retired.
Are you starting to see a pattern? We were. And this pattern has been repeated over and over throughout the last ten to fifteen years. However, with each trip, our dream became more lifestyle focused and less location specific. We began to realize that experiencing different cultures and values while traveling was helping shape our world views and priorities. As we traveled more and started to learn more about the world around us, we found we wanted to see everywhere and experience everything. This idea evolved into wanting a sailboat to travel throughout the world and see it all. (Or at least the part we could see without crossing a significant part of any really big open water according to J!) Keep in mind we knew nothing about sailing and neither of us had ever even been on a sailboat. This resulted in many cold, dark, winter evenings spent on the couch watching YouTube videos about live-a-board catamarans. Eventually, we came to understand that this may be too much adventure and cost for us. We would have to take too big of a gamble to make it work. Even so, it is a dream we still talk about longingly!
A less expensive and less committed idea we came up with was ‘vagabonding’; getting rid of everything except our backpacks and travel for several years and see the world. We would have no permanent home and virtually no possessions. We hung on to this one for quite some time but eventually realized that we had a few too many responsibilities and obligations to pull that off. Still, we often discuss this plan and have set it aside as a potential future option! We were greatly influenced by this idea and are currently working to get rid of ‘stuff’ and move towards a more minimalist lifestyle. Every time a box, a bag, or better yet a truck load of our stuff is given away, we feel good about it. The dramatic downsizing of our house last year and the simplification of our lives has brought us both so much joy and has helped move us towards being truly content. Having less things to worry about is very freeing and helps us both realize what is truly important.
We then moved on to the idea of living our summers in Canada and our winters somewhere else. This dream itself has had many versions including the following:
1) Buying a place outside of Canada to live in during the cold months, and then having a truck and holiday trailer to spend summers in Canada. It would be the best of both worlds; getting to winter in another country and then travelling throughout Canada for the summer and seeing all that this beautiful country has to offer.
2) Owning two homes, one in each place.
3) Having a home in Canada, and renting or travelling all winter.
Our snow-birding idea has had more versions than most other people have plans for their entire retirement dreams! Eventually, we did decide on the current plan which is to move and take up residency in another country. The part of the world we have become the fondest of is Central America. We love the laid-back lifestyle and the focus on family and community. We have visited multiple countries in Central America but have virtually researched the entire area. Of those countries, we seriously considered five (Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, Nicaragua, Guatemala), and chose the one that fits us best!
This post has seriously oversimplified how this dream has evolved and the process it took to get here. We still discuss other plans (past ones and some new ones) but permanent residency in a Central American country is what we keep coming back to; we are pretty certain it is the one that will be executed in the fall of 2024.
Once the decision was made about what our retirement would look like, and where it would take place, we needed to figure out when and how we could make it happen. It was easy to fall into the trap of “Of course we keep going to work, saving until we have the right amount of money, waiting for the right time, getting older and saying, ‘one day we will actually do something about it.’” Well, we got tired of waiting and delaying our future and decided to take on this new challenge. We surprised our friends, and T definitely surprised his colleagues by taking an early retirement and starting to take action. J retired in the spring of 2022, and T retired in the spring of this year. We anticipate that come October, we will be driving to Central America. We hope to spend six to eight months there this winter and find out if it is all we have dreamed of and if we can adapt to the lifestyle. If we find it is a good fit for us, we will hopefully return to Canada to sell our house. We like the idea of leaving without a place to come home to, much the way in ancient times explorers would burn their ships after landing at a new place to increase the settlers drive to succeed in a new land. This will also give us an opportunity to check on the Boy, the Girl and the other people we love in our lives. Hopefully, we can put some of our concerns about being away from them to rest and will see our future in a light that allows for an even more clear-eyed decision.
A dry fit for packing what we need for our drive to Central America
As you can probably see from our past plans, everything is subject to change. But we are more determined to follow through with this idea than any we have had before. We are looking for an adventure together. We want desperately to avoid winter and to embrace a new and healthier way of life. We love the idea of living where people holiday and having a spare room or casita for family and friends to stay. Having a safe place to stay with familiar faces, will hopefully encourage them to travel in a way they may not have before. This will be our way of helping them see another way of life and may help them on their own personal journey to peace, joy, and contentment. Whatever it may look like day to day, we have a dream; and now we have started taking steps to make it happen. It is exciting and we truly can’t even imagine what these next years will bring. If the past is any indication, it will be lots of love, some adventure, a few tears and loads of laughter.
Watch for the upcoming post where we share which country will hope to move to!
