Cruise Through Retirement

We’ve enjoyed cruising together for over 30 years.

Living in California, it was only a three-hour drive to the ports in Long Beach, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, so a long-weekend cruise was our favorite (and usually most cost-effective) break from our busy life.  As our kids got older and Tim’s career enabled him to take longer vacations, we began branching out to longer cruises, other than to nearby Mexico, including Alaska, Bermuda, many ports in the Caribbean from various U.S. ports, and a two-week cruise out of Barbados. 

Most recently we’ve cruised 62 of the last 90 days, across the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea, and to see more remote ports we couldn’t easily see from land. 

Now that we have sold everything and travel full-time as nomads, time is no barrier.  We utilize repositioning or open-jaw cruises for transportation, and to explore areas that are more difficult to reach by other means.  Cruising for transportation is not only easier on the body than long-haul flights with dramatic time changes, but also a lot more fun and usually no more expensive. For example, if we had purchased airfare from Vancouver, Canada, to Sydney, Australia, and then paid for accommodation, food and entertainment for a month, it would have cost more than the price of a 31-day transpacific cruise that included all of those things and also took us to some wonderful, expensive to reach and visit destinations like Moorea, Tahiti and American Samoa.  From Australia, we cruised the islands of Papua New Guinea, difficult and expensive to access other than on a cruise—especially the privately-owned paradise known as Conflict Islands.

We have cruised on 5 different American cruise lines, with multiple ships on most of those. And have 4 more lines booked. Then we’ll do a big comparison!

Our website and YouTube channel—like our LIFE!—is focused on our full-time retirement lifestyle which includes lots of long-stays as well as shorter-stay travel on land.  We live for short periods of time around the world, tasting all it has to offer.  Cruising is just a part of that—we are not full-time cruisers and, in fact, don’t plan to step on another cruise ship for 10 months as of this writing, at which time we’ll sail 25 days for transport across the Pacific Ocean again.  But then we REALLY amp up the time at sea!

We have 121 days of cruising planned between Oct ‘24 and Mar ‘25 so be sure to subscribe to our mail list & our youtube channel and follow our social media so you don’t miss it! That’s almost 70% of those 6 months on a ship—will we love it or hate it? Follow along to see.

Cruising will always be part of our lifestyle and a passion, and lots friends and other nomads ask us questions about cruise strategies so we are sharing some thoughts, tips and tricks here.  We’ll also share links to some real cruise experts that we turn to for more details and inspiration. And we’ll be working hard at becoming greater experts ourselves.