At 51 I Quit My Job And We're Travelling the World for a Year!

So, 2 years ago we started planning something we weren't sure we'd actually do. Now there's no going back.

So on the 23rd of November, James will be 51, I'll be 62, and we are leaving to travel around the world for a year.

And to make it happen, I've quit my job, and my last day is Friday, November the 13th.

Unlucky for some. So this has gone from something that we've talked about literally for years to something that we are now actually committed to doing.

And there's a very specific reason we decided it had to be now.

So for those of you who don't know us, or if you're new here, we are James and Rob. We're a British couple in our 50s and 60s with a home in the UK and a home in Cape Town, South Africa, and we're about to leave the UK to spend more than a year traveling around the world. So on this channel, we share the practical side of travel, what places really cost, what works, what doesn't, and whether something could actually feel like home.

So let's be precise, because this isn't an idea anymore.

So we've been planning this quietly in the background for at least 2 years. We've had jabs, we're going to have some more today, looked at insurance, visas, flights, accommodation. There is a lot of work to work through, and some of it can still change before we even leave.

My last day of work is November the 13th, and then we leave on November the 23rd.

So for just over a year, we're not backpacking, there's not a string of 2-week holidays. We want a slower style of travel with longer stays in many places, and time for ordinary life as well as sightseeing.

We'll move through several regions. You'll see why we chose them later.

And it all finishes at the end of our year in South Africa, and that's deliberate. From one home here to another home there.

We'll give you a first look at our journey later. Then next week we'll show you how we actually built the route and why it ended up looking the way it does. We've traveled loads over the years, but there's always been a return flight. 2 weeks here, 3 weeks there if we were lucky, then back to work.

And neither of us ever did that big gap year thing when we were in our 20s. Instead, life became careers, responsibilities, and holidays just fitted around annual leave.

Maybe we should have, but here we are.

So we'd much rather have experiences in our lives than beautiful big houses and so on, you know. On our deathbed, no one's going to brag about how much money they've got, but they will remember all the experiences they've had. So we've been lucky enough to travel extensively through Africa, we've visited many different parts of Europe, but as we said, they've always been for 2 weeks, or when James was lucky, he could squeeze 3 weeks holidays in.

There was always a return flight, so you had to pack as much as you could into that, so you never got to see the destination properly. You just got a snapshot of wherever you were.

We're sort of racing around to try and do all the touristy things, But we never really, except in South Africa, we never really had enough time to just to stop and kind of absorb normal life, and that's one of the goals of our years of travel. But the real reason we decided to do this now goes back much further than the last 2 years. I'll be 62 when we start this trip, and you do start thinking, well, if we don't do it now, when exactly are we going to do it? And the point is not that 62 is old, the point is that none of us knows what we will want or be able to do several years from now.

We could wait another 5 years. Financially, that might be easier. Logistically, it might be easier, but Rob will be 67.

Oh my God. And maybe I'll still want to do it, but that's the problem— maybe. So like I said, I'll be 62 when we leave, and I don't feel old at all, and except when my body reminds me, and I still feel energetic enough to spend a few nights on buses and all that kind of stuff.

Hopefully. We'll find out.

But waiting another 5 years, as James said, we would have been financially better off to do that, just felt like the wrong idea because you really don't know what's around the corner, do you? And I feel like we are in our go years now. I think in retirement we talk about the go years, the slow years, and the no-go years, and I feel like we are in the go years now, both physically and mentally. And I wonder whether as I approach 70, I would still have the same mindset to having the kind of adventure that we're going to have.

We'll hope so. As we've always heard, never let the old one in. But like you say, health— something might happen, the wheels fall off the wagon further down the line, you might just not be able to travel as easy. So we need to take advantage of it while we can because life's short, and you don't want to spend your whole life working for this retirement that you have in your mind, and before you get to retirement, something happens and everything completely changes.

Yes. So we really want to make the most of this now, and lots of things conspired, including moving house and so on, that has really enabled us to do this. Now most people would probably find planning more than a year around the world completely overwhelming. I know I would, and to be quite honest, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes.

But I love it!

And that's probably why this trip exists. I like having a solid plan, doing all the budgeting. James actually enjoys hours of research that it takes to create one.

Maps, spreadsheets, flights, hotels, weather, visas— I genuinely enjoy all of that.

To be honest, James has been planning this for 2 years. It's become his full-time hobby.

