Episode 07 - From Grief to Globe-trotting: Our Origin Story

Embarking on a life less ordinary, Rita and I, Jim Santos, peeled back the layers of traditional retirement to reveal a tapestry woven with adventure and discovery. Our tale begins with shared grief, leading to a partnership rooted in the love of exploration. When the familiar confines of the United States seemed too small, we chased a dream to Ecuador—a journey that reshaped our golden years. Now, we pull back the curtain on the decision that sparked our move, the realities of adopting a new homeland, and the unexpected career twist that saw me become an Ecuador Coastal Correspondent.

The transformation went beyond a change of scenery; it was a metamorphosis of health, family ties, and quality of life. Our tale wends through the challenges and triumphs of adjusting to life in South America, from the steep learning curve of a new language to the ripple effects of our daring choice on our wellbeing. Weaving Rita's insights into the narrative, the episode reveals how the leap into the unknown can pay dividends in living more fully. This is a story about more than retirement—it's about reinventing life itself.

Our journey didn't stop at Ecuador's borders. As wanderlust beckoned, we faced the world's unpredictability with resilience, from navigating a global pandemic to personal loss, always with an eye on the horizon. The road led us through financial planning for continuous exploration, reconnecting with our heritage in the British Isles, and plotting a travel odyssey that balances the thirst for adventure with life's practicalities. Join us as we share the laughter, the lessons, and the boundless excitement of living life without a fixed address.

Transcript

Jim Santos: 0:23

Welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita. I'm your host, jim Santos, and in this podcast series you can follow along as my wife Rita and I work out our crazy plan to outfox the real estate market in the US and actually increase our retirement nest egg by spending the next three years or so living abroad and exploring the world. Are we bold, forward thinking pioneers or just plain nuts? Let's find out together, shall we? Now, several of you have asked questions about how we got to this point. Did we just wake up one day and say, hey, let's sell everything and hit the road? Or what happened? Well, perhaps we haven't been properly introduced. So let's go to the Wayback Machine and set it for the end of 2008 and see if I can give you a little origin story for how Rita and I got together and started the wheels turning. It was a dark and stormy night. I'm just kidding, but the roots of our tale do start at a dark and stormy part of my life. As the year 2008 came to a close, things were not looking good for me. My wife Carolyn died on December 3rd of that year of complications arising from a seven year fight against cancer, just 23 days short of what would have been our 25th wedding anniversary.

Jim Santos: 2:04

I started the new year of 2009 as a 50 year old, recently widowed, 319 pound diabetic with high blood pressure, trying to come to grips with the obvious fact that I was going to be alone for the rest of my probably short life. As you can imagine, I was in fairly bad health. My doctor put me on large doses of two types of medication for type 2 diabetes and one for high blood pressure. My diabetes was really out of control. My A1C reading was almost 11, which in medical terms means that my blood in some states could legally be marketed as a dessert topping. My doctor informed me that with hard work, diet and exercise, I might be able to put off insulin injections for about 5 years, but it would definitely be in my future. So I should get used to the idea.

Jim Santos: 2:52

There's a popular psychological viewpoint that our consciousness is divided into parts, one of which is called the narrator. This is the part of our mind that takes the often chaotic parts of life and forces them into a story, a series of meaningful and connected events. It seems to me, however, that most of our lives are made up of random events that rarely seem significant when they happen. It's only looking back through the milky lens of memory that we imagine that we see a pattern. For Rita and me, the first random event was our meeting up at all. Although we'd both been living just 12 miles from each other in the small county of Jefferson in West Virginia about 56,000 people for more than a decade, we'd never met. From talking about our lives there prior to our meeting, it turns out that, while I was working for a local internet service provider, I definitely was the tech that installed the internet access at her real estate office and quite possibly at her home, but our paths never did cross. It wasn't until a Saturday in March of 2009 that I, just three months of widower and still in a daze, called her office to arrange a showing of a fixer upper house that they had listed. I was mostly looking for a project to occupy my mind. Now the assigned agent did not show and since I had a contractor with me to give me an estimate on repairs that would be needed, I called again. Rita then reluctantly agreed to cover for the no show agent.

