Empty nest, new adventures

Celebrating our 20th anniversary on a group tour in Peru

If there’s one thing on which my wife, Lorri, and I are completely aligned, it is our passion for travel. From the earliest days of our relationship we have prioritized taking trips together - though they were quite modest at the start. Our now 18 year-old son is already an experienced world traveler after numerous trips abroad along with many within the US. A few months ago, Lorri and I set out to plan the first of what we hope will be many “vacations” (some think this is the wrong word to use once retired, I have learned) in this latest chapter of our life. Sure, we’d taken trips without our son before, but now that he’s in college, we are truly empty nesters. So how to kick things off?

We’ve been rather consistent in all the travel we’ve done to date: it’s all been self-directed. And by that I mean that we’ve never taken any tours, been on cruises, or undertaken any coordinated travel. All aspects of any given trip were thoroughly researched and arranged by us, without the support of any travel professionals or organizations. When we started to consider options for our first empty nester trip - to take place shortly after our 20th wedding anniversary, we came upon the idea of trying out an organized group tour. The idea of having someone else handle all the logistics was really appealing! We knew we’d want it to be a small group (perhaps 10-12 people at most), a tour that employed local guides, and also an experience where we’d have at least some unprogrammed time on our own. And so we turned to Google for ideas…

We looked at a number of options before settling on the tour operator, G Adventures. Why did we choose them? They offered many types and durations of tour packages, including ones with National Geographic Journeys. They ticked all the boxes mentioned above, and also had dedicated tour leaders (Chief Experience Officers or CEOs) as well as a stated philanthropic mission. After considering a number of the many tours they offered, we landed on the Inca Explorer 15-day experience in Peru. While Lorri and I have traveled extensively, South America had been a gap in our travel to date. Machu Picchu has long been on our bucket list, we love Peruvian food, and so it wasn’t too hard of a sell for us.

As Eric and I have just recorded a Two Sides of FI episode on our experience (I’ll update this post once the show is released), my thoughts on the trip are fresh in my mind. At a high level, it was a really great experience. In some respects, it’s hard to believe just how much we packed into 15 days. We were truly fortunate to have had gorgeous weather nearly every hour of our trip (thank you, Pachamama!). Our experienced and capable CEO, Joshi (she’s from Lima) did an amazing job at all times on our journey - whether providing expert local information, ensuring all the travel logistics went smoothly, assisting at the pharmacy, recommending meal options, and everything in between. Lorri and I both agree that the CEO model that gAdventures uses is highly effective and something we really liked.

In other positives, having someone else handle all the logistics - a stated goal for this trip - was amazing. The only thing we had to plan were our flights to and from Lima to bookend the trip. All internal flights, bus trips, tickets, boats, guides, hotels, some meals, etc. were handled by gAdventures. It’s quite refreshing to know that it’s all taken care of and that you have a local expert at the ready to answer all questions and navigate any tricky situations should they arise.

The experience overall was great. All the planned and optional activities we undertook were both informative and enjoyable - perhaps barring the dune buggy experience that was much more aggressive than I’d expected. Lorri certainly enjoyed it! I’d need 10X the pictures I’m sharing here to fully describe all that we did - the tour itinerary spells it all out for those interested in more details. But just to list a few: we visited the floating islands of Lake Titicaca, took a flight over the famous Nazca Lines, toured Machu Picchu, saw numerous archaeological sites, learned tons about the rich and long history of Peru, shopped at local markets and cooked together at a restaurant, and ate many amazing meals.

Admittedly, one of our biggest hesitations going in was how it would feel to be with a group of other people most of the time. As Lorri put it, to “share your vacation” with others. Fortunately, our small group (nine guests including, us plus Joshi to make ten) was made up of lovely people. There were three couples from Canada, an English woman, and us as the lone Americans. It was nice to have the opportunity to meet and talk with others who also love travel, and the company at meals and on some of the long van rides was definitely welcome. At times we did feel somewhat of an unstated obligation to take meals together - even though this wasn’t mandatory, but I guess this is part of the tour experience. There were several evenings that we elected to go our separate ways for dinner and for us, this was important.

Speaking of dinners, we decided to cap off our tour with yet another 20th anniversary celebratory dinner on our last night in Lima. One look at the picture below will make clear just how lovely (and also affordable!) of an experience that we had at Mérito. It was impossible to resist having just a little more ceviche (a favorite of ours) before leaving Peru, and all the other dishes we selected were wonderful too. Taking this evening off from the group meant that our “last supper” as a collective was the day prior, but that seemed to work well for others too.

Were there any negatives? It seems overly harsh to describe them as such but let’s call them factors worth considering if you’re thinking about taking a tour. If you really value flexibility, it is certainly different than solo travel. It’s pretty easy to take a down day if you’re on your own, but there is a schedule to be kept when you’re part of a tour. The logistics are pre-planned so you do need to accept that adherence to the schedule is part of the game. In addition, the quality of groups can certainly vary. Any fears we had about this were quickly put to rest given how nice our tour peers were. But perhaps we were just lucky? It’s certainly possible that you could end up with a domineering or otherwise unpleasant person in your group. Thankfully, this wasn’t something we experienced - quite the opposite.

What lessons did we learn? Two weeks is probably our limit for this flavor of travel. It’s a lot of moving around, packing, travel time, etc. Any longer would probably be too much for us unless the tour had fewer locations to travel between along the way. We also like the idea of pairing a shorter (perhaps 7-10 days) tour with a week or more of time on our own - a hybrid experience, if you will. We also think that at least for us, these kinds of tours are a great fit when solo travel is below our comfort threshold - perhaps due to language barrier, safety concerns, etc. But we’ll likely continue to do solo travel in much of Europe, for example.

So would we do it again? Absolutely. We learned much from this experience and made so many positive memories. Lorri and I agreed that the cost of the tour was well worth it and the model that G Adventures uses proved to be a great fit for us. We are definitely much better informed about this kind of travel now - and even more so thanks to all the great information we got from the much more experienced travelers on the trip - and know what we’d consider doing differently in the future. Got any questions? Ask away in the comments below! Mahalo 🙏