Wayfaring: The Journey Begins

June 30, 2025

Today we begin chronicling our grand adventure into what we decided to label ¨Wayfaring¨.

The story of David and Amy is one over 40 years in the making. Having had many adventures over the years we now embark on a new, exciting, and unfamiliar journey. Sometimes diving in head first is not the best course of action but in this case we think it is a great way to experience life employing an immersive, out of the box, out of our comfort zone, adventurous and sometimes uncomfortable and possibly even dangerous strategy.

We will start the conversation by going back to how we arrived at the beginning.

Having been retired for a few years and feeling like we needed to make a change in our living arrangements we sold the house which had been in Amy´s family since 1974. The closing required our vacating the premises by June 30, 2025. With all of our belongings in storage or at homes of relatives we began the homeless ¨Wayfaring¨ lifestyle.

It is worth interjecting at this point that the story and the life situation you or I find ourselves in is not the point. Every story is different and therefore there is no magic formula or set of criteria for someone choosing the wayfaring lifestyle. I say this in order to preempt the notion that since our experience does not resemble your own, you should consider or not consider the ideas put forth in our living experiment.

So what is our situation? What follows is a synopsis of where we are in our lives. Keep in mind this site in meant to explore the lifestyle as it applies to each person individually and not to promote or judge anyone´s specific life situation or life decisions. So, without many details as to how and why, we will frame our present situation. David´s parents are living and in their 80´s and are in somewhat failing health and require care from professionals and their three sons. Amy´s dad and step mom are in their 90´s and in relatively good health and need little attention. Both sets of parents live in the same town along with David´s two brothers. Amy´s brothers and sister live about four hours away. We have two sons who live one to two hours away from our parents. The one who is married has a son, our only grand child, and that fact is a key factor in many of our decisions. Over the past couple of years we have spent considerable time with relatives for various reasons. And over the next year we are scheduled to spend time house sitting, people sitting, dog sitting and travelling, so the timing appears to really encourage our experiment. Our ages at the beginning of this crazy endeavor are 62 and 60 and, as people say, we are not getting any younger.

So you may be inclined to conclude we are just ¨mooching¨ off others so that we can travel more or to avoid the responsibilities associated with living our previous lifestyle. There may be some truth in that conclusion but the other side of the equation is the ability we now have to add value to the lives of others. The added value we can now provide includes financial support, helping with children, maintaining homes, family travel, and emotional support. Admittedly, part of the experiment is to explore ways to do more with less money and that idea will be the subject of future posts. Again, our situation, which includes a pretty close family, should have no bearing on your decisions or ideas. We share this information so that this point is made to anyone who might happen to be considering some alternative lifestyles regardless of your age, family situation or life view.

July 1 is the official first day or our Wayfaring adventure. We will share our hopes, ideas, successes and failures as we ramble through the coming year.