The year was 2009, and my wife said, “I’ll be back.”

I said, “Where are you going?”

She said, “I’m gonna get a passport.”

I said, “I want a passport too.”

Ten years passed by, and we didn’t travel anywhere.

So we renewed our passports again in 2019.

By the time 2019 came, we had already been empty nesters for seven years.

Nothing was stopping us from traveling.

We just never pulled the trigger.

We never pursued it.

We made the big decision to move to California, and I think hopping across the country prepared us to hop across the world.

There were some underlying things going on between getting those two passports.

My wife needed two new hips, and she got those.

Then I was diagnosed as legally blind in 2021.

That was a big shift for me.

Arie being born definitely affected me too.

There was something about just packing up and leaving at one time that felt different.

My wife started talking about traveling out of the country, and I said to myself:

“What’s stopping us now?”

Since we started talking about it, I knew two things were important.

My wife and I needed to be in agreement.

And if the Lord wills, then we will go.

I don’t know how complicated it needed to be.

If the Lord isn’t stopping us, and my wife and I are in agreement, then that’s a green light.

We just needed to figure out where we wanted to go, or at least where we wanted to start, and then map everything else out from there.

We talked about putting our stuff in storage.

But then we were like, why carry a bill?

Let’s just sell everything.

And that’s what we did.

We already live pretty minimalistic.

I honestly think that’s the first step—to learn to live on less than what you need.

Also, I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2011, and I know how to make money online.

So what made me take that risk?

It didn’t seem like a risk to me.

It seemed more like a decision.

I think the main thing I need to get through my head is that we’re going somewhere we’ve never been.

It’s a different culture.

They do things differently.

So don’t go in there thinking you know everything.

Go in there open.

Be willing to learn.

But then there’s a pessimistic part of me that starts thinking:

“What can go wrong?”

And when I started thinking about that, I realized something.

It can go wrong in America, and it can go wrong in a different country.

But what happens when things go wrong?

We find a way to solve it.

That’s what we’ve always done.

We realized we wanted new memories.

We wanted new experiences.

And that’s why we sold everything and moved to another country.