Yeah, the routes we have now look completely different from where we first started.

And next week we'll show you exactly how this whole route came together.

Over the last few years, when we first threw the idea out there, it was just pie in the sky, and then slowly it started solidifying more and more, and I'll disappear on, say, an afternoon on a Sunday, just go on my laptop, start looking at destinations, start looking at ways of getting to and from where we would like to go, and yeah, that's how it started.

And, and we've watched tons of YouTube videos, but there aren't a lot of YouTube videos for people like us, are there? Sort of people of our age. There are a few, but most of them are sort of young, beautiful Instagram people, and They're giving you a very sort of sanitized view of the world, and what we want to do in this channel is give a bit more of a realistic view. So if any of you are thinking about doing a big trip like this, or even going to visit the destinations, you'll get a more better sense of it.

Or for slow travel, even planning on retiring in some of these places, and that's what our idea was. We want to see where in the world we would like to stay for a certain amount of time, because you want to make your pension go a lot further when you retire. A 1-month adventure in the UK might be worth equivalent to 2 to 3 months in that destination. So that was the idea, is to start finding places on that. So yeah.

Yeah, we absolutely have no clue how we're gonna enjoy this, whether we're gonna find some places we absolutely love and prefer over the UK or Cape Town, or places that we thought we would love but we found out we don't. And I guess that's part of the beauty of the whole adventure, isn't it?

Exactly, that's the beauty of it. You discover places you've fall in love with, you discover places, you're a bit like me. We've been planning this now for 2 years, but booking our first long-distance flight and then handing in my notice was probably the moment it stopped being a plan.

And it suddenly became really real.

Exactly.

We have been saving and saving and saving our air miles for many years, and we were fortunate enough in the end to accumulate enough air miles to book our flight to New Zealand on Qatar Airlines. Because they don't have many seats, we were literally sitting up in November— I was in South Africa actually, and James was in the UK— in November last year waiting till midnight in Doha so the seats became available because there's only a few of them. We managed to bag our seats a week earlier than we planned, but hey, that didn't matter. So that was like the first real line in the sand to say we are committed to going.

It's real.

And the second was?

Yeah, me just planning on when I'm going to hand in my notice. So been counting down the days. since we booked that flight. The day finally came, end of August, I handed in my notice.

And how did you feel about that?

A mixture of excitement and nervousness. I'm in my 50s, I've just handed in my notice for my career. You just don't know what the future holds, so it was a scary moment, but at the same time it was really exhilarating.

So you finished work on the 13th of November, right? And then we have 10 days to get everything ready before we leave. So James, what scares you most about this trip?

The uncertainty. You've got routines, you know exactly how things should feel, you know what time to get up, you know. So we're getting rid of all of that. So after spending 50 years of your life building a routine, we're literally throwing all of that out the window, living out of a little suitcase, jumping on planes, trains, automobiles, random Airbnbs, hotels.

And I guess you probably feel additional pressure since you've done all the planning and organizing. I just nod my head when James shares a B&B with me or an Airbnb. I go, yeah, that looks nice.

But he'll arrive then, he's like, what is this? Yeah, exactly.

And I think what scares me most is the age that I'm at. Like I said, I don't feel old at all, but obviously health becomes something that you are more aware of, and I'm not the greatest sleeper, so I wonder how I'm going to be sleeping in 55 different locations that we're going to. I also worry a bit, if I'm honest, about travel fatigue. How can we inject some kind of normality and routine into our life without feeling like we've got to see every single sight and we're on the go all the time? And then of course we've got to build at least a day of our week into every single week to edit videos and get them uploaded so that you guys can follow us. So those are some of the things that I am worried about. I guess I'm also slightly concerned about that feeling of being a bit untethered. Like, I like my home, whether it's here or Cape Town, and obviously friends and family as well. So how is it going to feel to be on the move for a year?

Mm-hmm.

I suspect we're going to go through sort of waves, and obviously we'll share this with you, of kind of euphoria at the start where it's all new and it feels like a holiday, to probably fatigue in the middle, and then kind of getting into more of a routine that will find easier to cope with?

Well, I think we've been trying to make sure that we're going to be staying at least a week in a destination before we go on to the next destination in the country, so to give us that space to be able to just unpack for a bit, relax for a bit, do what we need to do. And there's one question we already know many of you are going to ask. We are not abandoning Cape Town.

In fact, this whole journey ends there.

