You Can Travel For Months Without Quitting Your Life

You don’t have to blow up your life to travel longer you just have to travel differently. We’re Jim and Rita, and we’ve learned that the real breakthrough isn’t a bigger bucket list. It’s choosing a travel style that fits your real-world responsibilities while still giving you the time to go deeper than a quick getaway.

We dig into the “part-time roamer” lifestyle: extended travel for one to three months at a time while keeping a home base. That single choice changes your pace, your budget, and your mindset. Instead of rushing from attraction to attraction, you start living like a temporary resident finding the local market, figuring out public transportation, and building simple routines that make a new place feel familiar. We share what that looked like for us across long stays in Panama and Mexico, including why some locations felt like a perfect cultural fit and why others didn’t.

You’ll also hear the less-glamorous side of long-term travel planning: finding the right accommodations, dealing with heat waves and broken air conditioners, and handling the logistics back home like car storage, home temperature, lawn care, and the surprisingly tricky mail question. We compare slow travel with a version of fast travel that still feels relaxed, and explain why trains and buses often beat airports for stress, cost, and actually seeing the country.

We close with the difference between part-time roaming and “part-time expat” life, plus why having a home base can be the best of both worlds especially when travel throws you a curveball. If this sparked ideas for your own extended travel plans, follow the podcast, leave a quick review, and share this with a friend who’s dreaming about traveling longer.

 And if you want to go deeper, you can check out my book, "Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style", where I walk through all of this in more detail. You can search for it on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and audiobook, or just use the link on our podcast page. If you have any questions, a topic you would like discuss, or would like to be on our show, email us at jim@jimsantosbooks.com .

Be sure to enter the Goodreads Giveaway between May 10 and May 22nd, 2026 for your chance to win one of 100 free copies of "Wherever We May Roam: Finding Your Travel Style". Click here to enter!

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Transcript

Why Travel Longer?

Jim 0:00

You don't have to quit your life to travel longer. Welcome to Wherever We May Roam, the new phase that travels with Jim and Rita. This podcast is about discovering your own travel style to explore the world. I'm Jim Santos, and along with my wife Rita, we've spent more than 16 years traveling. Sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for a few months, and sometimes a whole lot longer. And what we've learned is this there's no right or wrong way to travel. Some people take extended getaways, some roam part-time, some work from the road, and some make travel a full-time lifestyle. This podcast is about helping you figure out what works for you and how to make it happen in the real world. So whether you're planning your next trip or thinking about something bigger, we're glad you're here. Let's get started. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Wherever We May Roam, Travels with Jim and Rita. We've been going over some of the different travel styles that we discovered and that you'll find in our book of Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style. And last episode we were talking about the extended getaway. Now we're going to be taking it just a little bit further and talking about another way of traveling, and one that we have quite a bit of experience with. See, there's a version of travel that most people don't even realize exists. It's not a long vacation and it's not full-time travel either, but for a lot of people it's actually kind of the sweet spot. Because here's the reality, you you don't have to quit your life to travel longer, but you do have to think about travel differently. And this is where the idea of the part-time roamer comes in. Now, a part-time roamer is someone who travels for extended periods, usually one to three months at a time, maybe just once a year, but often more. You still have a home base, you still have structure, but when you travel, you go deeper, and that changes everything.

Rita 2:06

Oh yes, it absolutely is.

Jim 2:08

Yeah, generally you're you're not rushing, you're not trying to see everything. You're really just trying to live somewhere, uh even if it's just temporary.

Speaker 2:16

Right.

Jim 2:17

And that that shift from being a tourist to a temporary resident is really huge.

Rita 2:23

It is.

Jim 2:24

Now for us we've been finding, you know, so some people go away for like two, three months at a time. Because generally most countries you can enter on your visa and stay at least three months.

Speaker 2:34

Right.

Jim 2:34

Uh for us, I think the sweet spot seems to be about ten weeks.

Rita 2:38

Yeah, I I think so. That that's a that seems to be as long as we want to be away away from our home.

Jim 2:44

Yeah, ten to eleven weeks away and then plan for another trip and then go off again.

Speaker 2:49

Right.

Jim 2:50

For us, the maximum is probably about nine months of the year or maybe eight, because we generally don't want to travel during the summer when everybody's out traveling.

Rita 2:59

Right.

