We’re Army Veterans Who Retired and Sold Our Home to Travel the World Full-time—Here’s What It’s Like

For Travel + Leisure’s column Traveling As, we’re talking to travelers about what it’s like to explore the world through their unique perspectives. We chatted with U.S. army veterans and married couple Michael and Beth Richardson. After they both retired as lieutenant colonels, they decided to give up their comfortable Florida lifestyle to travel the world full-time. Here’s their story…

Michael Richardson: I joined the army three weeks out of high school in Massachusetts, when I was 17 years old. We grew up pretty poor, so we didn’t travel. My first flight was when I joined the army. I started off enlisted, then I got my associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees, became an officer, and retired as a lieutenant colonel 32 years later. Now, I’ve been all over the United States, living in California, Hawaii, New York, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Alaska. I’ve also lived in Germany for seven and a half years. I’ve deployed to Iraq, Kuwait, Kosovo, and Bosnia. 

Beth Richardson: Growing up, my family went on trips to destinations like Disney World and Myrtle Beach. I was interested in languages and cultures, and so I was an exchange student in high school in Madrid my junior year. Then, in college, my major was Spanish with emphasis on Latin American studies, so I did another exchange in Ecuador. During college, I was able to travel on my own. I started in the U.S., and then ventured to the Caribbean, England, and a little bit of Europe.

I enlisted after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. A few years later, I was stationed in Korea. I got more adventurous and started traveling through Asia and Australia. Then, I went to officer candidate school and became a lieutenant in the Military Police Corps. I was stationed overseas in Panama, Germany, and then throughout the U.S. So I was in for 23 years.

Michael: Beth and I met in Kuwait in 2005, and while we were still dating, we were deployed to Iraq together in 2007. Then, she went home, which I was very glad about because it’s just one less thing to worry about. After I returned, we got married in November 2008. We lived in Germany together for three years, and then D.C., where we both retired as lieutenant colonels—me in 2013 from the Medical Service Corps and Beth in 2016 from the Military Police Corps. 

Afterward, I worked for the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project for eight years, where I was responsible for mental and brain health programming. Beth had also taught ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) at the University of Pittsburgh, during which she went to school on nights and weekends and got her registered nursing degree. She started her own nursing business doing patient advocacy for the elderly.

We traveled when we could. No matter where we went, Beth was always on her phone. With 80- and 90-year-olds, it doesn’t get better, and she’s conscientious and caring. We were in Costa Rica in summer 2022, and Beth says, “I think I’m going to sunset the business so that when we travel, I can be fully engaged.” 

We were thinking we’d travel four or five months of the year, but a few days later, we were sitting in our home in northeast Florida in Atlantic Beach outside of Jacksonville, and I said, “What if we sold our house and our stuff, and we’d be completely unencumbered, and then we can just go!”

She’s a lot more conservative than I am and we loved our house. But in August, we contacted a real estate agent just to see what was possible. By Sept. 15, it was sold. We didn’t expect it to go that quickly, if at all. 

The Richardson Family while skiing in Alaska.

Michael and Beth Richardson

I sent a note to our friends in the neighborhood and let them know we were selling all of our things, too. We went from a roughly 5,000-square-foot home to a 10-by-20-foot storage space. We kept our antiques and some things you just can’t replace. Our philosophy was, if it’s easily replaced, let’s get rid of it. We kept a lot of our clothes and sporting equipment for snorkeling, skiing, golfing, and tennis in Beth’s parents’ basement.

Soon, all we had was a mailing service, and our relatively homeless, jobless, traveling, vagabond life started in September 2022 without a lot of forethought. We had seen this food show on television about mole in Oaxaca, Mexico, so after first visiting our grandson, we spent almost a month in Mexico and Guatemala.

We’re planners. We’re older, so we don’t like surprises. We’re not just throwing on a backpack and saying, “OK, what are we going to do?”

Generally, we stay in Airbnbs and Vrbos. If we have one night, maybe two, near an airport or it’s a transition day, we might do a hotel. We like to get to know the area we’re staying in and the people. Beth speaks Spanish, so it’s a lot easier in Spanish-speaking countries. You build a relationship almost automatically.

Michael and Beth on a zodiac boat in the icy Arctic Ocean.

Michael and Beth Richardson

Beth: It’s hard when you always have to think what’s next. It gets daunting and tiresome, so sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and let someone else take care of what you’re going to eat next. 

Michael: So, we’ll throw in a cruise, usually an expedition-style one, to give us a break. We’ve been from the Arctic Circle all the way down to Ushuaia. We’re trying to go places that are a little tougher to reach because we’re still in relatively good health. Her parents are, too. Our grandson is still a toddler, and we also have a baby granddaughter now.

