Extended Getaway Travel

Your vacation shouldn’t leave you more tired than your job. We dig into why so many trips feel rushed even when you “did everything right,” and the answer isn’t hustling harder or planning tighter. It’s choosing a different travel style. We call it the Extended Getaway: a three to six week trip designed to be realistic, affordable, and actually restorative.

We walk through the tradeoffs that make short vacations stressful: losing days to airports and check-ins, living out of a suitcase, and trying to cram too many destinations into a tiny window. We also share why we’re cautious about packaged tours, including a story where a simple day trip turned into hours of waiting and barely any time in the place we came to see. From there, we shift to what works better: fewer bases, more flexibility, and a rhythm that leaves room for culture instead of just landmarks.

To make it concrete, we tell the story of our first extended getaway in Italy, from renting an apartment in Florence to the kind of unplanned night in Venice you never could have scheduled. Then we break down a month in Panama City, Panama with real budget travel numbers: a condo with a kitchen, laundry, and a view for under $1,200, cheap rideshares, local mercados, and an average spend of about $100 a day for everything. Along the way we share practical long vacation planning tips like “zero days,” packing light, and building in adjustment time so the trip feels livable.

Subscribe for more travel style guidance, share this with a friend who always overpacks the itinerary, and if the extended getaway sounds like your kind of slow travel, leave us a review and tell us where you’d spend your first three to six weeks.

And if you want to go deeper, you can check out my book, "Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style", where I walk through all of this in more detail. You can search for it on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Audiobook, or just use the link on our podcast page. If you have any questions, a topic you would like discussed, or would like to be on our show, email us at jim@jimsantosbooks.com.

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Transcript

Why Trips Feel Rushed

Jim 0:00

If your trips always feel rushed, there's a reason, and it's probably not what you think. Welcome to Wherever We May Roam, the new phase of travel to Jim and Rita. This podcast is about discovering your own travel style to explore the world. I'm Jim Santos, and along with my wife Rita, we spend more than 16 years traveling. Sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for a few months, and sometimes a whole lot longer. And what we've learned is this: there's no right or wrong way to travel. Some people take extended getaways, some roam part-time, some work from the road, and some make travel a full-time lifestyle. This podcast is about helping you figure out what works for you and how to make it happen in the real world. So whether you're planning your next trip or thinking about something bigger, we're glad you're here. Let's get started. Hello everybody, and welcome to our podcast, Wherever We May Roam, Travels with Jim and Rita. In our last episode, we introduced you to the fact that we have a new book out now, coincidentally titled Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style. And in the last episode, we gave you a general overall view. We talked a little bit about the reasons why we wanted to put out a book like this and some of the details. In the course of preparing to write that book, we realized there are basically four styles of travel when it comes to planning longer trips. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about the first one of those, and that's something that we call the extended getaway. Now, when you think about a vacation getaway, I think, Rita, most people think about like a week or two weeks.

Rita 1:41

Right.

Jim 1:41

But if you approach it the right way, you can stretch that to three, four, even as many as six weeks without busting your budget. A lot of people just kind of wait for that vacation, they're really looking forward to it, and they try to cram as much into it as they can in the time of their vacation. And there's probably a better way to go about that. How many times do you hear somebody come back from a vacation at work and say that they're exhausted?

Rita 2:04

Right. Now they need time to rest.

Jim 2:07

Right, glad to get back to work where I can relax.

Rita 2:09

Right.

Jim 2:09

Yeah, the problem with shorter stays also is that you generally waste the first few days checking in and adjusting to maybe a time zone change or something.

Rita 2:17

Right. And you spend the first day just traveling.

Jim 2:20

Yeah, and then the last days you're packing up and getting ready to leave and worrying about catching your flight and what you have to do when you get home and things like that.

What An Extended Getaway Is

Rita 2:26

Right. So you actually lose two days of that week of travel.

Jim 2:30

Right. And before you know it, the trip's over.

Rita 2:32

Right.