Jim Santos: 4:19

Now I noticed she was attractive. I was in mourning and depressed, but I wasn't dead. But I certainly never thought we would ever go on a date sometime in the future, much less would have believed that we would soon be sharing our lives, and I was definitely not in the looking to date stage. Nothing may have ever happened between us, except that a couple months later I also bought a second investment home from her. I was still assuming that I'd be alone for the rest of my life and in fact when I showed up to sign the offer on that second property, I was wearing sweatpants that may have been laundered sometime that month, a t-shirt with a prominent food stain and a baseball hat to cover my unwashed hair. Wooing was not on my mind. So we may never have become any closer. But for an accident that delayed my commuter train one evening when we were scheduled to meet to sign some papers. She waited for me and so we were alone in her office and we were both tired enough to let down our defenses and talk about our lives honestly to each other. A random act of fate again, I don't know, but sitting in that empty office we found that we shared the loss of spouses from cancer and I think for the first time we looked at each other as real people, not just client and agent. Later on, of course, I joked that she had a strict two house minimum on dating clients. We also found that we shared a love of travel and after a one week vacation to Ocean City, maryland, to see how we did on the road because, as you may know, there are many couples who do not travel well together we were soon planning many other trips. We visited Hawaii, southern Florida, new Orleans, paradise Island, st Croix and Italy, to name just a few destinations.

Jim Santos: 5:59

I was working remotely for General Dynamics, assigned to the US Senate, and Rita just needed some files and her phone in order to work at her real estate job. So our jobs were fairly portable. Sometimes we would work during the day and explore the evenings, or however the local time zone worked out. I remember trying to work on computers from an internet cafe in Posatano, italy, while boisterous fans alternately cheered and cursed the football game that soccer to you heathens that was playing on TV. Every place we visited, we would ask ourselves what would it be like to live here? How would we feel about moving to another part of the US or even overseas? It wasn't something we obsessed over, but it was always in the back of our minds. Now that was when we hit the next random event and found International Living Post Cards. These are little emails that go out to subscribers a few times a month with information and short articles about the particular country you fancy. Oddly enough, we both signed up for them independently and ended up with two subscriptions to International Living Magazine as well. To this day, neither of us remembers exactly when or why we subscribed. Now, the more we looked through IL and other resources, the more intrigued we became with the idea of trying the expat lifestyle.

Jim Santos: 7:18

Our main goal was to find a place where it was warm year round, as Rita is not a big fan of cold weather. What attracted us to Ecuador was not that only do you have warm Pacific Ocean beaches, it's also in the same time zone as Washington DC, except, of course, during daylight savings time and because of its position on the equator, it does not get hurricanes or violent storms. We did more research, narrowed it down to a section of the southern coast and made plans to go and see for ourselves. We found local real estate agents online and gave them a list of properties we'd like to see, and we made our first trip to Ecuador in late January of 2013. Our plans called for exploring four or five places on the coast, but at our second stop, in Salinas, we fell in love and decided to concentrate on finding an oceanfront property there. We didn't quite find what we required as our visit came to a close, but we did identify the building we wanted and resigned ourselves to wait for a condo with an ocean view on one of the higher floors. Our reasoning was that we were not going to travel 3,000 miles and still be a block away from the Pacific. We didn't have to wait long.

Jim Santos: 8:28

Within two months, we had found and purchased our condo, basing our purchase simply on our visit to the Alamar building, where it was located, and on pictures of the unit. Now, we weren't totally blind. We had put an offer in on the unit just above this one during our stay, so we were familiar with the view and the floor plan. Everything was handled long distance, which I admit was a scary proposition. There's nothing like wiring a couple of hundred thousand dollars off to another country to get your heart really pounding. Fortunately, we had an excellent attorney in Ecuador and all went smoothly. We planned a five week trip to our new digs to begin preparing and furnishing it and on April 4th of 2013, we got married in a simple but deeply moving civil ceremony at the Cambridge Maryland courthouse and left the next day to return to Ecuador, this time as husband and wife. At the time, we still weren't sure if we were looking for a winter retreat or an investment property, but by the end of those five weeks in Ecuador, we were enamored enough to feel that we wanted to live there full time.