Before this, we traveled quite a bit too. But since we sold our house in September 2022, we’ve been to 50 different countries and 26 of them have been new for both of us. We’ve also been to all seven continents. When we go to a country we’ve been to before, we’ll go to a part we haven’t visited.

In Italy, we spent nine days in the summer in the Puglia region, sampling the wines and getting to know the food, people, and culture. Beth had never been to Sicily, so we spent a week traversing the area and the Amalfi Coast. We met some friends for a birthday party up in the Piedmont region. In France, we hadn’t been to the northern coast, so we spent time there. We’d been to England a number of times, but hadn’t been to the Cotswolds, so we’re seeing different parts of each country.

Last summer, we took an Atlas expedition cruise and circumnavigated the archipelago of Svalbard near the Arctic Circle. We saw polar bears—they were swimming. The excitement of seeing big, rare animals was amazing, but for us, we came to appreciate the subdued highlights almost as much.

Beth has a green arm, not a green thumb, so she’s really into plants and flowers. It was amazing seeing the resilient flowers and plants that grow in the Arctic on a whale bone that’s been there a couple hundred years. Then, we were in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest place on Earth and you see resilient plant life in flora and fauna. How they survive is just remarkable. When were in the Arctic, our guide stopped and said, “Just listen.” We heard the bubbles popping from the glacier ice—thousands of years trapped in the air pockets.

Beth: It sounded like Rice Krispies.

Michael and Beth with the gorillas in Rwanda and during a Malbec Harvest in Argentina.

Michael and Beth Richardson

Michael: My favorite is Africa because of how close you get to all the wildlife. We did 13 days of safari. We were there during the birthing season in November, so we saw giraffes, baboons, lions, and all these babies with umbilical cords still attached to them just hours old. Then, we saw a leopard with a fresh kill—a baby zebra—it was the whole circle of life right there. That was beautiful. It somehow got better when we saw the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. Rwanda was one of the cleanest countries we’ve ever visited. People were so gracious. The kids were all smiling, running, and skipping, and there was a real sense of community, especially given the tragic experiences that had occurred just 30 years ago. To me, it was the biggest surprise.

You see the connectedness of what’s going on across our world, and the impact of tourism. We appreciate understanding the whys and the hows of what’s going on in the world. We like to learn. We’re very curious travelers.

Beth: What’s also impressive is witnessing the things you’ve seen in pictures for years. For me, one was Mont Saint-Michel. I had intentions to go for years, and missed the opportunities. When we finally got to see it as we were driving up, it was special.

No matter how much you plan or read about a place, until you experience it, you don’t get a full appreciation of the food, the culture, the people that make it so remarkable.

Michael: The only thing I miss is a sense of community back home. We have great friends and love playing golf and tennis. Now, whenever we go back to Florida, it’s often fleeting because we’re going somewhere. But it’s well worth it for the upside of what we’re experiencing. Our plan is to do this for three years. It seems like a good amount of time.

Beth: We know this is only temporary. And perhaps the military has trained us in that a lot of people probably couldn’t uproot themselves and move on. The military has taught us this is only temporary.

Michael: As we travel, we also invite friends and family to join us. We do a lot of planning, so our friends know we’ve done the research. We had four friends with us in Africa. South America was the only place someone didn’t come with us.

Beth: Some people we meet along the way become family, whether it’s on a cruise or our guide in Romania, who brought us back to his house to meet his wife and daughter and have pizza and white wine. That type of experience is what we go back to. We won’t remember the church that was Dracula’s castle in Romania, but we’re going to remember Alex and Christine. 

Michael: We didn’t have any specific numbers in mind; we just wanted to visit new places. But on our way to Australia, we started counting and realized since we’ve started this world-traveling lifestyle, we’ve been on 90 flights on more than 21 airlines and seven cruises. We’ve scuba dived in seven countries, visited 51 wineries in 11 countries, and taken two polar plunges—one in the Arctic Ocean last summer and one in Antarctica this year. Through it all, Beth and I have only been apart 14 days. We’ve become so much closer.

Beth: We’ve become better friends, actually best friends. We’re both in this together. It’s like, the only other person who has a stake in this is my partner. We listen to each other, we’ve been able to push back on each other, and be more open.

Michael: What we’ve seen together is the connectedness of the world. There’s nothing that’s so isolated out there anymore. Even the plant life in the Arctic versus Atacama, the animals, the people—it’s all so connected, and it doesn’t take much to disrupt that. The more we travel, especially when we get to the more remote areas, it’s more obvious to me: We’re a lot more alike as people than we are different.