Jim 3:00

And that's when we can see our grandkids as well.

Rita 3:02

Right. And and part of that is like in the winter, sometimes we like to get out of the cold and go to a warmer climate.

Jim 3:10

Aaron Powell But we do like to be home for about a month around the holidays. Right. Thanksgiving and Christmas. So for us it kind of maxes out at about eight months of the year would be the most we would probably travel there.

Speaker 2 3:20

I think so.

Jim 3:21

When Rita and I started doing the longer stays, everything about the way we travel changed. We started getting into kind of travel routines, but it it changed the way we packed.

Speaker 3:31

Right.

Jim 3:32

Changed the way we looked at how we get around within countries. It was really just a an eye-opening experience once we started devoting that much time to travel.

Rita 3:41

It was kind of interesting the way when when we very first started out, we would fly from place to place. Or or we'd use a train. But then we met a young traveler, solo traveler, who enjoyed this flex bus, and she turned us on to that, and we realized we really enjoy that because we see more of the country.

Jim 4:03

Yeah, and we'll have a lot to say uh about that when we get to the section about transportation and getting around in countries. But it really is a change in your perspective when you start traveling like that.

Rita 4:12

Aaron Powell Yeah, when you have longer, a longer time period to travel in that you know you're going to be gone. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jim 4:18

Yeah, we start figuring out things uh when you're traveling, like where to shop, and it's usually where the locals are shopping.

Rita 4:24

Exactly.

Jim 4:25

You figure out how the local transportation works. And I gotta tell you, in most countries we've been in, the local transportation systems work much better than they work in the U.S.

Rita 4:35

Oh, absolutely.

Jim 4:36

They're much easier to use and there's a lot more coverage.

Rita 4:39

Right.

Jim 4:39

We've we've been a lot of places where you really do not have to have a car.

Rita 4:43

Aaron Powell Actually, we've only rented a car once in Italy and for the month of that we were in Ireland. And for a week in Italy. And a week in England. And the rest of the time we've been using trains, buses, planes.

Jim 4:58

Yeah, while we were living in Ecuador, we generally use buses and taxis as well. But we occasionally rented a car so that we could explore the country a little bit.

Rita 5:06

Yeah, but what but we did fly to other countries in South America. Right.

Jim 5:10

Yeah. But when you're traveling like this and shopping where they're shopping, eating the kind of foods they're eating, uh traveling the way they travel, you really get an idea of what daily life feels like then. And that's when travel becomes more than just a trip. It becomes more than just the the actual act of traveling.

Panama And Mexico Long-Stay Lessons

Speaker 5:27

Right.

Jim 5:28

A good example of that is one that we started talking about last week, when we spent ten weeks in Panama, and then shortly after that we spent five weeks in Mexico. These were extended stays, but we actually lived for a month in Panama City. We lived for six weeks in Playa Coronado, and we lived for four weeks in San Miguel d'Aliende. And we really had different experiences in each of those.

Rita 5:59

Yeah, that's true. And they claimed it was hotter than normal.

Jim 6:03

Right, but it was January.

Rita 6:04

It was January.

Jim 6:05

And it was this side of the equator.

Rita 6:07

I and it's kind of interesting thing about us, every place we go, we do the could we live here thing. And and Panama was very nice.

Jim 6:17

Yeah, I was really hoping that we could live in Panama because Panama City is a very modern city.

Rita 6:22

We loved it.

Jim 6:23

Yeah. Most of the buildings in Panama City were only built in the late 70s.

Rita 6:27

Right, right. And actually, I think for us, it was entirely too hot. And that was in January.

Jim 6:34

In January, yeah. And then the six weeks that we were living in Playa Coronado, that was kind of the opposite. We thought that that would be, you know, a very nice, relaxing beach vacation. And there really wasn't much going on in Playa Coronado at all.

Rita 6:48

No.

Jim 6:48

Uh unless you were Canadian and a golfer.

Rita 6:50

Right. Right. We we kind of like steer clear of expat communities, and this condo, which we didn't know, was in a total Canadian US expat enclave.

Jim 7:05

Yeah. And there were a lot of golf courses in the area, so that was very popular. But you know, we look for local places to shop and to eat. And local food, and there really wasn't anything like that.

Rita 7:15

No.

