ABOUT

Hi, Where Gary and Sally we are the Timeless Wanderers. We retired early to travel full time. We left Australia in October 2022, to travel. After spending over 30 years in hospitality and devoting our time to our children. It was now our time, our dream was always to move to Europe when we retired, we have been coming here 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 sold everything up in Australia the house, cars all our furniture and only kept a few things that were special to us.

Our business had changed a lot since COVID, we had a busy coffee shop in Brisbane CBD. Unfortunately, after COVID the whole CBD changed. People coming into the office for a 5-day week was never the same, it was over. Today it is more 3 days in the office and 2 work from home. The writing was on the wall for us to get out, we had many months of stress and sleepless nights.

In the end after discussion with the family. We decided not to renew our lease and to do something totally different.

We went to Europe for a few months travelling to Scandavia and skiing in Austria then went to our favourite place, Lucca places to live, and realised our cheap it was to buy and live in Tuscany for a couple of months. We now call it our happy place, the longer we stayed in Lucca the more we realised this is when 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 by car.

The more we thought about it that this possible for us. We returned home and started selling everything that wasn’t tied down. Our house and car sold quickly, that we started to panic the dream was happening. We rented a storage shed to keep all our belongings till we find our new home in Lucca. With nowhere to live, we left a couple of months earlier than we planned to.

With no 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 here in a air BNB. We absolutely loved the town.

Unfortunately, our next air BNB 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 sons place for XMAS. 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, you will know what I am talking about. A friend had asked if we thought about housesitting. We had heard of it but never appealed to us. We started looking into it and thought this could be fun. After joining the website Trusted House sitter 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 house and dog for a week while the owner went on a holiday. This cost us nothing but looking after Amara the dog, who we became very attached to. After Liverpool we had pet and house sits in Essex and Horley. We loved it meeting new people staying in beautiful areas and homes. Some of our sits have already booked us for future sits. We realised that people want mature retired people who they can trust their homes and loved ones with. Being from Australia made it even better, as everyone has a son or daughter or family living in Australia or been to Australia themselves. We are now fully booked for 4 months straight from the end of August till Christmas. I will talk more about house sitting in a future BLOG.