Jim 2:34

Yeah, now the extended getaway, the idea is to spend a longer time on your vacation. And I know that's easier to say when you're retired like us. But even if you're working, many Americans get at least four weeks' vacation time over the year. And believe it or not, spending one month on vacation can actually be more economical than taking two two-week stays. Less time and money spent getting back and forth, and more time spent enjoying yourself and relaxing. So the question becomes, how do you turn a getaway into something that actually feels meaningful? And how can I make a longer stay more economical? So the extended getaway traveler is someone working within real-world limits. Their job, their schedules, their responsibilities.

Rita 3:14

Some people don't want to leave their home for an extended period of time, but Yeah, even for retirees, though, that can be a problem.

Jim 3:21

But you also may have other family responsibilities too, so you feel like you can't be away for too long. But that doesn't mean you can't travel well. It just means you have to be a bit more intentional about it.

Rita 3:31

Right. Yeah, you got to decide how you want to spend your time and how much uh you really want to abuse your body to do it.

Jim 3:39

Right. So you don't want to necessarily put too many destinations into a short period of time.

Rita 3:44

Right.

Jim 3:45

Yeah, you end up spending a lot of time moving around from place to place, packing and repacking, and not really having time to enjoy yourself or even experience the place that you're in.

Rita 3:54

Yeah, that's right. I mean, you you it's that two-day thing, the first day you spend traveling, the last day you spend traveling.

Jim 4:02

And then there's a trap of falling into tours. I know I know a lot of people really enjoy tours, but we've not had great success with them.

Rita 4:08

No.

Jim 4:08

Remember a week we spent going to San Francisco. We s took a day to take a tour of the Mirror Woods.

Rita 4:14

Right.

Jim 4:15

And the first part of that first hour and a half or so, I was crammed into the corner of a back seat of a van while I went around from hotel to hotel picking up people.

Rita 4:24

Right.

Jim 4:24

And the tour guide spent, you know, a lot of time talking to us, talking about himself a lot.

Rita 4:29

Oh, yeah. It was 45 minutes of talking about his previous life when he lived in Germany. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jim 4:35

Yeah, he actually pulled over to the side of the road too before he got to the woods to tell us about the woods that we wanted to go see, except he was sitting there telling us about it.

Rita 4:42

Aaron Ross Powell Meanwhile, the time that was allotted for the tour was ticking off.

Jim 4:47

Yeah, so we thought we'd spend the day going to visit Muir Woods and then Sausalito. And I think we ended up having about an hour and a half, hour and fifteen minutes at the woods.

Rita 4:56

Right. And so at Sausalito, we dumped him.

Jim 5:00

Yeah, we decided we were done with the tour.

Rita 5:02

Yeah, we'll take a boat back to San Francisco. Thank you very much.

Jim 5:05

Yeah, we've arranged for transportation in other countries. I think we can handle catching the ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco by ourselves.

Rita 5:12

Right.

Jim 5:13

The other thing when you only have a a week or even two weeks of travel, it's really not enough time to settle in. You get that feeling that you're just living out of a suitcase, and that's not a great way to relax.

Rita 5:24

Yeah, you really don't have time to just sample the culture. You're just going from site to site, and yeah, it's not very leisurely.

Jim 5:33

Yeah, and we've done that. I mean, we've done these trips where you you try to see everything, and really those are some of the least enjoyable trips.

When Tours Waste Your Day

Rita 5:40

They are. Even when we're doing that type of trip, we usually just do one event a day so that we can detour and see what see what life there is all about.

unknown 5:53

Right.

Jim 5:53

Now, Rita, you mentioned as we were preparing to start recording here our our first really extended getaway that we ever did together was taking a trip to Italy.

Rita 6:01

Right.

Jim 6:02

And we originally did that because your brother was planning one of those overplanned trips around some like fourteen cities in twelve days.

Rita 6:10

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. And and then that's a time frame it was. I think it was about 12 days.

Jim 6:15

Yeah, and it was expensive. It was like$10,000 per couple.

Rita 6:18

And we ended up doing a 21-day trip for less money.

Jim 6:24

Instead of trying to cram 14 different destinations into uh 12 days, we expanded our time there to about three weeks, and we spent time in eight different locations altogether. Yeah, we flew into Rome, but we immediately took a flight from there to Florence.

Rita 6:39

Yes.