Jim Santos: 9:31

When we returned to the US, we decided to start planning for the move and to gather documents for our residency visas. Once again, international living was one of the resources we used to prepare. Since we had no idea what the health care situation might be like, we both thought it would be prudent to get complete physicals while still in the States. At my appointment, I heard something I never expected to hear from my doctor. You've lost 20 pounds, he told me, and as if I'd started on a diet and exercise plan. I told him I hadn't done anything intentionally, but we had just spent five weeks in South America. He told me that made sense to him since, and I quote, we eat crap here. He told me he had spent some time in Dominica doing a Doctors Without Borders stint and couldn't believe how much his health improved just from eating the native foods. So by the end of November 2013, we had sold all of our US properties a condo, two cars and a boat While we bought a smaller home in the US to provide rental income and a safety net. In case we changed our minds, we registered our residency visas and acquired our Sedgulus, the Ecuadorian ID cards. So all that remained was to start our new lives south of the equator, and we did so on January 5, 2014, when we landed at the Jose Joaquin de Alamedo International Airport in Hwayekil with our luggage a cat and a dog to begin our lives as expats in Ecuador.

Jim Santos: 11:01

International living was still part of our lives. Shortly after our move, I submitted an article to them entitled Stop and Smell the Puppies. It was about the new, relaxed lifestyle and told the story of Hal of Small Boy, who interrupted our dinner on the outdoor deck of a small local restaurant just to show off his new puppy. The second time he came back it was because he had forgotten to show us how nice his new puppy smelled, shoving it into our faces one at a time and proclaiming proudly Huele bien. A few weeks later I got my first rejection notice. Softening the blow a bit, an editor told me he liked the writing style and wanted to know if I would write a longer profile article about our lives and our choice of Ecuador. At the time I was still working remotely for the US Senate, so I had to use the pen name Denver Gray, which is my middle name and my mother's maiden name. This caused a mild sensation in loneliness when the article was published, as all the expats were trying to figure out who this Denver Gray person was. At any rate, except for a few years when I wrote for a local newspaper back in West Virginia, I now had my first income from a published article. I would go on to write more for them from time to time under that pseudonym.

Jim Santos: 12:16

After those random events that got us to Ecuador, the next six years would bring tremendous changes to our lives. Although looking for a lower cost of living had nothing to do with our decision, we did find that, since we no longer needed a car, we had no mortgage, our yearly property taxes were a laughable $400 a year and we were shopping at the inexpensive local Mercado, we had reduced our living expenses so much that I was able to retire just a year and a half after the move, at the tender age of 57. At that point, when I told IL I can now use my real name, they also offered me a contract to be the Ecuador Coastal Correspondent and provide regular articles. Since we are now both retired, rita and I began to do some exploring so we could find more source material. After all, if I was the Coastal Correspondent, I would have to see more of the coast.

Jim Santos: 13:07

I must point out as well that my editors wanted only boots on the ground, observations and interviews with real expats. No fair googling, and using Wikipedia, I would only write about what I had actually seen and experienced. This had the unexpected benefit of accelerating my learning of Spanish. Although far from fluent, I was able to learn enough functional Spanish to chat with the folks around us, qualify for an Ecuadorian driver's license and feel comfortable exploring that beautiful country on our own. This confidence in our ability to communicate also helped us to roam comfortably in Peru, uruguay and Argentina, not to mention in many circumstances when visiting the US. Travelling in Ecuador and other South American countries gave us a deep appreciation of the cultural differences and how they should be celebrated rather than feared or scorned. We've seen beautiful places and met wonderful people, and we've experienced a thousand things we could never have known if we had not made the move. We've also been able to share some of those experiences with our four children and nine grandchildren that's right, nine. We've brought all of them, except the twins that were born after our stay, to visit us in Ecuador and see for themselves that there's no limit to the options in your life.

