Pamela and Marc retired in 2023, sold their house in San Francisco, and set off to travel full time. Two and a half years and 48 countries later, the nomadic couple have no plans to stop.
Their approach is deliberately slow – a month or more in one place, renting an apartment, doing the grocery shopping, learning the bus routes – so that a destination has time to become, briefly, home. They’ve taken about thirty VoiceMap tours in 15 countries around the world.
This interview is part of our new How We Travel series, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.
What do you always pack that other people find strange?
Pamela: This is Oompa Loompa.
She holds up a stuffed toy.
He’s a character from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and we use him as a bit of a metaphor. In the movie, the girl who wants an Oompa Loompa essentially wants the thing she can’t possess.
Before we started travelling, I’d sometimes come up with crazy ideas, like “we should get a boat,” and Marc would say in a cautionary kind of voice, “Oh… ‘I want an Oompa Loompa!’”
Then we found this stuffed Oompa Loompa in New Zealand, and he’s been with us ever since. It’s a reminder that the impossible can be possible – which is basically the lifestyle we’re living.
Tell us about one of your most memorable trips.
Pamela: Japan, easily. We spent three months there – long enough that it stopped feeling like a holiday and started feeling like life. That meant dealing with the language barrier and different customs, which is exactly what made it stick with us. These days we’re less interested in ticking off countries and more interested in finding a local café or a park we like.
How does travel enrich your life?
Marc: Every place I travel to, I end up finding people who believe it’s the best place in the world to live – and I want to understand why. It’s never the top-10 list on YouTube; it’s always about the community, the lifestyle, the quality of life…
Pamela: We look for opportunities to talk to people and ask what they love about York, Tokyo, or Sydney. Since we’re cooking wherever we are, we often ask where to find places like a butcher or a market too.
What does travel give you, Pamela?
Pamela: Since we’ve been in Europe, we’ve liked the idea of learning history so the world gets put together in pieces. We’re both lifelong learners. Being American, our own history classes were short by comparison, and now we’re learning European history from the beginning. We were in Rome and saw Hadrian’s mausoleum, then later in England saw Hadrian’s Wall, and thought, “Ah, that guy goes with that place.”
Is there somewhere you’ve felt drawn to return to?
Marc: For me it’s York – the only city in the world I’ve been back to more than once. I was fascinated by the city walls and the Minster. What impressed me most is that it’s still an active church and congregation, not just a tourist attraction.
Do you often meet up with other travellers or retired nomads, and how does that shape the experience?
Pamela: Yes, we look at different ways to build community around ourselves. Most of our relationships now are with fellow travellers. We belong to a couple of Facebook groups for nomad travellers – our favorite is called Go With Less.
Marc also uses a group called Time Left, which meets for dinner around the world on Wednesday nights. That’s one of the things we do separately, because otherwise we’re together 24 hours a day.
How much do you plan in advance?
Pamela: We tend to take ‘repositioning cruises’ when we’re crossing one of the big oceans, and those get planned a year or two in advance. We generally spend 6-8 hours a week finding cruises and the right Airbnbs in the right areas, and we try to lock in housing at least three months ahead.
How do you decide where to go next?
Pamela: We rarely rent a car, so great public transit is a big factor in choosing where to go next. We look for places with some interesting history or architecture, and somewhere we could reasonably live like a local for a month.
It might be from something we read, or a tip from another traveller, or something that made us curious about a city. Some of our best trips have been to places we barely knew anything about.
What do you like about taking VoiceMap tours when you travel?
Marc: We stayed a month in Munich and a month in Berlin, and took trains to different places for day trips or overnight stays. In Augsburg, a very small town, there was a VoiceMap tour, and because we could get off the train at our own pace – on the day we wanted, in between rainstorms – using it on our own schedule worked brilliantly.
When it starts to rain, we duck into a café or shop, stop the tour, and wait it out; when it clears, we walk back out and continue. It’s incredibly flexible, and because it’s geolocated, we can go back to wherever we ducked for cover and pick up right where we left off.
Pamela: Rome was a great city for VoiceMap. Being part of a “herd” of people is never our favorite way of touring, and in Rome it would have been impossible to avoid. We purchased VoiceMap’s entire tour pack and did every single tour after the crowds went home. What we like is going at our own pace and not feeling rushed through a checklist of landmarks.
Are you travelling perpetually, or just living in lots of different places?
Pamela: I think the answer is both. We prefer to say this is the way we live, because people assume that travelling means the two or three-week vacation where you try to see everything and come home needing a nap!
“Life is travelling slowly” is basically our motto at this point. A lot of people we meet can’t imagine selling their house and going out into the world. For us, home means Marc and Pam, wherever we are.
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This interview is part of VoiceMap’s How We Travel series. If you have an interesting perspective on travel to share, send a message to claire at voicemap.me.