Hi! We thought we would start our blog with a quick summary of the first 6 months of our year. If you’re only interested in our travels, you can skip this part!

You probably already know that we retired at the end of 2018 and had been planning to spend our first few years of retirement traveling down in South America. But before we could start traveling, we had to lighten our load a bit – – by selling our house and getting rid of a lot of useless junk! So from January until April, that’s what we did. We painted the inside of the entire house, ripped up carpet and got new flooring installed, replaced most of the light fixtures and on and on. We worked 6-8 hours a day 6 days a week. It felt like we would never get done! But it was worth it in the end because we sold the house in 3 days!

After we got the house sold, we went on a cross country road trip out to Seattle to see Ivan’s mom. She had valve replacement surgery while we were there and did amazingly well. We also visited lots of Ivan’s friends and family in Oregon and Washington State and had a really nice time.

We got home from our trip on June 7th and tied up all the loose ends we could think of (banking stuff, final bills, insurance issues, etc.) and got ready to hit the road. We finally took off for Lima, Peru on June 22!