That's a question that we get asked all the time. We want to retire and Ecuador seems like a great place to start looking as it has been ranked as #2 by International Living. You see we have lived the main part of our lives in Australia. However, we both have travelled to different parts of the world and love the adventure of new places and people.

John, at almost 57, is old enough to retire early. His research into Ecuador, which goes back 10 years, has now led us down the path of wanting to find out more. Initially John's interest in Ecuador was for health, lifestyle and environment just to mention a few.

As for myself, Dixie, I am a few years younger than John but also do think about our retirement and how will we survive on superannuation and any other savings and investments. I also became interested in Ecuador and decided to do some researching of my own.

To my amazement I found that real estate is extremely cheap and we would be able to buy a beautiful property with everything we need and be left with plenty of money to live on and start some part-time income activities like import-export, internet marketing and perhaps even start a health retreat in "the valley of longevity". Many other visitors to Ecuador have decided to stay after experiencing its delights, so we won't be the first - although maybe one of the small minority of Australians.

Our timing is right because our children are old enough to live their lives without us all the time. They all have jobs or are at university. So now we are taking the plunge and taking a exploratory trip to Ecuador for around 7 weeks to see and feel for ourselves.

This is the first of many pages for our new site as we will be adding to it as we travel, hopefully with lots of our own photos. We are very excited and looking forward to this new adventure and phase of our lives.

Hopefully we will bring you only happy and interesting news. While in Ecuador we will be doing a few courses on import/export, multi-currency investing and a couple of real estate tours.

Have a great day, week, month and year and hopefully you will enjoy our journey which starts on Sunday January 27th 2008.