Oh hey… thanks for stopping by.
G’day! We’re Dean and Pauline, the couple behind Next Stop Retirement.
We’ve been travelling together for more than 30 years, and somehow our list of places we want to visit keeps getting longer rather than shorter.
Travel has always been a big part of our lives.
I spent much of my working life in the travel industry, including designing tours and working as a travel agent. Together, Pauline and I spent years travelling with our daughter, exploring Australia and eventually taking her further afield as she got older.
Now junior has grown up, retirement is getting closer, and for the first time in our lives we’re starting to have something we haven’t had much of before… Time.
And that’s got us thinking about a completely different question.
Not just where do we want to travel?
But how do we want travel to fit into our lives?
Why we started Next Stop Retirement
As we started thinking more seriously about retirement, we also started thinking about what travel might look like when we finally had more freedom over our time.
And something became pretty obvious. The retirement travel conversation seemed to revolve around a surprisingly small number of choices.
- Keep taking the same two or three-week holidays you’ve always taken.
- Sell everything and become a full-time nomad.
- Move overseas and become an expat.
- Start cruising or taking organised tours.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those options. In fact, we might try some of them ourselves.
But what if none of them quite fits? Or what if several of them do?
What if you want to keep your home but spend three months overseas each year? What if you want to spend a month in one place, then take a road trip somewhere completely different? What if you want to use one city as a base and explore an entire region?
Or mix independent travel with the occasional cruise, group tour or bucket-list experience?
The more we travelled and thought about our own retirement, the more we realised just how many possibilities there are.
And that’s really what Next Stop Retirement is about.
Exploring those possibilities.
Trying different ways of travelling. Learning what works for us and what doesn’t. Changing our minds when something surprises us. Then sharing what we learn so that maybe you’ll discover an option you hadn’t considered before.
Because retirement doesn’t mean finally choosing one way to travel and sticking with it for the rest of your life.
It might just give you the freedom to keep asking:
What should we try next?
There’s no single right way to travel through retirement
For a while, we thought the goal was to figure it out.
Find our ideal travel pace. Work out how long we liked staying in each place. Decide whether we preferred longer stays or moving more often. Then, by the time retirement arrived, we’d have our travel style sorted.
Except travel doesn’t seem to work like that.
We’ve stayed in places where a week felt too long, and others where a month may not be long enough. We’ve returned to cities we once loved and experienced them completely differently the second time around.
We’ve tried slowing down and discovered that sometimes it suits us perfectly. Other times, we’ve been itching to move on.
And that’s probably been one of our most useful lessons.
We don’t need to figure out the perfect way to travel through retirement
What works for us today might change in five years. What works in Vietnam might not work in Spain.
A travel style we dismiss after one experience might turn out to be exactly what we’re looking for somewhere else.
So we’re becoming increasingly comfortable with changing our minds… trying something new… seeing how it feels.
Keeping what works. Changing what doesn’t.
Then wondering what else we haven’t thought of yet.
For us, retirement isn’t the point where we finally choose how we’re going to travel and stick with that decision forever.
It’s an opportunity to keep exploring and trying new things that we might enjoy.
There’s a world of ways to travel through retirement. The joy is figuring out what yours could look like.
Stay a while
Get to know a place. Find your rhythm. Experience for a while what the locals do.
Keep Moving
Explore more. Follow the roads. Let the journey become more important than the destination.
Chase a Dream
Tick those big things you’ve dreamed about off the list. Create those special memories.
Maybe you’re asking the same questions
Perhaps you’re counting down the years until retirement. Or maybe you’ve already retired and are finally starting to enjoy the freedom you’ve worked so hard for.
Either way, travel probably feels a little different than it once did.
It’s no longer just about fitting everything into a two-week vacation. It’s about deciding what you want this next chapter of travel to look like.
Maybe you’re wondering whether you’d enjoy spending longer in one place. Whether moving every few days still suits you. Whether it’s worth returning to destinations you’ve visited before. Or whether there are ways of travelling you haven’t even considered yet.
The truth is, you don’t have to have all the answers.
There’s no need to decide what your retirement travel lifestyle will look like for the next twenty years. There’s a good chance it will keep evolving, just as ours has.
Whatever retirement travel eventually looks like for you, we hope Next Stop Retirement helps you discover a few more possibilities along the way.
We’ll keep sharing what we learn, in the hope it helps you discover what might work for you.
What you’ll discover on Next Stop Retirement
Every trip teaches us something. Sometimes it’s about the destination itself, sometimes it’s about a different way of travelling, and sometimes it’s simply a better way to plan the next adventure.
As we continue exploring the many ways travel can fit into retirement, we’ll share what we learn through three simple areas.
Places that changed the way we travel
We’ve been fortunate to visit more than 30 countries over the years, and every one has given us memories we’ll never forget. But a handful have done something even more valuable. They challenged our assumptions, changed the way we think about travel, and helped shape the philosophy behind Next Stop Retirement.
Mexico
We learned that the first time you travel for several months can be harder than you thought, no matter how amazing the place may be.
We also learned that road trips are better when you don’t have a fixed itinerary, and that places aren’t as scary as the media suggests if you use some common sense.
Vietnam
Hoi An taught us that even after 30 years of travelling with the attitude that the only good day is one where you fill it with sightseeing, you can learn to slow down and just be present.
It also showed us that some places make it easy to stay for weeks, while other places make a week feel like too long.
Peru
Not only is this one of the most interesting countries in the world, but it taught us that not every group tour has to be a non-stop race between destinations.
The other big lesson we learned here is that, value travel does not mean budget travel. It’s about how much the experience is worth to you.
France
In Paris we found out that following the guidebook and ticking off the tourist sights was interesting, but exploring a city without a plan is how you see the real place.
And leaving Paris showed us that if you want to know what a country is really like, you have to leave the city behind.
Fiji
This place, and the beautiful people who live there, were the first to really show us that you don’t need “things” to make your life happy and full. You just need enough to get by and the right people around you.
It was also the first time I felt how much better travel was when shared with the right people.
Australia
Our home country taught us that no matter how far you search across the world, you won’t always find something better than you have in your backyard.
It wasn’t until the COVID travel restrictions were in place that we took a genuinely deep look at our local area. And we were shocked to find it was actually amazing!
We’re still figuring it out too
If there’s one thing travel has taught us, it’s that the best answers usually come from experience, not assumptions.
We’re still discovering new places, trying different ways to travel, and occasionally changing our minds along the way.
Some ideas work brilliantly, others don’t. Either way, every trip teaches us something.
There’s a world of ways to travel through retirement. We hope sharing what we’ve learned helps you discover what yours could look like.
Wherever you are as you plan your retirement travel, we’re glad you’re here.
Keep exploring with us.
Contact us
Email : hello@nextstopretirement.com