Jim Santos: 14:25

By far the most important way Ecuador changed me personally was my health. It's not an exaggeration to say that moving to Ecuador added years to my life, possibly even saved it. The healthier and more relaxed lifestyle, having the time and beautiful weather to be able to get out and walk three to six miles a day, a healthier and more varied diet of natural foods and the financial independence to retire from a stressful job all of these things have combined to change my quality of life in a profound way. I've lost a lot of weight since those days ten years ago when I thought my life was over. I was able to gradually reduce the dosages of my medication and now, instead of having to inject insulin, as my doctor predicted, my A1C recently tested at 5.8, when under 5.9 is considered non-diabetic.

Jim Santos: 15:16

In Ecuador, we enjoyed the small villages and cities of the coast, discovered the wonderful larger cities of Huayaquil, quito, cuenca and Loja, tasted new foods and regional favorites in small villages everywhere, met charming and friendly locals and loved every minute of it. We even visited the Galápagos Islands and had a wonderful time touring on our own. My improved health and our confidence in Spanish took us to Buenos Aires for a tango show. Uruguay, for two weeks of self-guided exploration. Peru, to walk around Lima, cusco and the Sacred Valley, and the biggest achievement of my life so far hiking the 26 miles of the Inca Trail to walk among the ruins at Machu Picchu.

Jim Santos: 15:59

Now, all of this travel has some interesting side effects. We found that we absolutely loved every place that we visited. While I stand by the statement that no place is perfect, so many places have their own special beauty and positive features. We yearned to go back to Buenos Aires and spend a month living there before going on to visit some of the interior of Argentina, possibly ending up hiking for a few weeks in Patagonia. Uruguay also seemed worthy of a longer look, especially to take a closer look at their banking system. And while we were in Peru, we didn't get to see the floating villages of Lake Titicaca or the canyons near Aariquipa. What's worse, it made us realize just how many incredible places there are to see and things to experience. Just think of what we might be missing out on. There's so much more to Central and South America, and then there are places in Europe we need to get to. And what about Indonesia?

Jim Santos: 16:54

We didn't go to Ecuador to get away from anything in the States, except, of course, cold weather, and our decision to leave had nothing to do with Ecuador. We loved it there. We were just too excited by the possibilities of travel to stay in one spot for too long. As long as we were healthy enough to travel. We wanted to embrace the roving retirement or slow travel lifestyle. We felt like we were done with a prototypical vacation where you just visit a location for a week or two, hit the tourist spots and go home. We wanted to experience what it's like to actually live in different destinations for a minimum of a month, possibly two or three, before moving on to the next. Our time in Ecuador gave us many gifts that we could not have received any other way. We're more comfortable with different cultures now than ever before, and the idea of dealing with different languages is a challenge rather than an obstacle. We're both fine with arriving in a new country and finding our own way getting cabs, negotiating hotels and restaurants and just generally walking around on our own exploring.

Jim Santos: 17:59

I first noticed this myself in February of 2017, when I made a solo trip to Panama, leaving Rita behind in Ecuador while I attended a writers conference in Panama City, I took a bus to Huayaquil, walked over to the airport from the station and was on my way. It was only while I was standing in line at passport control in Panama, listening to the other travelers, that it hit me that something had changed here. I was by myself in a foreign country I'd never visited before, one where most people did not speak my language and all I knew about where I was headed was the name of the hotel. I hadn't given any advance thought to where I would find a cab or what I would say to the driver. No thoughts about the check-in process nothing at all that I heard folks around me stressing over. The only thing that I was vaguely worried about, in fact, was that, for the first time in 30 years, I'd be sharing a hotel room with someone other than my wife. Foreign protocol was much more in my mind than the fact that I was a stranger in a strange.

