How I Travel for Months at a Time (Without Being Retired)

People sometimes assume that if you spend three months in Europe, you must be retired. I’m not.

In fact, I have no particular intention of retiring anytime soon.

I still run my travel business. I still work on my websites and online projects. I still have clients who need me. And I’m definitely not independently wealthy enough to simply stop earning money and spend my days wandering around Europe.

So we figured out something that works better for us: We take our life with us.

For several months at a time, we still work, grocery shop, cook, do laundry, answer emails, and complain about things exactly as we do at home. We just happen to be doing it in Europe.

And yes, that makes laundry considerably more interesting.

It Actually Started in Mexico

We’ve been taking longer trips for about 13 or 14 years now, but Europe wasn’t where this started. It was Mexico.

For several years, we rented a condo there during the winter, usually in February or March. I think our longest stay was about a month.

And it was fine. Except I discovered something important about myself. I am not very good at being a lounge lizard. For a week? Sure. For a month? I got bored.

I’m also not particularly fond of heat, which admittedly makes choosing Mexico as your winter escape slightly questionable.

Then we started looking at what we were spending. February and March are high season in Mexico. Meanwhile, we realized we could rent a place in parts of Europe – including Mediterranean countries – for less money. And the weather would be more our speed: generally sunny, pleasant, and not too hot.

And unlike lying around a pool for a month, we’d have cities to explore, history everywhere, trains to take, places to visit, and plenty to keep us interested.

That was pretty much the end of the Mexico experiment. Europe won.

We Changed Our Life to Make Longer Travel Easier

Once we decided we wanted to spend closer to three months away instead of a few weeks, we started looking at our life at home differently.

We owned a house in Wisconsin. A house that needed attention whether we were there or not. And if you’re going to disappear for three months during a Wisconsin winter, somebody still needs to think about things like snow.

We didn’t particularly see the point. So we sold the house and moved into a condo.

We didn’t move only because we wanted to travel for months at a time, but it was absolutely part of the decision. Now we can lock the door and leave. No lawn. No snowplowing. No sitting in Spain wondering what fresh nonsense the house has decided to get up to while we’re gone.

We still have things to arrange. Someone collects our mail. Prescriptions come with us. We stay in touch with family. But the logistics are considerably simpler. And, for the record, we have no plants or pets. That helps.

We Still Work While We’re in Europe

This is probably the biggest reason we’re able to do this without being retired.

We’re working.

I still run Sojourn Travel, the travel agency I’ve owned for decades, and I work on my websites and other online projects that I’m involved with.

The work comes with us.

Because most of my travel clients are in the United States and Europe is generally about seven hours ahead of home, my workday simply shifts. Instead of starting first thing in the morning, I often work from late afternoon into the evening.

Some clients know I’m overseas. Some probably don’t. It doesn’t really matter. They email me. Or they call me. I answer them. Trips get planned. Problems get solved. Business continues.

Meanwhile, our mornings and early afternoons can be ours. I love this!

That arrangement isn’t going to work for every kind of job or business, obviously. But it’s one of the reasons having work that can travel with me has become increasingly important.

I don’t need work to disappear from my life. I want it to fit into the life I want to live. There’s a difference.

We Don’t Treat Three Months in Europe Like a Three-Month Vacation

This may be the part people misunderstand the most.

We are not on vacation for three months. That would be exhausting. And probably financially ridiculous. We live much more normally than we would on a typical vacation.

We grocery shop. We cook. We do laundry. We work. We have weekdays and weekends. There are days when we go sightseeing and days when we don’t do anything particularly exciting. Sometimes dinner is at a wonderful little restaurant in Spain. Sometimes dinner is whatever we’ve managed to assemble from the refrigerator.

In other words, we do many of the same things we’d be doing at home. We’re just temporarily doing them somewhere much more interesting.

That’s one of my favorite things about staying longer. Eventually, you stop feeling as though you have to squeeze something important into every single day.

You’re not racing through a destination. For a little while, you’re living there.

Apartments Make the Long Stays Work

We use a combination of apartments and hotels, but apartments are what make the longer stays practical.

Girona, Spain, has become our most frequent long-term base. We generally stay there for at least a month, and one year we stayed for two.

We’ve also done longer stays in Portugal and Italy, and we’re considering adding the U.K. into the mix.

Around those longer stays, we’ll often add shorter apartment stays – maybe a week or two – in other places we want to visit.

And then there are hotels. I love hotels. Nice hotels. This is occasionally a threat to the budget. I tell myself they’re treats sprinkled throughout the trip, which sounds much more responsible.

For an apartment we’re actually going to live and work in, though, there are a few things I care about.

I want a full kitchen. I need a washing machine. There are usually no dryers, so forget that. I want enough space for both my husband and myself to work. I want a central location where we can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, cafés, and things to do.

And these days, I am increasingly enthusiastic about elevators. A charming fourth-floor apartment loses some of its charm around the third flight of stairs.

Have we occasionally failed to notice this before booking? Of course we have. Which brings me to one of the most important things we’ve learned.

Vet the Apartment Like You’re Actually Going to Live There

Because you are. An apartment that looks adorable in six carefully selected photographs can become considerably less adorable when you’re living in it for a month.

