We started 2026 at the Galle Face Green, in Colombo Sri Lanka.Our history marks twelve full years since the start of early retirement. Jay and I have completed eleven seasons of vanishing from the Lower Mainland for four or five consecutive months. One winter was spent tending to a medical issue. And now, the logistical framework for the upcoming journey is firmly ironed out. We plan to spend roughly a month meandering toward Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and settling there from December straight through February. Our homeward trajectory takes a scenic detour through the equator, carving out a week in the Galápagos followed by another in Bogotá, Colombia.
Because those ports and apartments belong to the imminent calendar rather than the finished ledger, they remain off the master tallies for today. Instead, this writing serves as an annual audit of the notes I first published a year ago. I have updated our primary residency figures to account for our most recent months in Sri Lanka, while folding our varied excursions alongside Jay's sisters into the roster of short-term visits. We've lived a for cumulative total of over four years in the following places during our retirement winters.
The ledger above outlines the domestic bases that have anchored our winter seasons. Even so, our migrations rarely follow a tidy, direct path from Carnarvon Street to a single overseas terrace. We routinely thread regional circuits into the itinerary, whether tacking on side journeys prior to settling down or exploring neighbouring territories on the long haul back to the Canadian West Coast.
The partial catalog below captures some of those short-term detours and transit pauses. Last winter offered a prime illustration of this habit. Beyond our residential weeks in Sri Lanka, we orchestrated several shared excursions alongside Jay’s sisters, looping through both the Middle East and Thailand before joining a cruise from Hong Kong to Japan on our gradual circumnavigation home this past spring.
| Additional Short-Term Trips and Visits | |
|---|---|
| Location | Location |
| Antananarivo, Madagascar | Manila, Philippines |
| Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei | Mokhotlong, Lesotho |
| Bangkok, Thailand | Naha (Okinawa), Japan |
| Boracay, Philippines | Osaka, Japan |
| Chiang Mai, Thailand | Pattaya, Thailand |
| Dar es Salaam, Tanzania | Philippines Cruise Ports |
| Doha, Qatar | Phuket, Thailand |
| Hong Kong, China | Puerto Princesa, Philippines |
| Ipoh, Malaysia | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Ishigaki, Japan | Sabah, Malaysia |
| Island-Wide Trips, Sri Lanka | Saint-Denis, Reunion Island |
| Istanbul, Turkey | Sarawak, Malaysia |
| Kaohsiung, Taiwan | Stone Town, Zanzibar |
| Krabi, Thailand | Taipei (Keelung), Taiwan |
| Kuching, Malaysia | Taipei, Taiwan |
| Langkawi, Malaysia | Tokyo (Yokohama), Japan |
| Malacca, Malaysia | Tokyo, Japan |
| Manama, Bahrain | Tunis, Tunisia |
In the early seasons of early retirement, I indulged in an exhaustive inventory of aspirational targets, scribbling down every distant meridian that caught my eye. Over the ensuing decade, Jay and I methodically picked our way through that optimistic docket with surprising thoroughness. As a consequence of our persistent wandering, the grand archive has dwindled down to a remarkably modest pair of unclaimed frontiers. Even with the official manifest looking lean, the kitchen table tells a different tale, as fresh possibilities and sudden logistical schemes constantly bounce back and forth between my morning coffee and Jay’s proper cup of Ceylon tea.