Jim 7:16

You know, it's different if you were there for just a week for a vacation and uh, you know, to to lay around on the beach.

Rita 7:22

Right.

Jim 7:23

It really wasn't the kind of experience that we generally go for.

Rita 7:26

No, we were kind of looking for rural culture cultural experience and we didn't get it.

Jim 7:33

But we did kind of find that in San Miguel de Allende.

Rita 7:37

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Jim 7:39

This is a a very old city, just a beautiful city and extremely clean.

Rita 7:44

It was.

Jim 7:45

You go out in the morning for a walk and you'd see people sweeping in front of their homes, dumping soapy water around and cleaning up. If there was any litter, if you come back that way an hour later, it was usually gone.

Rita 7:56

Yeah. We actually almost bought a house in San Miguel.

Jim 7:59

A couple of times we almost bought a house there.

Rita 8:01

Yeah.

Jim 8:02

But but that was an example of where we were staying in a place where there was a large mercato almost across the street from us.

Speaker 2 8:09

Yeah.

Jim 8:10

Yeah, just a couple blocks away. We had this beautiful place where we could get all kinds of wonderful food. Yeah, and just really wonderful, friendly people. We didn't have a washer and dryer there. Well, actually we did. It was on the roof.

Rita 8:20

Right. But but they weren't fond of us using it. They wanted their and they're made to do our laundry. And we just said no, we'll just take it to a launderer or down the street.

Jim 8:35

We found a little place uh just a woman's home. Yeah. A couple blocks down the street where we you drop your clothes off and they put it in a big scale and weigh it. And they charge us a couple of pesos per pound.

Budget, Comfort, And Home Logistics

Rita 8:46

Right. We could drop it off in the morning, pick it up and on our way back through in the evening and once a week, you know. Once a week your laundry's done.

Jim 9:28

Yeah, so that kind of travel is what we're talking about when we talk about part-time roaming, where you really get to experience the culture, really get to see what it's like uh to live there. And that kind of travel does come with some challenges.

Rita 9:42

It does.

Jim 9:44

Budgeting when you're going to be at a place for a long period, finding the right accommodations. We've had hit and misses there. We have. The accommodations in Playa Coronado, for instance, were very nice, but the air conditioners kept malfunctioning.

Rita 9:57

Right. And we spent a lot of time with the repairmen in in the condo trying to fix things.

Jim 10:04

Yeah, and it was in the 90s by like 10 a.m. It was. So it wasn't like we could just do without for that. And the accommodations in Mexico uh actually it was a very comfortable apartment, except once again they were having a heat wave.

Rita 10:17

They were it was following us that year.

Jim 10:19

It was about 10 degrees warmer than normally is that time of the year. Right. But that had nothing to do with the accommodations itself. But you know, you again, you're you're living there. For that month, you're living there. So uh you do need to have to deal with with things like that.

Rita 10:32

Right.

Jim 10:33

We dealt with it mostly there by sitting around in our underwear with the doors open.

Rita 10:36

Right. And everybody else in the building were doing the same thing that we're gonna do.

Jim 10:40

Every room was somebody walk by in the underwear and go, oh no.

Rita 10:44

I know. It was it was a very unusual experience.

Jim 10:49

But another problem with this kind of travel, and there's a couple of chapters in the book dealing with this, managing the logistics back home.

Speaker 10:57

Right.

Jim 10:57

If you're gonna be gone for a couple of months, you're looking at things like are you gonna be able to store your car safely and well during the time that you're gone? Are you going to be able to control the temperature in your home while you're gone? Someone gonna be taking care of the lawn. And one of the biggest problems is what do you do about mail? So we have a whole chapter about mail, and we'll be talking about that later.

Speaker 11:19

Right.

Jim 11:19

But it is non-trivial what you have to do uh with your home when you're gonna be gone for a couple of months at a time.

Slow Travel And Fast Travel Done Right

Rita 11:25

Yeah, because your car is in your garage. You know, that that's one given like if you have a garage. If you have a garage. If you have a garage, yeah.

Jim 11:32

Right. Actually, when we were in Mexico, we had our car in an outdoor storage place because we didn't have a garage at that time.

Rita 11:37

We had sold our home, yeah.

Jim 11:40

So we added an outdoor storage with just a cover over it. And that was fine for that was the month of May, I think.

Speaker 2 11:46

Yeah, it was.