Jim Santos: 19:00

But getting back to Rita and me, we decided that the best thing for us at that point in our lives was to sell our condo in Ecuador and set up a base in the US. Some places that didn't tax our retirement income were the mild climate so we wouldn't have to worry about leaving the home in harsh winters, and preferably where an HOA took care of the lawn. We found all that in Knoxville, tennessee, and we spent part of 2019 making the move. We also found an investment property nearby a new bill that we could rent out to create an income stream to support our travels. It was completed in December of 2019 and by March of 2020 we had a tenant in place and we were all set to go out and explore the world Just in time for COVID-19 to come along and freeze all of our travel plans Now.

Jim Santos: 19:49

The next few years were not a total waste. Before COVID hit, I had finished my first book, the Galapagos Islands on your Own and on a budget, and managed to release it just two weeks before travel to the islands was shut down, rendering it pretty much useless. Wonderful timing on my part. Undaunted, I spent part of the next few years writing other books, short stories and blogs. I also continued a relationship with International Living, doing some voiceover work for them and others, and I eventually began using that equipment to record audiobooks for myself and a few other authors.

Jim Santos: 20:24

We did manage to slip in some trips around the US San Francisco, for example but it wasn't until the spring of 2022 that we felt it was time for us to finally plan a trip abroad. Tragedy struck, however, as one of our son-in-laws was diagnosed with cancer. Naturally, everything was put on hold while we helped our daughter and her children deal with his rapidly advancing illness and, eventually, with his untimely death in the first hours of 2023. Now, in some ways, this served as a wake-up call to us. We were now six years older than when we were actively traveling, and if you think six years doesn't make a difference. You're probably not over 65 yet.

Jim Santos: 21:04

So, after some trips to visit the rest of our brood, we began to plan a nine-week trip through Eastern Europe for the fall of 2023. We would start in Athens, greece, visit one of the islands and then the city of Thessaloniki, before heading to Istanbul. From there we'd go to Vienna, possibly take a day trip to Budapest and move on to Prague. Then we would drop down to Croatia, spend two weeks visiting four cities on the coast and from there over to Barcelona for a week, then four nights in Lisbon on our way back to the US. We were back, baby. Okay, I admit it, we were overcompensating a bit. Now you can read about our European journey on my blog at jimsantosblog. com or jimsantosbooks. com.

Jim Santos: 21:50

But, spoiler alert, we ended up, rather ironically, both coming down with COVID-19 just as we reached Prague. After sheltering in Prague while taking Pax Lovid, we reluctantly cut the trip short and returned to the US to recover fully. Fortunately, we learned nothing from this defeat. Rather than dissuading us from such grandiose travel dreams, it only underscored that our travel window may be closing soon. I'll be 66 in March and return 73 in December. So while we're in reasonably good health. Now the brush with COVID just reinforced that good health is not a guarantee, and if we want to see more of the world, we'd better get our butts in gear. That was the germ of the idea that got us where we are today.

Jim Santos: 22:37

As I mentioned before, our current trip to Panama was planned before we developed the broader plan. It was just to get away for the winter and to make sure we spent some time in a new location. I did some spreadsheets looking at what it would cost us to maintain our home while we were away and what we'd have available to travel on. It looked like we could easily afford to spend 3 to 6 months a year traveling, but would that be enough?

Jim Santos: 23:03

Two other situations that developed towards the end of last year put the finishing touches on our plans. One of those was the rise in interest rates on savings account, one high yield account. We have got up to 4.35% and we were able to lock in a share certificate for 3 years through our credit union at 5.38%. Since we have no mortgage on our home, it got us sinking. What if we sold the house and put the proceeds in accounts like the ones we have now? Our US expenses would drop dramatically. We'd actually be earning a decent amount of money each month in interest, and we wouldn't have to touch any of that income to travel full time. This had the added advantage of allowing us to sell now, while prices are high, and not have to buy back in right away. Maybe by the time we are done with travel, the market will have adjusted and we can buy back in at a lower price. Either way, we will have increased buying power from the interest earned.

