Welcome to The Backpacking Housewife Dotcom!

Hi, I’m Janice Horton. I’m also known as The Backpacking Housewife. I’m an ex-housewife, an empty-nester and a nomadic world-traveller with my backpacking husband after we decided to sell everything we owned to travel the world.

Ten years ago, 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.

My mission for this website and across all my social media channels is to provide you with 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!

So, if you love travel as much as I do or you are just curious about exploring the practicalities of long-term slow travel, why not consider subscribing to my mailing list? I promise I’ll never spam you. You’ll hopefully see the pop-up sign up box before you leave or there’s a link at the bottom of this post and in the sidebar.

I can promise you that it’s not too late to embrace your travel dreams!

tHE BACKPACKING HOUSEWIFE – Travel with me

Unlike us, of course, you might not need or want to go to the extreme of selling all your belongings to fund your travels.

You might have other ways to do it. Perhaps you have an opportunity to work remotely now or take a work sabbatical or early retirement? Maybe your perspective on life has shifted due to the recent pandemic and you’re looking longingly at your travel bucket list and all you want to achieve sooner rather than later and before something else gets in the way of you heading off into the world on the adventure of a lifetime?

Perhaps the kids have left home and you have an empty nest and like myself and my backpacking husband, you now find yourself with midlife wanderlust and more time and fewer responsibilities than before, so are looking to travel meaningfully and extensively in your Third Age and beyond?

If you’re planning a short trip, you might want to get house sitters in to care for your home and any beloved pets while you are away. If you’re thinking of an extended trip and you own your own home, then you might simply want to rent it out to help fund your travels, instead of selling up as we did.

What’s stopping you?

National Geographic says: Life Begins at 50. “Empty-nesters are inspired by their children’s gap years. Young-at-heart empty nesters are increasingly looking to travel. What’s more, they’re heading further afield and for longer, preferring exotica and adventure over slippers and comfort zones.” And goes onto say. “A lot has changed within a generation, and the empty nesters don’t see why they should miss out on what didn’t exist when they were younger.”

By 2030 the number of people in the world aged 60 years or over is projected to grow by 56%.

This means that there is a whole generation of older adults with more free time and access to capital in terms of money, education, skills, abilities, and better health profiles, will remain active, productive, and contributory for far longer than any other generation before them. This is great news!

Many more people are looking at using their empty-nest or retirement years to travel extensively!

So, if you’ve started to suspect that your life wasn’t meant to be lived in one place all of the time and you’d like to start travelling more – or even living a location free nomadic lifestyle – then this is absolutely the website for you!

“Over the past ten fabulous nomadic years, we’ve taken planes, trains, boats, buses and tuk-tuks, to make our way across sixty countries and all the continents and seas 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 don’t ever want our halcyon days of travelling to end.”

TRAVEL TO RETIRE: RETRAIN: VOLUNTEER

If you’re not quite ready to retire yet maybe you want to volunteer or work abroad? Maybe you want to retrain for a new career somewhere else in the world? The backpacking husband, who loves to scuba dive, worked to achieve his life-long dream of becoming a PADI IDC Staff Instructor over the first three years that we were travelling.

He trained as a Divemaster in the Caribbean and he did his Instructor Development Course in Thailand.

Now he volunteers on coral reef, conservation, and wreck salvage projects all over the world.

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 Backpacking Housewife novels. Have a browse at all my books on my Books Page or click the links below to see my book list on Amazon.

Are there any skills or vocations or hobbies or pastimes that you’ve always wanted to pursue?

Can travel help you to achieve them in the same way that it helped us?

What are your personal ambitions?

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. I’m getting to grips with Instagram and Pinterest and Tiktok 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 in the new future!

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Janice xx

THE BACKPACKING HOUSEWIFE USES AND RECOMMENDS BOOKING.COM