Jim 11:47

But over the winter that would not work as well.

Speaker 2 11:50

No.

Jim 11:51

Yeah. So the idea is that you staying long enough to settle in and get comfortable, but not too long, because we do want to see a lot more places. And a lot of people tend to underestimate those things. One variation you hear a lot of people describe this sometimes is slow travel. And it can be slow travel, but we've also experimented with a little bit of fast travel. In fast travel, you're seeing more, but you still try to maintain that sense of a relaxed exploration. For example, the trip we took to Eastern Europe.

Speaker 12:22

Right.

Jim 12:23

We wanted to see some parts of Eastern Europe, but with the war dragging on in Ukraine, we felt like, you know, we may have a limited window of time when we can see these countries uh travel in them freely.

Rita 12:34

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And we kind of gave ourselves about five days in each location.

Jim 12:40

Yeah, we started out in in Germany and Berlin, and we went from there into Prague, Hungary into Budapest, and then up to Poland, two different cities in Poland working our way to Warsaw.

Rita 12:52

Vilnius was our next stop.

Jim 12:54

Yes, Lithuania. Lithuania. Yeah, then Lithuania and Latvia, and it planned to go further, but we'll we'll talk more about that later. But in that particular trip, even though we were, you know, maybe a week in one place, four or five days in another, Vilnius just a couple nights, it still didn't seem like it was rushed.

Speaker 2 13:15

No.

Jim 13:16

And part of the reason was our trips between the cities was either by train or by bus.

Rita 13:23

Yes.

Jim 13:24

So you don't have that weird disconnect of going to an airport and you know, all the stuff that that entails.

Rita 13:30

And we've kind of looked at which is the least amount of energy spent on, you know, that you have to do to travel. And trains are pretty easy. Airplanes are really kind of a pain because you have to be there so many hours before. And then the airports are two hours sometimes out of town, or an hour you have to get a driver, or if there's not some type of metro that you can use. So it just takes about the same amount of time as if you went by a train, dropped off downtown, or you went by bus, dropped off downtown.

Jim 14:12

Yeah, we've really found the ground transportation not only be more affordable, but also more reliable.

Rita 14:18

More reliable and and not as stressful.

Jim 14:22

Yeah, definitely not as stressful. But because you're tr still traveling through the countryside, there's still that sense that you're seeing things, you're experiencing things, you're not just looking at a terminal and then looking at cloud tops and then looking at another terminal. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Rita 14:35

Honestly, that's why I like the train and the bus system the best, because you're actually seeing the entire country.

The Truth About Part-Time Expats

Jim 14:43

Yeah, that kind of fast travel gives you the option to see or to explore a large area, and then you can pick your spots for where you might want to do a return trip where you might want to go and spend more time. For instance, in Poland, we were about a week each in Krakow and in Warsaw. But in general, Poland was just absolutely wonderful. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Rita 15:03

A beautiful country.

Jim 15:04

And we'd love to go back there sometime and spend a a month in Poland, maybe in one or two other locations. Whether you're doing slow travel or fast travel, it's still a wonderful way to see a lot of the world and really feel like you experienced it. Like you didn't just go to a museum or go see a fancy building and leave.

Speaker 15:22

Right.

Jim 15:22

Now there is a kind of a branch, the part-time roamer, they're calling the part-time expat. This was a phrase I first heard when we were living in Ecuador. We'd have uh Canadians come down for the winter and say, Oh, I'm a part-time expat.

Rita 15:37

When they'd be there two months.

Jim 15:38

And it's kind of annoying because no, you're not a part-time expat.

Rita 15:41

They haven't had to get a bank account, they haven't had to apply to get utilities hooked up.

Jim 15:47

You know, had to deal with the signature Nazis at the bank.

Rita 15:50

Oh, right. Well yeah, even when we opened an account, I think I had to write my signature at least 12 times before they accepted it. So then when I went to cash a check, I had to make sure that I wrote it exactly like that.

Jim 16:07

Try sometime writing your signature when you're hyper-aware of whether you're writing it the way you always write it.

Rita 16:13

Right, because who writes anymore? I mean, that's the biggest thing. We print everything.

Jim 16:19

Now, the part-time expat though does deserve kind of its own category because they do tend to travel maybe as much as as three months of the year.

Rita 16:27

They do.

