09 Sept 09 2023: Updates international, fully nomadic senior lifestyle plans

Now that we’ve been at this for a while (developing the plan to start our international, fully nomadic senior lifestyle) there have been some significant revisions since our last update.

The first major change I think I talked about before; doing 30 days per country rather than 90 due to Schengen restrictions and our desire to visit so many different countries.

When we first started mapping this out we were planning Panama for mid-November through February then Costa Rica for March/April and then Croatia after which the plan got much more fluid. It was over a year out at that point and we didn’t know what would strike our fancy after a month in Dubrovnik.

Well, for starters – not a month in Dubrovnik. More likely a month in Split with a couple of day trips to Dubrovnik. Split is more central and, from everything I’ve read, more of an actual city rather than being primarily a tourist attraction.

The timing got a significant adjustment with the addition of Trusted Housesitters into the mix. We (well, Sandra) managed to schedule three basically back-to-back petsits in England for April and May (first one starts Apr 6th and the 3rd one ends May 28th). We have a few days in between each one so we’ll be able to do some unencumbered sightseeing. The last one is essentially a suburb of London and apparently the dog we’re caring for loves to ride the train so they said if we want to do some day trips into town it would be fine.

We decided that after England we’ll head to Italy for the month of June – going to make it more than just a jump, though; we’re going to make that journey into a mini-adventure.

The story for that planning exercise will be part of a new ‘series’ of posts to capture the initial planning process and then we can revisit those afterwards and talk about what happened and what didn’t, what worked and what flopped, etc. They’ll be tagged as (Time Capsule).

I tasked Sandra with picking at least one activity for each of our stops on the England – Italy journey and it seems geocaching will become part of our routine. So, if you’re into that sort of thing, maybe follow along as we explore.

Factoring in the Schengen zone restrictions is proving a little bit of a challenge for me. We may only get 2 countries covered for long stays this time around. I’m going to start looking at 3 week stays rather than 4 due to transit time between countries. I really don’t want to fly any more than we have to and sitting on the train for 15 hours at a time is pretty unappealing for one of us. With our current itinerary we only have 16 unused Schengen days So do we add time to Italy and/or Croatia? Do we spend 2 weeks somewhere?

I don’t think we’ll be answering that before springtime but it’s part of the conversation.