Jim 6:39

Yeah, we had a nice little apartment in Florence. This was before Airbnb. We actually found it through Craigslist. And we'll get into some of the ways to find accommodations too. But staying in apartments or homes rather than hotels really helps out a lot.

Rita 6:52

And it was a nice two-bedroom apartment right in in downtown historic center the center of Florence.

Jim 7:03

We were in an actual neighborhood, too.

Rita 7:05

Right. That's what I meant. Yeah.

Jim 7:07

There was a little coffee shop and uh pâtisserie and the big market. Yeah, the market wasn't too far away from the cloud.

Rita 7:14

Historical market.

Jim 7:15

Yeah, so it was really nice. You felt like you were actually living in Italy.

Rita 7:18

Right.

Jim 7:19

Now while we were in Florence, we rented a car for a day and took a trip to Pisa and stopped at Lucca on our way back.

Rita 7:26

Right.

Jim 7:27

But we also took a train to spend a weekend in Venice.

Rita 7:30

Yeah.

Jim 7:30

We had a great time there. Really in Venice, this is one of the things that can happen when you're doing the extended getaway rather than, you know, a tightly scheduled vacation.

Rita 7:40

Right.

Jim 7:41

Uh we were just walking around the streets, it was getting late, we were hungry. We saw a sign that uh obviously said that it was a restaurant.

Rita 7:48

And it was uh like a boat boutique hotel.

Jim 7:51

Yeah, kind of off the beaten path too. And when we went in, we were a little hesitant because there were no tourists there, there was just a bunch of adults having some kind of boisterous party, uh, which turned out to be a birthday party for a three-year-old.

Rita 8:04

Right.

Jim 8:04

Yeah. Uh I think there was one other couple too there in there too, a young couple.

Rita 8:09

Right.

Jim 8:09

But it was definitely not a tourist location.

Rita 8:12

Oh no.

Jim 8:12

No. And when our our waiter came over, who we later found out was the owner, we asked for menus and he just looked at us and said, Do you trust me?

Rita 8:21

Yeah, right.

Jim 8:23

Well, I don't know. So he asked us, you know, peche or carne, do you want fish or meat? We said meat, and he went in the kitchen and came back with a bottle of wine, and after that it was course after course of this wonderful food set on the table, sort of family style. Lots of bottles of wine. There was grappa, there was lemon cello. We were just having a wonderful time. The the people having the party eventually also sent us over some birthday cake and some champagne.

Rita 8:48

Right. They joined we joined in their party, they joined in our laughter, and actually, I think we were there about three hours.

Jim 8:55

We were there a long time, three or four hours. And just totally unplanned, unscripted.

Rita 9:00

It was wonderful.

Jim 9:01

And you don't have time for that kind of thing if you're in one of those tightly regimented stays.

Rita 9:06

No, or in a tour.

Jim 9:08

Yeah. With the tour guides, you really don't have the time to go into the community and try to live in the community.

Rita 9:14

No.

Jim 9:15

We moved on from there to Positano on the Amafi coast. And again, we were in an apartment right on the beach, uh, had a full kitchen and a laundry that nobody could figure out because the controls were all in Italian.

Rita 9:28

But we had Uncle Tito down on the beach.

Italy For Three Weeks Done Right

Jim 9:30

That's true. And we went to a local grocery store there getting supplies, and we noticed that the proprietors' kids were having working on their math homework and were having some trouble. So we helped them out, and the parents thought we were just wonderful for that, and they took us all around the store, pointing out things that we should try and what to use to cook with the shrimp that we were going to pick up later. And as we were leaving, and I paid for the groceries, he gave me too much change back. He gave me like an extra ten euro of which is probably why we had to help the kids with their math.

Rita 9:59

Right.

Jim 10:00

Yeah. But you know, he apologized, he offered to carry our groceries back to the apartment for us. And then every time we came back to the place, it was like we were old friends or part of the family.

Rita 10:10

Yeah, we're grandparents now.

Jim 10:13

It was the same with the Uncle Tito you were mentioning. The little guy on the beach just had a little a little stand and a lawn chair and umbrella. But he had a cousin who did everything we needed.

