A strange thing happened last week when I returned home from the coffeehouse.  I entered the kitchen and tweaked Rachael as I do from time  to time by announcing that I had a great idea - let's sell the condo, leave home, and go on an RTW tour!

A peculiar expression crossed her face briefly, and then she called my bluff.

Well, not an RTW exactly.  Rachael doesn't have any interest in biking around the world, and neither do I really.  But she is suddenly, for the first time, receptive to a longer journey than the four to six week time boxes we've fit our travels into for the past 25 years.

The timing is just right for a major change to the model, for many important reasons:

• We both finally fully retired last year and we're feeling an exhilarating sense of freedom that surprises me - I'd been a bit anxious about retirement and whether I'd have trouble filling my days, but that feeling lasted perhaps three or four days.  Retirement, even from a good job, is a blessing.
• We both still have the luck of excellent health, but we're far enough along into this aging thing that we know that the years that we could do something like this are numbered.  If not now, when?
• And, most importantly of all, we're both in our primes!  I turned 71 last month, a prime number; and in March Rachael will age into her own smaller but undisclosed prime age (hint - we'll both be in our primes again in two years, and then not again for another decade).

We're going for it.  After several days of frenzied discussions, we've settled on the outlines of a plan.  We'll sell the flat and the car, get rid of most of our belongings and put the rest in storage, and then hit the road on the first of an indefinite series of longer journeys.  We'll keep Portland as our base camp, returning to it a couple times each year to reconnect with friends and family, help celebrate my parents' birthdays (nicely spaced into February and July), and regroup.  

First up (if you don't include our brief trip to Hawaii that we leave for tomorrow and a six week tour of Greece this spring that's already locked in): a short five month jaunt from Venice to Lisbon.  

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• 5,000 miles in five months!
• Autumn in Northern Italy!
• Halloween in Langueduc!
• Thanksgiving in Barcelona!
• Christmas in Sevilla!
• January in the Algarve!

How cool is that!  We can hardly wait.

Join us.  But first, join us tomorrow in Hawaii!