Convincing her husband to take early retirement and leave behind their lives in San Diego, California to travel the world back in 2018 was no easy undertaking for Kimberly Walker, originally from the Golden State.
The former landscape designer explains that Mark, who worked for a weight loss and nutrition company, was resistant at first, but eventually came around to the idea.
“It’s one of those life-changing things,” Kimberly tells CNN Travel. “Once you quit your job and you retire. You can’t get it back if you made a mistake.
“So I think he was pretty nervous about it. And I told him, ‘Look, no matter what happens, we’re going to wish we started earlier… There’s just no other way to look at it.’
“And I’m so glad he listened to that, and we did it.”
Life-changing moment
The couple, who married in 1997, “traveled as nomads” for four years, visiting countries like Poland, Montenegro and Australia, before settling in Portugal in March 2021.
According to Kimberly, her husband, a keen cyclist, “loved to be able to count on clear, warmish days,” while living in the European country and took to life there immensely.
While she thought they’d have many more years of such days together, everything changed in an instant eight months ago, when Mark passed away suddenly.
Now Kimberly is having to navigate her way through life without her beloved husband, while residing in the destination that they chose to start afresh in.
“Even if you do have to contemplate as a woman, probably being a widow, you don’t contemplate it now,” she says. “We just had the world by the tail. I mean, we were crushing it.”
Reflecting on the motivation behind their decision to leave the US six years ago, Kimberly stresses that their main goal was to see more of the world together.
“A lot of people are running away from the United States, that really wasn’t our thing,” she says.
“We just wanted to travel. We liked Europe, and Southern California is so far away from Europe. That flight… I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted to come over and stay.”
Once they were finally ready to make their move, the couple sold off most of their possessions, opting to keep their house in San Diego, found “good homes” for their two dogs and bid their friends and family farewell.
“Our whole neighborhood had a big send off for us,” Kimberly recalls. “They had a pool on when we’d be back. And nobody had more than six months, but we settled into that lifestyle and we really liked it.”
Over the next few years, Kimberly and Mark jetted to destinations like Amsterdam, Denmark, Brussels, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom, often house sitting for other couples. They chronicled their travels in an online blog.
After getting “stuck” in New Zealand for 18 months during the global Covid-19 pandemic, the couple “finally got tired of carrying 100 pounds of stuff around,” and decided that they wanted to stay in one place.
They traveled to Portugal, a destination they’d previously discussed moving to, for a house-sitting gig in early 2021, and felt that it was the right place for them to put down roots.
“We thought, ‘OK, we like this. We can do this.’” Kimberly recalls. “And we started doing what we needed to do to get residency. That was about three years ago.”
The couple were granted a D7 Visa, which permits non-EU citizens with a steady passive income to reside in the country.
Kimberly and Mark rented a home in Vilamoura, a resort in the Algarve region of southern Portugal, and focused their energies on becoming familiar with their new surroundings.
Putting down roots
As they’d spent a lot of time traveling to different European countries, Kimberly and Mark had a good understanding of some of the cultural differences beforehand. However, they were still struck by the laid-back approach to life in the country.
“The really super patience of the Portuguese people is so funny,” says Kimberly. “We would be stopped behind a car… And there’s several cars holding you back. You figure there’s a (traffic) light.
“After five or 10 minutes, you wonder, ‘Why are we still stopped?’ And somebody has just gotten out of their car and gone into the pharmacy or something, and none of the other cars mind.
“And as Americans, that won’t do. But I am getting more and more like that.”
After living in Portugal for a while, Kimberly found that her outlook on many things was changing, and she felt completely removed from the “materialism in America” that she’d grown accustomed to.
“That’s one of those things you don’t notice until you leave,” she says. “Everybody I know in the US would be offended by me saying that, because they don’t know what they don’t know.”
Kimberly goes on to explain that there isn’t the same “depth of stuff” over there, and she’s quite happy to do without.
“If everybody’s going to have the same set of dishes, you don’t have to worry about your dishes,” she says.