So this is the shape of the year. We start in New Zealand, move through Asia into Mexico and South America, and eventually finish back in South Africa.

So there are 11 countries and a lot more stops hidden inside that route, but we're deliberately not going to go through all of them today.

Because next week we're going to show you how we turned a blank map into this route, what we cut, what the weather did to it, and how much of it we actually have booked.

For today, the important thing is this: we know where we're headed, but what we don't know is what a year of living like this is actually going to do to us. Knowing where we're going is only half the story, because the bigger question is what a year of living like this will actually teach us. Your normal living costs in your home country is— it doesn't look so bad. I wonder how we're going to feel when full-time travel becomes our normal life, how that's going to be, whether we're going to get burnt out by it or—

I don't think we will. I think we'll find ways of coping. Well, once we start seeing the signs of burnout, we can pull back, slow down, stop for a bit. But I think it would just be really good to help expand our borders. Yeah, see all these places we've always talked that we wanted to go to, always been on the bucket list. So I just think it will help widen our horizons.

And as Jane said earlier, one of the questions we're going to be posing along the way is, could we actually live here? So we're going to have that as a sort of filter when we visit places, and not just places you should see and how much it costs, but actually, could we live here as well? And I guess another question is, which we really don't know the answer to, is what happens when we finish the travels? Will we want to continue this lifestyle after 12 months?

Who knows? That's what we need to look at on the other side, so you guys can then See, rethink now, and then we'll see at the other end, because who knows, we might get to the other end and go, oh, that was enough.

Yeah, we sort of talked about this a bit, haven't we? We might decide that after that we want to do 3 months at home, 3 months travel, but you know, there are still lots of places that we are not going to get to that we want to go and visit. The world is a big place, and we know we're not going to cover it all in this trip.

We know a lot of you found us through our South Africa videos, and from December the locations are obviously going to look very different.

But we really hope that you'll come with us.

Because the way we make videos isn't changing.

As I said earlier, there are lots of videos online of kind of generic tourism videos showing you the beautiful people and the beautiful places, but we don't want to make videos like that. We want to carry on making the same kind of videos we've made in Cape Town, but just in other parts of the world.

Basically, we want to show for people that want to retire, besides looking at Cape Town, obviously there's loads of other places in the world that people look at retiring, we want to have a look at those as well for ourselves because the world's a big place. We might find different places that we fall in love with. So the purpose of this, we're going to slow travel, sit in a destination, do the costs, see what it is to live there, eat out, everything to do with making your money go further.

Yeah, how do you get around? Are the places stay safe? Could we stay here? for a longer period of time, and perhaps more importantly, what is it that other YouTubers don't tell you about this location? We're going to try and get under the surface and share that with you.

Yeah, we're not going to do the Instagram stories.

So if you enjoyed watching us work out what places are really like, rather than just showing you the postcard version, we really hope that you'll stick with us while we do the same thing around the world. The countries will change, but the questions won't.

If we hadn't decided on doing this now, do you think we ever would?

I don't know, but honestly we have been talking about this for several years, so now we're finally getting there. It feels like absolutely the right time to do it. We've told our friends and family, we're getting all our affairs in order, and we'll talk about what this looks like later on because it is really complicated getting everything sorted out for when you're going to be away for a year. And are you scared about finishing work and leaving the comfort of a 9-to-5 job?

Yes, I am scared of losing a career. I've built a career over the last 30 years. Giving all of that safety up to just run into the wind.

Yeah, and of course we don't— as I said earlier, we don't know what we're going to feel like when we get back, whether James is going to go back into a similar job, whether he's going to retire, whether we're going to carry on traveling, whether we can make enough money through other sources to, you know, ensure that we've got enough money to live on and James can continue paying into his pension, are all those unknowns. But don't you think sometimes life is just better when there are unknowns? It just gets you out of the sort of slump of the routine that you're in.

We've never had a gap year when we were in our 20s.

So we're having one at 51 and 62.

And in 2 months' time, in late November, it starts.

So if you have enjoyed this video. Perhaps you're surprised by this. Do leave us a comment and let us know what you think, and obviously make sure you've hit the subscribe button and the bell so you're alerted when new videos go live. The next few videos we're going to outline exactly how we've planned this trip, and then of course you're going to be joining us as we take a flight to the other side of the world and start this journey in New Zealand. So this is James and Rob signing off for now, and we'll see you next week.

Bye!