HOME SWEET ANYWHERE

How Martin and her husband sold their house and became full-time international wayfarers.

The travel bug can bite at any moment, and it sank its teeth into the author and her husband, Tim, when they were in their mid-60s. Since then, they have recorded their travels on the author’s blog, homefreeadventures.com, always following their motto, “postpone nothing.” To jettison home and a lifetime of stuff can be a liberating and rejuvenating experience, and the Martins took to the road with an envious moxie and openness. Since they were not operating with a fat bank account to provide an easy cushion—they calculated their budget by including their Social Security checks—they were always on the prowl for bargains mixed with good locations and a modicum of cleanliness. Nearly every page has some crack piece of travel wisdom: the power of civility, patience and flexibility; the difference between knowing the facts about a place and knowing “those facts in a way that only being on the ground and experiencing them offers a person.” Martin is a plainspoken chronicler, eschewing pyrotechnics in her descriptive writing, and though obviously polite and cultured, she is also often frank and unvarnished in her estimation of things and people. She was not too jaded to pay attention to the serendipities of travel—a full moon rising over the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, for instance—nor too formal not to speak her mind: Argentinians are moody, temperamental and confused. The Martins were happy making a lonely trip to the Oracle of Apollo and catching the wind off the Cornwall coast, but they also liked to mix it up: “Seeing your first bar fight after age sixty-five is not an insignificant event.”

Though the dialogue has its wooden moments, this is, on the whole, an accessible, inspiring journey.