Rita 10:23

Anything. He'd get your wash done, take you on tours to Capri. I think he got us to Pompeii, too.

Jim 10:31

He did. He said, I have a cousin who can drive you to Pompeii. Right. And wait for you and bring you back.

Rita 10:35

Right.

Jim 10:36

I have a cousin who can do the laundry since we couldn't get the washing machine to work.

Rita 10:40

I think they sabotaged the washing machines in Europe so that you have to use laundries.

Jim 10:46

Well, it was one of those that washes and drives.

Rita 10:48

I hate those sayings.

Jim 10:49

You couldn't figure it out completely. So I think your brother wasted about a day and a half trying to figure out rather than spend the uh five euro to get our laundry done.

Rita 10:59

We kept saying, Uncle Tito, help you out.

Jim 11:02

He has a cousin.

Rita 11:03

Yeah.

Jim 11:04

So that that kind of connecting to a community is just something you don't see when you're doing those high package tours and trying to cram into too much each day.

Rita 11:11

Right. Then we headed back to Rome.

Jim 11:15

Yeah, we only had a few days in Rome, but again, we didn't try to do too much each day.

Rita 11:20

I think we were there four or five days, wasn't it?

Jim 11:22

I think it was just three nights. Was it okay three nights.

Rita 11:25

Okay.

Jim 11:26

But we did see the Coliseum.

unknown 11:29

Right.

Jim 11:30

You and I had uh started walking around town, saw the Trevy Fountain and the Parthenon and the Forum.

Rita 11:34

Yeah. Oh, and we went to the Vatican, too.

Jim 11:38

Yeah, that's right. The only tour we had was uh Was the Vatican.

Rita 11:42

And we self-guided there as well. We wandered off.

Jim 11:49

That last day there while we were walking around, it actually started raining a little bit. But that was just an excuse to duck into the restaurants and have a snack or a drink or something.

Rita 11:59

Right.

Jim 12:00

Yeah, and one of the bars where they had just closed down the square, had a big market of some kind going on. Uh the bar was still open, but we were the only ones in it.

Rita 12:08

I think it was Plaza Novella.

Jim 12:10

It might have been, yeah, Plaza de Fiores.

Rita 12:12

Yeah, or yeah, or that one or that one. Yeah.

Jim 12:15

But they just loved the fact that all we wanted to order was rum and cokes.

Rita 12:18

Right. They loved us. We had spent uh three weeks drinking wine, which was lovely wine. We're not complaining, but we wanted to get back to our mainstay.

Jim 12:30

Yeah, what was funny was they brought us two six-ounce glasses of rum and two cans of coke.

Rita 12:35

And we're like, what?

Jim 12:37

Oh well, when in Rome.

Rita 12:39

Yeah, that's right.

Jim 12:40

Right. And you know, just interacting with them, communicating, even though we didn't share a lot of the language. They gave some free peanuts. They had a new bartender, a Vietnamese guy, they were breaking in, and we realized they were trying to teach them swear words in Italian.

Rita 12:55

Oh, right.

Jim 12:56

So we started teaching him swear words and other languages too.

Rita 12:59

Right.

Jim 13:00

Some even in American Sign Language.

Rita 13:01

Yeah, we tried to be helpful.

Jim 13:03

Yeah, so it was fun.

Rita 13:04

It was. We wouldn't have that kind of experience if we had been in a regimented uh tour group. When we were in Venice, right before we went into Doge's Palace, there was an older lady who was queuing up to get into a restroom, and her tour guide came and was grabbing her arm to get her out of the line and said, Oh no, we have to go back. You have to go back, we have to go to the ship. And we thought, oh, I don't think we'll ever do that. For the poor woman never made it into Doja's palace or the toilet.

Jim 13:41

Yeah, not the kind of travel style we wanted.

Rita 13:43

No.

Jim 13:44

But that was really our first experience at the kind of extended getaway that we're talking about here.

Rita 13:48

Right.

Panama City For Less Than Hotels

Jim 13:49

Another good example for making this economical is the month we spent in Panama City, Panama.

Rita 13:54

Right.