Jim Santos: 24:01

If you are interested in more details on this story, you can listen to earlier versions of the podcast, and there is also an article in the March 2024 issue of International Living Magazine that just came out that I wrote about avoiding this boomer trap. So that's how we got here. Although we both love our home in Knoxville, and it's been a wonderful region to live in, we decided we couldn't pass up the chance to be able to slow travel while increasing the size of our nest egg. So the house is on the market and it's in the lap of the gods where we go from here. Now.

Jim Santos: 24:35

I've said there were two situations, and the second is one I've heard voiced by several other people lately. To be bluntly honest, it doesn't seem like the US is going to be a particularly nice place to hang around for the rest of 2024 and possibly beyond. I used to work in the US Senate doing tech support and I have never seen such blatant tribalism at work. Things have become so divisive and there's been so much hate and ugliness that so many people who would rather see everybody lose than the other side win that I really don't want to have a front row seat to the action between now and the inauguration, insurrection or coronation, whichever may occur. Give me a quiet mountain village in France or a beach in Croatia or a little pub in Ireland instead, anywhere away from the talking heads and pontificating politicians.

Jim Santos: 25:25

I've always said that escaping politics is not a reason to leave the US. The most successful people who travel are the ones who are running toward something, not away from something, and in fact I have a whole chapter in my book Living Abroad, challenging the Myths of Expat Life on that very subject. But right now sure seems like a nice bonus. So before I wrap things up, another question I've heard is when are we going to hear from Rita? After all, it's not travels with Jim, it's travels with Jim and Rita. Where's your other half. Well, part of that is my fault. When we packed for this trip, I neglected to bring a second set of headphones, so Rita cannot take part in our interview episodes, but she's here now and ready for fame, if not fortune. Rita, say hi to everyone and let me know if there's anything about our story that you'd like to add.

Rita Santos: 26:15

Hello everybody. We're just sitting here at Coronado Beach.

Jim Santos: 26:20

Okay, so everybody knows, you're not imaginary. Now.

Rita Santos: 26:23

I'm not imaginary, and it certainly has been a wonderful 15 year adventure that we have been on together.

Jim Santos: 26:31

Now, when it comes to this new adventure that we're about to start now, is there anything about selling the house that has you particularly worried or just a little concerned about?

Rita Santos: 26:44

Probably the only thing that I really hope that you don't regret is giving up your chef's kitchen, because I know that it's been a joy for you to have it. And when we do travel and we're in air and air B&Bs or apartments or wherever we are, our kitchen space is usually limited, but you always manage to make it happen.

Jim Santos: 27:10

It is a little annoying trying to cook a decent meal using stone knives and bear skins in some of these places I know. I know it's a little different for us that we're not like our friends Todd and Daman. They sold everything and left. Now we're really talking about putting most of our stuff into storage.

Rita Santos: 27:31

Yeah, but this will be the first time that we haven't had a home.

Jim Santos: 27:37

Yeah, now I'll definitely miss the kitchen. I will admit that a bit, but the kitchen can be redone.

Rita Santos: 27:43

You know when we oh and actually I think that it could be redone into even being even more of an asset. We took a house that was already built. It wasn't one that we actually have built from scratch, which we've done before. So you know, yes, it could be a plus, it could end up being a plus.

Jim Santos: 28:10

Now, when we set out on this trip, we've talked about some possible destinations. Is there any destination in particular that you want to make sure we get to?

Rita Santos: 28:20

You know what We've been skirting around? I mean, I have for about 30 years going to the British Isles. I just feel like I want to definitely make sure we spend two or three months doing that, just for both of our heritage, just to see where we're really from. I want to do that, yes.

Jim Santos: 28:44

Yeah, according to a DNA test, we both have roots in the British Isles.

Rita Santos: 28:50

That's right.

Jim Santos: 28:51

Yeah, I thought Croatia would probably be on the list there, because that was something we didn't get to see on that last trip.

