A PREFACE

 In which our intrepid explorers attempt to explain themselves

Most people who retire settle down. Shannon and I fully intend to do the same.

But first, we're going to do the exact opposite.

We've been talking about retirement for several years, now.  We've discussed and discarded several potential forms of retirement, but just kept circling back to retiring overseas.  Now, at this point I could bore the reader to tears with a longwinded, meandering personal story about how we came to the conclusion that retiring at 53 and heading overseas would be the right choice for us... but I won't.  It's not like this is a recipe blog or something.*

Instead, the nutshell version is this: We're going to have a steady (though largely fixed) income until we die.  We want to live well** on that money.  And where we live now (the Oregon coast) is kind of the opposite of somewhere one can can expect to live well on a fixed income for decades (unless that "fixed" number is significantly higher than our own).

We've been doing as much local/internet research as we can on possible retirement destinations, focusing on infrastructure, healthcare, climate, cost of living, and, of course, local gaming scenes.  But that only goes so far.  We are fully aware that much of the information we've found is incomplete, out of date, biased, and/or produced by people with something to sell.

Therefore, we've decided to check it all out for ourselves, in actual, real-life meatspace.

We're going to go very slowly around the world, starting this September, to personally examine the places on our (increasingly poorly named) "shortlist" of potential retirement destinations.  In the process, we're going to spend significant time in each; probably somewhere in the month-long range, so we can get at least a glimpse at what it's like to actually live in a place, not just vacation there.***

This blog, then, exists for three purposes:

1. So Shannon and I can read it back later and laugh as we reminisce about the time I got peed on by a binturong**** or something
2. So friends and family can keep up with wherever the hell we are and why we aren't returning their phone calls in a timely manner
3. To create yet another slanted, subjective record of what some places are like as our contribution to the canon.

In our case, we're not TikTok influencers or YouTube channelers or marketing flacks or anything like that.  None of our luggage or phones or shoes have been given to us by companies hoping we'll say something nice about their products, nor is anyone financially sponsoring us.*****  We're doing this on our own, so at least you can be assured that our worthless opinions on what's great and what's crap are our authentic worthless opinions on what's great and what's crap.

So the next couple of months are going to be taken up with all the logistics of planning, getting visas, booking travel, figuring out what the heck to do with all of our stuff, and the like. Stay tuned for all of that nonsense.

And please feel free to leave comments!******  I'm happy to answer what questions I can and it lets me know I'm not just screaming into the void for an audience of zero.*******

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* Little known fact: Federal law mandates that recipe blogs must include at least 2,500 words of irrelevant personal anecdotal content before it's legal to finally share how to make the thing you're talking about.  If you see a violation of this requirement, contact the FBI at once.  Remember, it is only through constant vigilance that we can all, working together, keep the Internet from becoming once again convenient and useful.

** Our definition(s) of "living well" are of course subjective and idiosyncratic -- perhaps we'll go into that in its own future post.  For me, it involves rather fewer alcoholic beverages and significantly more board games than perhaps the "average retiree" would seek.

*** I reckon "vacation goggles" last at least a couple of weeks, so I want to make sure that we're there long enough to get bored and/or annoyed, if that's what awaits us at a given location.

**** Google's AI tells me that binturong (also known as "bearcats" despite being neither bear nor cat) smell "exactly like hot, buttered popcorn".  This is too good to check, and so I am, therefore, going to immediately accept it as unquestionably true.  If I have the opportunity to smell a binturong in real life I will be sure to let you all know right away... or at least once fully discharged from the hospital after an ill-advised attempt to then taste one.

***** More's the pity.

****** Assuming, anyhow, that you're actually interested in the content and aren't just a rando spammer hawking your totally legit "h3rbal V1agra" or the like.

******* Or an audience of one, if you count the fact that I'm absolutely going to browbeat Shannon into reading every single one of these whether she really gets anything out of it or not.