When it came to learning Portuguese, Kimberly says it wasn’t an easy process for her and she’s still “far from fluent.” However, she’s always been able to get by.
“It’s hard to learn Portuguese, because Portuguese people want to practice their English,” she says. “And they’re way better at it.”
Although Vilamoura, which is filled with international residents, isn’t necessarily the place that Kimberly would have chosen for them to stay long term, she says it was the people, particularly the local cycling community, that kept her and Mark there.
“Basically, if you live here, you either have a boat or you golf,” she says. “And we didn’t have a boat, and neither of us golfed.
“But Mark did meet fantastic cycling buddies, and he had a really good group of riders here.”
Tragic turn
Although adjusting to life in a new country came with its challenges, Kimberly says that she and Mark were happily finding their way.
“We were solid,” she says. “We were very good. We were together all the time. Had been for 37 years.”
The couple were in Spain visiting a friend in March when Mark suffered a heart attack and died.
“It was terrible,” Kimberly says. “It just shouldn’t have happened… But it did. I still haven’t quite accepted it. It’s been eight months, but it seems like eight days.”
While the thought of returning to the US did cross her mind momentarily, she ultimately decided to stay put.
“A lot of people assumed that I would come home,” she says. “But it’s not home anymore. I think I’ve been gone long enough and (I) was willing to leave in the first place.”
After making the appropriate arrangements and dealing with the logistics of the situation, Kimberly made her way back to Portugal alone.
She’d been dreading “that four-and-a-half-hour drive with his bicycle on the roof (of the car) to an empty apartment” and found the journey incredibly difficult.
Once she’d made it back to Vilamoura, Kimberly found herself alone and unsure of what to do next.
She decided to adopt a dog, named Honey, so that she’d have a “companion” and set about dealing with the paperwork that comes with the death of a spouse.
Kimberly says she was touched by the support she received from the local community, who rallied round her.
“I kind of figured out I had more friends here than I thought,” she says. “As people have come to my aid. And you need that right now.”
Although she’s unsure of how long she’ll remain in the resort town, Kimberly certainly isn’t ready to make any big moves just yet.
“I really don’t want to start over,” she says, adding that she’s not ready to move Mark’s stuff anywhere. “I’m staying right here in the same apartment for another year so I can take my time sorting things out.”
Inescapable grief
According to Kimberly, her family back home have been hugely supportive, but no one has been able to make the trip over to see her in Portugal as yet.
“I have two sisters, and they both talked about jumping on a plane and coming out to be with me,” she says. “But they’re typical Americans, neither of them have passports.”
While she finds being alone incredibly tough, Kimberly feels it would have been worse if she’d gone back to the United States.
“Not every single thing I do (here) is a memory without my husband,” she says, explaining that “every single thing hurts” when she returns to San Diego.
But while Portugal may not be filled with decades of memories of Mark, her grief remains inescapable regardless.
“I’m experiencing a loss that is hard to come to grips with,” she says. “But half of all people in my situation, half of all married people have to do this… I’m not that unique.
“It’s a little sooner than I wanted to and obviously, quick and abrupt…”
Kimberly and Mark had planned various trips together before his death, and she was keen to go ahead with at least one of them this year.
After struggling to find another travel companion, she decided to go on the trip that they planned to Norway alone in July.
“The tour was fantastic…” she recounts. “It was a lot of other single people… Everybody was very welcoming to me.
“And I can travel by myself. I’ve traveled alone. I know I can travel by myself, but traveling without Mark was a bar too high.”
While she hopes to continue to see the world, Kimberly stresses that she doesn’t want to travel alone again and is “going to need companions.”
“So if you know anybody who wants to travel?” she adds.
In August, Kimberly returned to the US and was finally reunited with her family for the first time since Mark’s death.
She explains that she made a point of getting her first trip back “out of the way” so that it wouldn’t clash with the wedding of her niece a few months later.
“I knew the wedding was happening,” she says. “And I decided that I wanted my first trip home not to coincide with the joy of the wedding.
