Welcome to The Backpacking Housewife Dotcom!

Hi, I’m Janice! I’m an ex-housewife, an empty-nester, a world traveller and travel writer, who loves to discuss dreamy destinations all around the world and, in particular, the pros and cons of midlife and senior travel and about making the most of opportunities to travel in retirement.

When my backpacking husband and I were in our mid-50’s, we sold our house, our business, our cars, our furniture and everything – once our sons had finished their education and left home to make their own way in the world – and we set off to travel around the world on the adventure of a lifetime.

Sixty-five countries and over ten years later – I have so many world travel experiences and dreamy destinations to share as well as lots of personal travel stories, in-depth destination guides, helpful travel planning information, real resources and tried and tested midlife travel tips for ageless travel adventures.

Of course, you might not need or want to go to the extreme of selling all your belongings to fund your travels. You might simply want to incorporate more travel into your life. Whether it’s a weekend away on a city break, a well-deserved holiday, a pilgrimage trek, or a meticulously planned grown up gap year, I certainly have the travel experience to offer you expert destination inspiration, planning suggestions, and lots of helpful tips and advice!

Perhaps you have an opportunity to work remotely now or take a work sabbatical or an early retirement?

Are you now fully retired and looking longingly at your travel bucket list and all you want to achieve sooner rather than later?

“For the past ten fabulously nomadic years, we’ve taken planes, trains, boats, buses and tuk-tuks, to make our way across sixty-five countries and continents and oceans to end up wherever we happened to find ourselves next. We’ve lived in hotels and motels and hostels and homestays, city apartments and huts on beaches, and we didn’t ever want our halcyon days of travelling to end.”

So, if you love travel as much as I do and you’re thinking of taking some time out to realise your midlife travel dreams, or if you’re planning to travel more in your retirement years – you are in the right place – this is absolutely the website for you!

If you’ve read my recent post Heartbroken you’ll know that I’m grieving the loss of my darling backpacking husband.

It pains me to share with you that my love, my wonderful, kind, generous, adventurous, and beloved backpacking husband of 41+ years – my soul mate and father to our three amazing boys and our three beautiful grandchildren – has passed away.

James (also known to many as Trav) died in my arms during the early hours of 6th March 2025. To our shock, with just one minor niggling medical concern apparent, he was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer early last year in 2024. He decided he wanted to keep this news within our family circle while he determinedly went through palliative chemo treatment.

Family have been so loving and amazingly supportive over what has been a year of extreme highs and terrible lows. We all love him dearly and I know everyone he met him also loved him. The messages of love and condolences I’ve received have been heart warming but as you might imagine I will never get over losing him – the love of my life.

Right now, I’m taking great comfort from all my fabulous memories and the fact we had no regrets.

We’d spent the ten years before James’s diagnosis travelling the world and living our dreams. The reality is that if we hadn’t taken that path and instead waited for the security of a pension at the age of sixty-five or longer. Well, James would have died before he could retire.

So, I want to tell you a really important message that I feel strongly about sharing – it’s about not putting off living the life of your dreams. If you’ve started to suspect that your life wasn’t meant to be lived in one place all the time and you’d like to start travelling more, then why wait?

Why not start making your own ‘One Day’ into ‘Day One’.

“I promised my darling husband that – when I was ready – I’d go on and have more adventures as a solo traveller and carry him with me in my heart. During previous travels, I’ve met many wonderful and confident and inspiring solo travellers, which gives me confidence. But I realise I’ll need to learn new skills to travel independently and safely as a woman alone.”

In the meantime, I’d love your support during this time and would appreciate you sticking with me, as I continue to write about all the travel adventures I’ve still yet to tell you about here and, before long, I’m sure I’ll have new ones to share too.

And, if you are a woman in your midlife or older and you’d like to learn from scratch how to travel solo and with confidence, then maybe here on this website we can learn these new skills together and simultaneously?

If you’d like to receive my monthly newsletters straight into your inbox, please do to consider subscribing to my mailing list. I promise I’ll never spam you. There’s a pop up link in this post and in the sidebar.

THE BACKPACKING HOUSEWIFE BOOKS

As well as being a travelling ex-housewife – I’m also a writer – and while we’ve been travelling I’ve managed to achieve my dream of being published by a top publishing house. I signed a book deal with HarperCollins to write my series of The Backpacking Housewife novels. Browse my books on my Books Page or click the links below to see my book list on Amazon.

Travel with me for midlife destination inspiration and ageless travel adventures!

On The Backpacking Housewife Dotcom!

Let’s connect on social media

I love social media so you can always find me on Facebook and on Twitter and Threads. I’m getting to grips with Instagram and Pinterest and YouTube too. So if one or more of these is your thing then please do connect with me.

I’d love to hear from you anytime so feel free to leave me a comment or a message at the end of a post or a note on social media or simply use the Contact Me button at the very top of the site.

I’ll reply just as soon as I can from here or there or from wherever I am in the world!

Janice xx