Rita Santos: 28:58

It is on the list, but you know, it's even worrisome because that is becoming so over crowded with tourists. I think we should do a lot of this in the dead of winter so that we're not just well of course, croatia would shut down on the coast a lot of it, but still on the shoulders. On the shoulders so that we can actually enjoy the areas that we want to look at.

Jim Santos: 29:29

But we'll be a challenge trying to get to places either before or after the big tourist seasons or stay reasonably close to a high tourist area We've talked about in France being in a village. That's maybe a half hour train ride or 45 minute train ride from Paris.

Rita Santos: 29:46

Yeah, I think we saw when we began our fall trip that September is still even busy, but October is a little less, but it's still busy as well. So maybe in some of these really high traffic areas we go December or January. Yes, it'll be colder, but gosh, we both used to skis. What's the difference? You just dressed for the environment.

Jim Santos: 30:18

Yeah, that was quite a while ago. I think if I went skiing now it's been most of my time trying to get back up the first time I fell.

Rita Santos: 30:24

Yeah, and I'd probably break both my legs. So no, I don't want to go skiing ever again in my lifetime.

Jim Santos: 30:31

Is there a place that we've been before that you would like to get back to spend a little more time?

Rita Santos: 30:37

You know, we really just kind of brushed over Buenos Aires and it was such a magnificent city. I think I'd like to spend at least a month there.

Jim Santos: 30:48

Yeah, definitely, that's on my list as well. How about Italy? We were in Italy three weeks, but I still feel like we didn't really see enough of it.

Rita Santos: 30:58

Well, we never got to Milan, that area at all, and I wanted you to see Siena because I had seen it. It was one of my favorite cities of my lifetime. So, yeah, I think that that would be an interesting trip too. Just if we're close, let's do it.

Jim Santos: 31:19

Yeah, there's definitely plenty out there that we can see and do some familiar places we might like to get back to and some new places that we haven't been before, and that's probably a lot of the excitement about this.

Rita Santos: 31:31

Right, and neither one of us have been to Spain or Portugal, so that's going to be exciting too. We've never done that, and actually, since our granddaughter, kate, is going to Denmark, do that area, we have not seen that either. We've got so much to see and do, and just it's great to be running out the clock with an adventure rather than sitting at home knitting.

Jim Santos: 32:02

Yeah, now we're thinking about doing this for at least two years, maybe three for into it, maybe a little bit longer.

Rita Santos: 32:10

Right.

Jim Santos: 32:10

But after three years I'll be 69 or 70, you'll be 76 or so, almost old enough to run for president.

Rita Santos: 32:19

Yeah, ooh.

Jim Santos: 32:21

That's a thought, yeah, so do you feel like there's any kind of like a time limit or a real push for us to get started on this and get out there moving?

Rita Santos: 32:30

You know, I kind of my parents lived to be in their nineties. I'm kind of looking back at their life. They quit traveling around 85, 87. I think we probably won't be doing the traveling that we are intending to for the next two or three years, but I think that we'll still be on the move. By the time I'm, you know, 76, 78, I want to permit home. I think you will too. We won't be doing maybe such an intense, you know, expedition like we're doing now, but I think we'll still be on the move.

Jim Santos: 33:11

There'll always be someplace to go.

Rita Santos: 33:13

Yes.

Jim Santos: 33:14

All right. Well, that was Rita. Everybody, thank you for joining me on this, and we'll try to get you in with our other interviews now that we've worked out a way to do it.

Rita Santos: 33:23

All right, sounds good. Bye everyone, all right.

Jim Santos: 33:35

Well, that's our origin story. Like and follow the podcast, leave a review, share on social media, pledge your firstborn, whatever it takes, and you can find out along with us how it all works out. You can find my blog and other information at JimSantosBooks. com. That's J-I-M-S-A-N-T-O-S-B-O-O-K-S dot com, and my Amazon author page is at JimSantos. net. I'd love to hear from you as well, so if you have questions, comments or would like to appear on the show to tell us your origin story, just email me at Jim@ JimSantosBooks. com. So until next time, this is Jim Santos for Travels with Jim and Rita. Reminding you, we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us.