Jim 16:28

Sometimes a little longer, but usually because they're planning on retiring in a particular country.

Rita 16:33

Yeah. And a lot of them have property what we found in Ecuador, a lot of the Canadians own their properties.

Jim 16:39

Right. They they own a property there and maybe they rent it out when they're not there.

Rita 16:43

Yes.

Jim 16:43

Actually, when we first bought our condo in Ecuador, we weren't really sure what we were going to do, and that was that was an option.

Speaker 2 16:51

Yeah.

Jim 16:51

We thought maybe we could spend the winters there, maybe rent it when we're not there, or maybe uh go down sometime with friends or family.

Speaker 16:57

Right.

Jim 16:58

And just stay for a few weeks at a time or something like that. But what happened to us and what happens to a lot of the part-time expats is they kind of fall in love with it and decide, I just want to live there.

Rita 17:07

Right. It's such a wonderful way to live. So low-key. The culture is just the sweetest. So yeah. We loved it.

Stability, Planning, And Next Steps

Jim 17:17

Aaron Ross Powell And those uh part-time expats can have maybe they've picked their country, but they haven't picked the location within the country. So they may also go back once a year and spend a few months in different locations within that country to try to get an idea of where they might want to settle. You know, we've also talked to people on the podcast who have uh multiple home bases around the world.

Speaker 17:39

Right.

Jim 17:40

One one we talked to has a place in Texas, a place in Malta, and a place in Costa Rica.

Speaker 17:46

Right.

Jim 17:46

And they kind of alternate between those and then do little exploring junkets with those as home bases.

Rita 17:52

I think for us at at this stage in our life, we will probably always have a home base, whether it's in the US or it's somewhere else. We will always have some place to go back to regroup.

Jim 18:06

And that's why uh the part-time roamer lifestyle really gives you the best of both worlds.

Rita 18:11

It does.

Jim 18:12

Gives you lots of photographs. I think we've got over 40,000 photos in our it's maddening. And so you get a mix with the part-time roaming of stability and freedom. So you feel like you have that freedom to travel, but you also have that home base that you know you can go back to. And that can be important. Uh one of the trips that we were making through Europe, we started in Greece, went to Istanbul, then to Vienna. Then when we hit Prague, we both were sick. We had both picked up COVID and bacterial infection someplace. So we had to come back, cut the trip short and come back. So it was nice having a home base that we could come back to for that.

Rita 18:48

If you need to recoup, it's nice to have a place of your own.

Jim 18:52

Yeah, but this lifestyle only works if you plan for it intentionally. Packing, planning your logistics, all of this is in our book wherever we may roam. And we go over a lot of these details, and we'll have more to say about that in in coming episodes, from money to logistics to avoiding some of the mistakes I'll freely admit that we have made along the way.

Rita 19:11

Oh, we've made plenty, but they're they're hilarious.

Jim 19:13

I mean, I'm sure we'll make a few more.

Rita 19:15

I'm sure. And we've had some surprises that we certainly weren't counting on. You just have to learn how to pivot, and we're comfortable with that.

Jim 19:24

Yeah, it's it's true. The more you travel, the more comfortable you are with travel. And doing the part-time roaming is a great way to get comfortable with travel fast.

Rita 19:33

It is. It is because you know, it's everything, you're you're always going to have a bump in the road, whether you live and never travel, or you're traveling. You you just have to learn how to deal.

Jim 19:46

And in the future episodes, we'll also be talking a lot about that planning process, about how you can set up a budget and what kind of travel you can be you can afford. And I think you'd be surprised at how much travel you actually can afford.

Speaker 19:58

Right.

Jim 19:58

So in the next episode, we'll be taking a look at a relatively new travel style, digital nomads. Until then, remember we travel not to escape life, but so life does not escape us. If you've been thinking about traveling longer or just traveling better, we hope this episode gave you a few more ideas. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to explore the world. Only the way that works for you. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow the podcast, and if you have a moment, leave a quick review. It really helps more people find us. And if you want to go deeper, you can check out my book, Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style, where I walk through all of this in more detail. You can search for it on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and audiobook, or just use the link on our podcast page. If you have any questions, a topic you would like discuss, or would like to be on our show, email us at jim@ jimsantosbooks.com. Thanks for listening, and as always, safe travels wherever you may roam.