A road trip through south central Colorado was supposed to be a few weeks away from home. It turned into something longer, and eventually into a different way of living. That trip is the reason this site exists, and it is worth explaining how one stretch of highway led to years of slower, multigenerational travel, and now to a modest second income built from writing about it.
I started out as a backpacking hitchhiker for several years then a solo traveler to places like India and SE Asia. Then I started traveling to places like Canada and Mexico with a converted van. After two years traveling with the van, I traded it for a Converted Ford 1967 School Bus. All of this turned me into the retired digital nomad travel blogger that I am. Marriage and two sons did not change my life very much. The fact that, back then, children could fly for free with parents did help me a lot.
The Trip That Started Everything
The original plan was simple: drive through south central Colorado, see some mountains, come home. Instead, the pace of that drive, the towns that asked to be lingered in rather than rushed through, and the sense that there was no real reason to turn around on schedule changed the shape of the trip entirely. What began as a short getaway stretched into a longer route, eventually becoming a full year on the road from Santa Fe, New Mexico, through Colorado, and on to Ashland, Wisconsin.
That year taught a specific lesson: travel does not have to be fast to be full. A slower pace meant fewer destinations checked off a list, but it also meant real time in each place, and that trade turned out to be the one worth making. The Colorado stretch of that trip is covered in more detail elsewhere on this site, for anyone curious about the roads and towns that started all of this.
Why I Write for Seniors and Multigenerational Families, Not Just Backpackers
Most travel writing online is built around backpackers in their twenties, moving fast, sleeping cheap, and optimizing for the next border crossing. That is a fine way to travel, and I have done my share of it, but it is not the only way, and it is not the way most seniors or multigenerational families travel, or want to.
This site is written instead for people planning a trip with parents, adult children, and grandchildren in the same itinerary. It is written for retirees who have the time for long-term travel but also have joints that do not love a 14-hour flight in economy, and for families trying to figure out a destination that works for a toddler and a grandparent in the same week. Those are different planning problems than the ones backpacker blogs solve, and they deserve their own answers: which flights are easier on an aging back, which destinations have the infrastructure for three generations at once, and which visa rules actually matter for a longer stay rather than a two-week vacation.
What a Month on the Road Actually Looks Like for Us Now
A month of travel now looks less like a checklist and more like a rhythm. It typically means settling into one region rather than hopping between five, with enough time in each place to learn the good bakery, the reliable taxi driver, and the walk that does not require stairs. It means building in rest days on purpose, not as an afterthought, and choosing accommodations with enough space and quiet for everyone traveling together, not just the person who booked the trip.
It also means more research before departure than it used to, because travel at this pace and with this mix of ages rewards planning. Visa length matters more when a stay runs past the standard tourist window, which is covered in more detail in the piece on extending a stay. Flight comfort matters more for older travelers covering long distances, which is its own topic worth reading before booking anything transoceanic.
How This Website Became Part of Our Travel Income
It would not be honest to leave out the fact that this site itself has become part of how this travel gets funded. What started as a way to keep notes from that first long trip turned, over time, into a modest source of income through affiliate links and the occasional sponsorship from travel companies whose products and services get an honest mention here.
This is not a claim that writing about travel pays for itself overnight, or that every reader who starts a travel blog will see the same result. It is simply the honest picture: a travel blog, built consistently over time, can become a real if modest piece of a travel budget. For anyone who reads these posts and wonders whether their own travels could support a similar site, there is a dedicated resource on this site walking through the actual skills involved, from writing to affiliate basics to the tools digital nomads use to keep a blog running from wherever they happen to be.
The Kind of Stories and Destinations You Will Find Here
This site mixes two kinds of writing: practical guides and personal accounts. The guides cover the planning side of travel that seniors and multigenerational families actually need, things like comparing booking platforms, working out visa extensions, or finding destinations in Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, Canada, and the United States that genuinely work across three generations at once.
The personal accounts are different. They are backstories, the kind of smaller, stranger moments that do not fit neatly into a destination guide, like getting married in North Sumatra, breaking down in Arkansas, or tracking down the world’s oldest chocolate trees. Those pieces exist to give a fuller picture of what this kind of travel actually involves, beyond the logistics.
What I Hope You Take Away From Reading Along
The hope is straightforward: that readers planning travel with parents, grandparents, or grandchildren in the mix find something here that makes the planning easier and the trip itself better, whether that is a visa detail, a destination that works for everyone’s needs, or just the reassurance that slower travel at this stage of life is not a compromise. It is its own way of seeing the world, and often a better one.
We have slowed down a bit in our travels but I always make sure to book activities we have never experienced before and I always make sure to visit new places even when we are returning to cities several times.
If reading this makes you curious about turning your own travels into a blog and some income, visit Travel Blogger Skills For Digital Nomads to see where to start, or head to the welcome page to begin exploring the site. And remember to visit my many travel related articles on my site to see the many photos I have taken during my journey through time and space.