Hi, we’re Gary and Sally, the Timeless Wanderers.
We retired in 2022 to long-term travel and follow our passion of Tuscany and skiing in Europe. We left Australia in October after spending over 30 years in hospitality and devoting our time to our children. It was now time to do something we always dreamed about, moving to Europe when we retired, a place we have been coming to since the 80’s. The last 20 years we have been coming here on our annual ski trip bringing the children sometimes and other times just the 2 of us.
We left for Europe for a few months travelling to Scandinavia and skiing in Austria, then went to our favourite place Lucca in Tuscany, a walled renaissance city. We now call it our happy place, the longer we stayed in Lucca the more we realised this is where we are meant to be. We started looking at places to live and realised how cheap it was to buy and live in Italy compared to Australia.
After discussing this with the family and realising how happy they were for us. We decided this was our next chapter in our life. We already had one of our sons living in Geneva, working for the UN as a human rights lawyer and only 6 hours away by car.
The more we thought about it, the more excited we became, realising that this was possible for us. We returned home and started selling everything that wasn’t tied down. Our house and cars sold quickly; we started to panic the dream was happening. We rented a storage shed to keep all our valued belongings, until we find our new home in Lucca. With nowhere to live, we left a couple of months earlier than we planned.
With no long term visa for Italy at this stage, we decided to go to UK where Australians can stay for 6 months without a visa. We ended up in a beautiful Cornish seaside town called St Ives. We spent a month in an AirBnB and absolutely loved it.
Unfortunately, our next AirBnB cancelled on us, which seems to happen a lot. We were homeless again, as we planned to spend a month in London before going to our son’s place for Christmas. This is where our life took another twist, we couldn’t find any accommodation in London in December that was reasonable and liveable. If you’ve stayed in London before, you will know what I am talking about. A friend asked us if we had thought about housesitting. We had heard of it but it had never appealed to us. However, we started looking into it and thought it could be fun, before joining Trusted House-Sitter’s for a very reasonable fee.
After a couple of days, we had our first house sit in Liverpool. This certainly changed our life; we were looking after someone’s house and dog for a week while the owner went on a holiday. This cost us nothing but looking after Amara their dog, who we became very attached to.
After Liverpool we had house sit after house sit across England in Essex, Horley and London. We loved it, meeting new people and staying in beautiful areas and lovely homes. Some of our sits have already booked us for future sits. We realized that people want mature retired people who they can trust with their homes and loved ones. Being from Australia made it even better, as everyone from England seemed to have a son, daughter, or family living in Australia, or even had been to Australia themselves.
After a family Xmas in Geneva with the whole family and a week skiing in the French Alps, it was time to get to Lucca to find our dream property. After viewing many properties, we found the perfect property for us, a 3-bedroom with 2 bathrooms, a lounge, fireplace, and dining room. It needed some renovations though – a new kitchen and two new bathrooms, but that would all be part of the experience of moving to Lucca.
Buying a property in Italy is a lot easier than we thought, l think the hardest thing was opening a bank account in Italy. Our realtor was fantastic and helped us overcome any obstacles we had.
It was soon time for us to leave as our Schengen time was almost up (Australians can only spend 90 days in the schengen at a time).
Our plans have changed a lot over the last months but that’s the beauty of traveling. We decided we didn’t want to settle down in one place, we instead wanted to keep traveling and use Lucca as a home base. We will split our time doing the Schengen shuffle – 3 months in and 3 months out, time in the UK house sitting and traveling to budget destinations.
If you have read this far, we thank you and look forward to sharing our future adventures and helping to inspire your dreams.
We would love to hear from you. If you have a question or comment, please send us a message. Thank you for joining us on our journey.
