Live fully. Travel with confidence.
Make the most of what’s next.
Practical trip planning and retirement guidance for independent retirees.
Go straight to trip planning: have your next big trip planned for you →
What SIDETRAKKED is for
Adapting to a new lifestyle in retirement.
Planning longer, slower, more fulfilling trips.
That’s what SIDETRAKKED is here to help with. Retirement changes how your days, your health, your money and your home all fit together. It also gives you the time to travel the way you always meant to: longer stays, a slower pace, and far less hauling bags from train to train. I write about both, and if you’d like a big trip planned properly, I’ll plan it for you.
Now, retirement brings a whole set of questions, and few people are entirely prepared to deal with the change. What a good week looks like once work stops. How to stay mobile and keep your energy up. What to do about the house, the money and all that open time.
I spent my career in logistics, making sure things got where they needed to be, on time. I still plan everything that way, our own trips included, and this is where I share what I’ve worked out.
Travel Better ↓
Slow, independent travel: longer stays, one home base at a time, paced to your energy and budget. No package tours and no rushing.
Live Better ↓
Your retirement lifestyle: finding your rhythm after work, health and staying mobile, money and downsizing, and the people and projects that fill a good week.
Two ways to use this site
Pick whichever one sounds like you right now. You can always come back for the other.
Travel Better
- A big trip planned for you from scratch, researched and costed before you book a thing
- Slow, flexible itineraries built around one home base at a time
- Long-stay accommodation checklists
- How much walking, how much rest, and how to pace each day
- Gear, tech, insurance, and planning checklists
Articles
Live Better
- Downsizing without losing what matters to you
- New hobbies, new interests, new people to share them with
- Practical planning for the big changes retirement brings
- Practical ways to stay mobile, organized, and energized
Articles
Free guide
The Trip Planning Reality Check
See where your plan is likely to break down, before you’ve spent a dollar on it. The same email address opens the whole free library.
The person behind this site
Hi, I’m Rob.
I spent 25 years in senior logistics and supply chain management with a major western Canadian grocer. Attention to detail and analytical thinking weren’t just job requirements. They’re how I’m wired, and for three decades I pointed that same instinct at planning my own trips abroad.
Most people never get to plan that way. They care, but the job is overwhelming and no one shows them how. A lot of travellers don’t find out what they missed until the trip falls apart on Day 3.
“SIDETRAKKED is the resource I wished existed when I was planning my own trips. Built by someone who has actually done it, made the mistakes, and worked out what really matters.”
I will plan your big trip for you
I plan the trip. You book it.
You fill in my Trip Planning Questionnaire about how you actually like to travel: your pace, how much walking is comfortable, your real budget, the climate that suits you, what a home base needs to have. Then I go and do the work, which is the part most people don’t enjoy: every base considered, every price checked against the source that sells it, every move between them worked out. What comes back is a set of documents built for your trip specifically.
It’s called a Trip Audit, and it comes in two steps. First, your Trip Compass, CAD $400: three or four real trip options side by side, with what’s good about each one and what you’d be putting up with, so you’re choosing between things you understand instead of guessing. You pick one.
Then your Trip Blueprint, from CAD $1,300, and the pieces that go with it: where to stay and why, what’s worth doing, what it all costs with every figure checked against the source that sells it, how you get from place to place, and what to sort out before you fly. Go ahead within 90 days and the full CAD $400 you paid for your Compass is credited towards your Blueprint.
I am not a travel agent, so I cannot book or reserve any of it for you. What you get instead is a qualified recommendation for every piece of the trip, with the alternatives, which you are free to book or to set aside. I take no commissions and sell nothing, so nothing in your plan is there to benefit anyone but you.
No bookings. No commissions. Nothing sold to you.
Travel and retirement: practical, sincere and to the point
An occasional email with planning tools and practical ideas for travelling and living well in retirement.
Based in Chilliwack, British Columbia. Unsubscribe any time.