Jim 13:56

Now we just touched on a little bit about the idea of staying in bed and breakfast instead of hotel rooms. Here we had a one-bedroom apartment with a well, it was the full kitchen, but it had a tiny stove. I think there's only two electric burners on it. It had a full-size refrigerator, though, and it had a washer and dryer.

Rita 14:13

Right.

Jim 14:14

And we were on the 21st floor, we had a beautiful panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean and Casco Viejo, the old town. So it's really a nice place. We were there for 28 days, and it cost us less than$1,200 to stay there. It was about I think it was$1,165 with all the fees.

Rita 14:30

Right. And it was so nice when you're doing extended stays like that, if your condo has a w at least a washer and a drying rack, because you can do your laundry in the evening and it can dry overnight. Because we we travel with very little clothing. I mean, I I travel with a carry-on and a personal bag. Jim has a bigger bag because he takes all the electronics and and his own clothing.

Jim 15:02

Yeah, we we do have a chapter just on packing. We do uh in the book. But when you have the laundry in the room or at least laundry very accessible to you like that, you don't have to pack as much.

Rita 15:13

Right.

Jim 15:14

And you know, trust me when you get over 65, carrying as little as possible.

Rita 15:19

Yeah, we're not into it. Yes. We are not we travel light.

Jim 15:24

Yeah, so this was a really beautiful place, very comfortable, access to the old town and the mercados. There was one just a few blocks from us. It was just wonderful uh fresh fruits and vegetables and chicken and pork and beef. Uh big fish market right across the street from us. Uh the Ubers in Panama City were incredibly fast and incredibly cheap.

Rita 15:43

Oh yeah, you could call them while you're in the condo and couldn't get down the elevator faster than they would be at the door looking for you.

Jim 15:51

So we were really able to take our time exploring the city. We used those Ubers to get to a couple of big modern malls and to get out to the Miro Flores Loch on the Panama Canal, see a boat coming through. Went to the Panama Canal Museum in Old Town, and we even took a boat trip to a nearby island.

Rita 16:08

Right. And we did have some really, really nice dinners in Old Town as well while we were there. We didn't have all of them. We didn't have all our meals at home, but we didn't. Right.

Jim 16:18

Yeah. But all in all, we only spent an average of about a hundred dollars a day, and that's for everything. Yeah, that's all the lodging, the meals, getting around town, entertainment, and everything. And some pretty nice meals and some pretty nice upscale restaurants.

Rita 16:33

Right, right. And and the Ubers, well, really we walked everywhere unless we were doing a a night out or going to malls or something.

Jim 16:45

Or bringing back groceries.

Rita 16:46

And the Ubers were$2.50 to$3.

Jim 16:49

Right. If we went to one of the bigger stores to get things, heavy things like Coke and milk and Take a can take a Uber. A bunch of cans, yeah, you take an Uber back.

Rita 16:59

Right.

Jim 17:00

So anyway, with all of this, as I said, we spent less than$100 a day on average. And just out of curiosity, I looked on booking.com at hotels for around the same time. This is in the month of January. And they were running anywhere from$150 to$250 a day with no kitchen and no laundry. Now I'm sure you could find cheaper places, but I was trying to compare apples and apples. You know, we were on a high rise where we had a beautiful view of the water and we had the swimming pool. So I wanted to make sure it was at least similar to that.

Rita 17:31

So And we were right there on the Rambla. So we we could exercise every morning. You could walk to old town, new town. It was just very convenient.

Jim 17:44

And the the hotels were also very convenient and along the Rambla. But even if your room included breakfast, getting lunch and dinner for two at restaurants every day is gonna add anywhere from eighty to a hundred dollars a day to your expenses. So a typical two-week vacation there would have cost more than we spent in four weeks.

Rita 18:05

Exactly.

Jim 18:06

And that's if you just stayed at the hotel the whole time, if you didn't do any of the tourist spots.

Rita 18:10

Oh, that's true, yeah.