We’ve learned to look closely at apartment listings. Really closely. Is there actually a workspace? What’s the kitchen like? Is the washing machine inside the apartment? What floor is it on? Is there an elevator? What’s nearby? Can we walk to groceries? How easy is it to get to the train station?

A quirky inconvenience might be funny for two nights. But by Week 3, it may have acquired a nickname and become the subject of daily profanity.

We’ve had some terrific apartments. We’ve also had a few that made me wonder exactly what I was thinking when I clicked “Book.”

I’m not a complete prima donna. But I like things to be nice. I’ll admit it.

We Don’t Rent a Car

Another big part of making this lifestyle work is choosing places where we don’t need a car. We rely heavily on public transportation, especially trains.

That’s one of the reasons a central apartment matters so much. We want to be able to walk out the door and get groceries, go to dinner, wander around town, or get ourselves to a train station without having to think about a car.

For us, that’s part of the appeal of spending so much time in Europe. A train can take us somewhere else for the day – or to the next place we’re staying. No parking. No rental car sitting unused for weeks. And no discussion about which one of us was supposed to remember where we parked it.

Three Months Doesn’t Have to Cost What People Think

Obviously, spending several months in Europe costs money.

Unfortunately, there is no magical travel fairy funding this operation. But it doesn’t have to cost what three months of conventional vacationing would cost.

One of the biggest factors is the apartment. If we’re staying somewhere for a month, we try not to overspend on accommodations. Longer apartment rentals can be much more economical than paying nightly hotel rates.

Having a kitchen matters too. We eat out, of course – sometimes quite a lot, depending on where we are – but we’re not eating every meal in a restaurant.

Food can also be less expensive than it is at home, and in places like Spain, eating out can be surprisingly reasonable.

Where do we get ourselves into trouble? Hotels. Did I mention I like nice hotels?

We also like visiting expensive cities. So there’s that. We’ve learned that too many hotel nights can send the budget heading in a direction we’d rather it didn’t.

Have we completely stopped doing that? Please.

The other major difference is that we’re still earning money while we’re away. That’s important. This isn’t a three-month period with no income coming in while we spend from a giant vacation fund. We’re living, traveling, and working at the same time. We’d have to eat regardless of where we were, right?

For us, that’s what makes the whole arrangement possible.

We Usually Travel Slowly – Except When We Don’t

In theory, working while traveling encourages us to slow down.

Girona is a perfect example. If we’re there for a month or two, there’s no urgency. We can work. We can take day trips. We can have completely ordinary days. We can decide we’ll get to something next Tuesday. It’s lovely.

And then there was this year. This year we moved around too much. We brought too much luggage. We stayed in too many hotels.

Apparently, after more than a decade of doing this, we decided to revisit several lessons we’d already learned just to make sure they were still true. They were. Longer travel works best for us when there’s some breathing room in it.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never have a busy stretch again. We like seeing new places too much for that. But three months doesn’t need to mean cramming three months with too many destinations and travel days.

Why We Keep Going Back to Europe

I’ve loved Europe for as long as I can remember.

I’m a castle and palace hound. I love history and historic places, which means we’re unlikely to run out of things that interest us anytime soon. There’s also a professional benefit. We sell a great deal of Europe through Sojourn Travel, so being there is research. Very enjoyable research, admittedly, but research nonetheless.

We don’t always spend our long stay in Spain. We’ve stayed in Portugal and Italy too, and there are plenty of other places we’re considering.

And I don’t really understand the idea of saying, “I’ve done Europe, so that’s that.”

Done it? Europe is an entire continent. I’ve been traveling there for decades and still have a ridiculous number of places I want to see. There are also places I want to see again. And again.

For now, we enjoy making one longer trip rather than flying back and forth across the Atlantic several times a year. That may change someday.

That’s another thing I’ve learned. The system doesn’t have to be permanent. It just has to work for us now.

So Why Don’t I Just Retire?

Because I don’t want to. I like working, and having things to focus on.

What these long stays have done is make me think very differently about what I want this stage of life to look like. I don’t particularly want a life divided neatly into working and then someday living.

I want the two to work together. I want to keep doing work that interests me. I want to keep earning money. I want to spend months in Europe. I want to keep learning things. I want to have the flexibility to change how all of this looks as we get older.

And that’s really the larger idea behind Still En Route. Retirement doesn’t have to mean exactly what it meant to previous generations – or even what it means to the person next door.

You get to figure out what works for you.

Did We Actually Figure This Out?

Sometimes I’ll be sitting in an apartment somewhere in Europe with my laptop open, doing completely ordinary work, and I’ll look around and think:

Holy crap. We actually figured out how to do this.

Not perfectly. We’ve booked apartments that weren’t what we hoped. We’ve gotten sick. We’ve had travel mishaps. We’ve dragged too much luggage around Europe. We’ve spent too much money on hotels. We’ve packed too much into an itinerary and wondered why on earth we did that to ourselves.

That’s part of it too. The goal was never to create some flawless three-month European fantasy. The goal was to build a life that lets us keep going places without waiting until someday to do it.

So far, this version works for us. We’re still working. We’re still traveling. We’re still adjusting the plan as we go. In other words, we’re still en route.

Preferably with an elevator. And snacks.

~Mary