Life doesn’t end at 50.

Admit it, you’re probably secretly thinking that the exciting things in life happen to you until you’re about 40 years old, maybe bit older if you’re lucky, but anything after that is all about serious  boring office work, tending to your garden, looking after children and soon after grandchildren and trying to age as gracefully as possible. Well, one of the absolutely amazing benefits of my Big Trip is finding evidently everywhere I look that it’s absolutely not the case. There are several 60-plus year olds in my team (among them my favourite Australian couple I have written about before) who are having an absolute blast on this trip and are more excited about overlanding life than the folks half their age on the truck. I love talking to them about the travels they have done in their 50s and 60s, and still are planning to do. Some of them have travelled more of the globe in a more adventurous rough ways that most people I know. I find their life stories very inspiring.

Another example that life doesn’t have to end at 50 or 60 years old was a German couple we met on the road (to be specific, in a nasty smelly toilet on a Chinese petrol station in the middle of nowhere). This German couple, easily in their 60s, was driving in their 4 wheel drive with a sleeping cabin across China, central Asia, Nepal and then planning to head to Thailand, Cambodia and rest of South East Asia. And this was only a small part of their Round the World itinerary: they were planning to spend the next 5 years travelling like this. Every year they were planning to spend June, July and August back in Germany with their family and friends, and the rest of the year on the road. Can you believe it? They are grey hair grandparents driving around the world and changing their own 150 kg tires on their monster truck! How many grandparents do you know back home having the guts to do anything like that??? Inspiring...