Planning A Relaxed 3–6 Weeks

Jim 18:11

Yeah. So our trip was not only economical, but it was much more relaxed. And since we had the whole month, if we felt like doing nothing but lounging by the pool all day, there's no sense that you're missing out and wasting your time. Exactly. There's no hurry to to go do anything. We had plenty of time to just relax and enjoy ourselves. It was a really comfortable vacation and we had a great time and we had learned some things by that point. It wasn't, you know, our first trip. You know, for one thing, we packed light, as we said. You'd probably would pack more for a two-week vacation than you would for a four-week vacation, especially if you're at a hotel and don't have access to laundry. But since we could do our laundry in the room, it really limits the number of outfits you have to bring, makes it a lot easier and a lot less stressful when you're doing the physical part of travel, which is often the worst part. The key in planning these, say, three to six week trips is focus on fewer locations. Like for instance, when we went to Mexico after we had sold our house and had the closing and we just needed to relax for a while. We took five weeks to go to Mexico. We spent one week, the first week in a timeshare right on the beach, just sitting on the balcony and looking at the water.

Rita 19:20

It was heavenly.

Jim 19:21

Yeah. Yeah, we took a ferry to Cozumel, but basically we were just relaxing and recovering from, you know, a stressful month of packing and cleaning and and getting out of our house.

Rita 19:31

And having great dinners down on the beach.

Jim 19:34

Yeah.

Rita 19:34

It was relaxing.

Jim 19:35

But then we went from there to a month in the mountain village of San Miguel de Allende.

Rita 19:40

Right.

Jim 19:40

So we had a five-week vacation, but we only stayed in two different places.

Rita 19:45

Yes.

Jim 19:47

The first one was just to blow off and relax a bit, and the second one was a chance to really get to enjoy the culture and the sights and sounds of a little mountain town, kind of away from the more touristy areas.

Rita 19:57

Yeah.

Jim 19:58

So also keep in mind simpler logistics. When you're planning these longer trips, try to keep it so that you're not constantly running around different places. That's going to add to the stress and it's going to add to the expense. Another important thing when you're planning these kind of trips is to build in some adjustment time. Even if you have three or four weeks or even five weeks, take a little bit of time when you first get there to just relax, look around, kind of get a feel for your surroundings.

Rita 20:25

Yeah, get yourself kind of set up. We call the day that you land and the day that you take off. Those are just zero days. That's all you get done.

Jim 20:33

Right. Those are just travel days.

Rita 20:35

Yes, travel days.

Jim 20:36

Trevor Burrus And it's important here and in all kinds of travel we're going to be discussing to have some flexibility and have some room for the unexpected.

Rita 20:43

Right.

Jim 20:44

You know, a rainy day isn't as bad when you have twenty-eight days to spend. You're only there seven days, and two of those are travel, and you get a rainy day. Well, now you've got three or four days for an actual vacation.

Rita 20:54

Yeah, that's true.

Jim 20:55

Aaron Ross Powell Leave room for things that you find that you weren't looking for. I mean we've ended up on many trips spending a lot of time in places that we didn't even know existed.

Rita 21:03

Trevor Burrus So the places we come upon we didn't even have in our itinerary and we ended up loving it the most.

Jim 21:11

Right. The Cathedral of St. Paul and St. Peter and Vilnius.

Rita 21:15

Oh, that was gorgeous.

Jim 21:17

We had no idea it existed.

Rita 21:18

No.

Jim 21:19

But it's this beautiful church that the inside was done mostly in what do you call it materials? Just white.

Rita 21:26

I think it was white m marble.

Jim 21:28

White marble and stucco and just almost uh really intricate carvings everywhere.

Rita 21:34

Absolutely all in white.

Jim 21:36

Yeah, all in white. Just really, really impressive. One of the most impressive cathedrals we've ever been in, and we had no idea it existed. Right. Yeah, so don't plan too much. You know, like I say, we plan maybe one major event each day and just see where things take us from there.

Rita 21:50

Right. Because there's so many other exciting things that you can do by just walking, just walking and going through neighborhoods or going through the commerce section. Yeah. And just enjoying it.

Jim 22:01

Yeah, so the goal to keep in mind here isn't to see more during this extended getaway, it's to experience more. Because we feel like we really saw what life in Panama City would be like. And we had time to find those mercados, explore the fish market, see where the locals were shopping and where they were eating.

