One jet-lagged winter night, I lay in bed, wide awake, and decided to count the number of countries I’d been to. I came up with 43. Not nothing, I thought. But it made me wonder: How many countries do the most intrepid travelers I personally know—Laureen and Arne Lund—have on their life list?
The answer is 145. The United Nations officially recognizes 197 nations, Laureen explained to me, and a few of the countries on their personal list—Taiwan, for example—are not on the U.N.’s. Still, 145 is quite a number. But it’s not Arne and Laureen’s favorite number. That would be 22—the countries in which they’ve spent one month or more.
Laureen, 65, and Arne, 66, are in their ninth year of serious, long-term travel. They both retired in their mid-50s. First Laureen, who was the marketing director for the city of Gig Harbor, Wash., and three years later, Arne, who was an engineer at Boeing. Their commitment to the Grand Adventure, as they call it, did not happen overnight—nor was it their lifelong dream. It started slowly, after they just happened to watch a program about walking the 500-mile ancient pilgrims’ path across Spain known as the Camino de Santiago.
“I’d like to walk the Camino after I retire,” Arne said, surprising both of them. Laureen began to do the research. They thought maybe the trip could span a couple of months. But the more they talked about it, the more they realized there were so many other places they also wanted to go. And though they weren’t wealthy, they’d saved and invested all through their working lives. And they had a house that they’d lovingly transformed from a Gig Harbor beach shack to a welcoming waterfront home. They had thought they might live there for the rest of their lives.
But if they sold the house, the rest of their lives could be dramatically different.
And then a few friends, close to them in age, died suddenly. “It was eye opening,” Laureen said. “We realized that now is the time.” Not to sit still in their beautiful home, but to travel to all those places they’d never seen.
A week before Arne retired, they sold their Gig Harbor house.
The Lunds’ first trip, which began in 2016, stretched from six months to 18 months, and included time with their two adult sons: One was traveling on his own and the other had joined the Peace Corps and was living in Burkina Faso. Laureen began blogging about their adventures (myfabfiftieslife.com) and Arne—“the king of spreadsheets”—began keeping meticulous records of logistics and spending. Over the years, their budget has evolved and changed, but it is currently about $280 a day, including air travel (they fly coach, but sometimes pay for extra leg room), ground travel, accommodations, meals, and everything else.
The Lunds are not full-time nomads. They spend summers in the Pacific Northwest, where their families and friends are. Six years ago, they bought a cozy, cheerful duplex in Port Orchard, so they’d have their own place to stay when they’re here. COVID, which grounded them for a year, gave them a chance to renovate their new home, where I visited them one rainy winter morning. In their shared office, there’s a huge world map and a whiteboard on the wall. Planning for their 2025 trip—three weeks in Maui (their traditional rest-and-recharge haven), a trip to the Cook Islands, a month in Melbourne, a stopover in Singapore, nine days in Bhutan, and a month in Bordeaux, capped by stops in Lyon, Dijon, Luxembourg, and Paris—was well underway.
I’ve been following Laureen’s travel blog for years—and its offshoot, a book review blog on which she posts every Wednesday. (Last year, she introduced me to one of my favorite books of 2024, Geraldine Brooks’ March, a riveting fictional companion to Little Women.) In her writing, and in conversation, Laureen is upbeat, funny, frank—and firm about what she and Arne are doing. They are not vacationing, they are traveling. They’re not looking for high thread-count sheets and swim-up bars and daily massages. They are visitors, not tourists. They’re not trying to cram as many sights as possible into a single day. They want to feel like they’re living in the country they’re visiting. They do sometimes worry about contributing to over-tourism in locations where that’s a concern. They like Airbnb rentals, because they love to shop for food where the locals shop and cook more often than they eat out. They make room in their suitcases for a collapsible kettle, a French press, a yoga mat that folds flat, and trekking poles. They like cooking classes and the occasional personalized tour, but mostly they prefer to be on their own and walk, walk, walk.
“I am long past being impressed by tourism kitsch, fancy restaurants or hotels, and shopping deals,” Laureen wrote in a 2022 post. “Travel is now about the senses and mine are more alive than at any time before in my life. The questions I like the best are when someone asks me to describe the way a place smells. Or what are the sounds I hear when I’m alone sipping coffee in the morning?”
In the fall of 2024, Laureen and Arne stepped outside their usual freewheeling lane and signed up with Intrepid Travel for a tour of the Central Asian “Stans”—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazahstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It was an intense month. Rather than posting along the way, Laureen waited until she was back in Port Orchard, so that she could be more reflective and comprehensive. She and Arne also visited Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In all of these eight countries, so seldom visited by Americans, they felt more than ever the importance of being courteous, respectful, and non-judgmental. But at the end of their eighth year of travel, they were well prepared to be, as Laureen put it, “self-appointed ambassadors for our home country.”
I hesitated to ask them to name a few favorite places. How can you do that, after 145+ countries in nine years? But they were game. I’m not the only one who’s asked this question. “New Zealand, for its spectacular beauty,” Laureen said, without hesitating. “Guatemala. The Camino de Santiago. And Bulgaria, because it’s cheap and beautiful and the people are so grateful to have you visit.”
“It’s like Italy but half the price,” Arne added. “Roman ruins, beautiful scenery, great food.”
Other questions I couldn’t resist asking: What’s still on your list? Answer: Mongolia, Cuba, Greenland, and Svalbard (a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean). And what is the advice you most like to give? Two answers: 1) Even if you don’t have endless amounts of time, try staying in one place for a month instead of stuffing your itinerary with one stop after another; and 2) Embrace uncertainty. Be open to surprises. But those are my words. What Laureen really said was, “We travel with low expectations, so we are always happy.”
That night, my husband and I got busy looking up Bulgaria. Which happens to be right next door to Greece, Turkey, Albania, Romania… “Now is the time,” I kept thinking. “Why wait?”
As for Laureen and Arne’s travel future? “We are always going to travel,” Laureen said firmly. “As long as we can stand up.”
Ann Hedreen is an author (Her Beautiful Brain), teacher of memoir writing, and filmmaker. Hedreen` and her husband, Rustin Thompson, own White Noise Productions and have made more than 150 short films and several feature documentaries together, including Quick Brown Fox: An Alzheimer’s Story. She is currently at work on a book of essays and is a regular contributor to 3rd Act Magazine, writing about topics including conscious aging, retirement, mindfulness, and health.