Rita 22:18

Absolutely.

Jim 22:19

There was one uh local grocery store there, I think it was called El Machado, means uh the machete.

Rita 22:26

Right. Right.

Jim 22:27

It's like a big grocery store, a big super Walmart, had a little bit of everything.

Rita 22:31

Yeah, it did.

Jim 22:32

But you only saw local shopping there.

Rita 22:33

Right. And they they really noticed that we weren't local when we walked in.

Jim 22:38

Yeah, we get a lot of those looks.

Rita 22:39

Yeah, we do.

Jim 22:40

Yeah. I do think though that they appreciate that you're sharing their culture, enjoying their culture, and not just going to the tourist stocks.

Rita 22:47

I think so too. I think there would have been a lot of travelers who would have never gone into that neighborhood. But we were it's it's it's kind of connected to um the old town, and we were just out walking.

Jim 23:01

Yeah, and just kind of came across it.

Rita 23:03

Right.

Jim 23:04

You remember when we first moved to Ecuador, first moved to Salinas, we went to a little empanada shop called Pedro's Empanadas.

unknown 23:11

Right.

Jim 23:12

And when we walked in, we got this look like we were the first gringos they'd ever seen.

Rita 23:16

I think we were.

Jim 23:18

Yeah, like we were Columbus just coming off the boat. But by the second or third time we came there, they were greeting us like family.

Rita 23:25

Oh yeah. We were family.

Jim 23:27

Yeah, it was just a wonderful experience being able to connect with people and connect with a new culture like that.

Rita 23:31

Yeah, and I think it was like a living room with a kitchen connected to it. And I really think people live there because that was obviously their home. Yeah. When you use the communal bathrooms, there were toothbrushes in there.

Jim 23:45

Right. Yeah, you go to use the bathroom and there's a shower and toothbrushes.

Rita 23:49

Yeah.

Jim 23:49

Yeah.

Rita 23:50

And I said, I think the people live here.

Jim 23:53

Yeah, we've had the same experiences in the mercados too. We'll be the only gringos in the mercado.

Rita 23:58

Right.

Jim 23:58

But you know, we developed relationships with the people.

Rita 24:01

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Jim 24:02

Yeah. So the extended vacation is also a great way to see how you respond to spending longer times away from home.

Rita 24:08

It is.

Jim 24:09

It's a great way to get out of your comfort zone a bit without making a big commitment. You know, you're not moving there, you're spending more time than a week or two though. So it's not just a hit and run kind of thing. Now the other advantage to the extended getaway as compared to some of the other styles we'll be talking about is that it doesn't take a lot to prepare your home to be away for a month.

Rita 24:29

No, it really doesn't.

What’s Next And How To Connect

Jim 24:30

Yeah. I mean, usually it's not a very big deal. You can have your mail held at the post office. Uh if your HOA doesn't take care of the lawn, maybe you mow it just before you go and have someone do it once while you're gone. Yeah, something like that. And as you'll see, we have a whole chapter or two about some of the things involved for preparing your home for being away for longer and some of the logistics. But really, all in all, if you're considering longer stays somewhere, you're thinking about maybe a roaming lifestyle, the extended getaway is a great way of dipping your toe in the water before you dive in.

Rita 25:00

It is, I agree.

Jim 25:02

So I hope we've inspired you to think about taking longer trips or maybe making them at least more memorable, which is exactly what we break down and wherever we may roam, finding your travel style. So thanks for joining us, and next time we'll take a look at the next step, part-time roaming, where you maintain a home base but spend as much as three or even nine months on the road. Until next time, remember we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us. If you've been thinking about traveling longer or just traveling better, we hope this episode gave you a few more ideas. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to explore the world. Only the way that works for you. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow the podcast, and if you have a moment, leave a quick review. It really helps more people find us. And if you want to go deeper, you can check out my book, Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style, where I walk through all of this in more detail. You can search for it on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Audiobook, or just use the link on our podcast page. If you have any questions, a topic you would like discussed, or would like to be on our show, email us at Jim at jimsantosbooks.com. Thanks for listening, and as always, safe travels wherever you may roam.