Hi – thanks for taking a detour from your daily lives to join us here at D2 Detours! We are Howard and Whitney Darby (2 “D”arbys) – husband and wife Canadians from Calgary, Alberta fulfilling our retirement dream of no fixed address!

We have always made travel a part of our lives, but in early 2021 we left our careers in the IT and legal fields respectively to begin a nomadic travel lifestyle.

Our intention with this blog is to pass along our insights into what we discover in each location – maybe just a bit of history thrown in.

Come along with us on our adventures! You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter (X) and Instagram.

Who Are We?

In 1985 we met in Whitney’s hometown of Edmonton, Alberta where Howard had recently relocated from Vancouver, British Columbia. The next year, we took a three-week trip to the Hawaiian Islands which was Whitney’s first trip over an ocean; Caribbean cruises and a European bus tour soon followed. Raising a family curtailed our overseas travel, but in 2014 we made travel a priority again visiting Italy, Croatia, Greece and England. A 2017 trip to Southeast Asia really whetted our appetite for living abroad, and a 2019 trip to Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain and Portugal solidified our plans.

Prior to retirement, Whitney spent most of her career as a paraprofessional in the legal field, with a short stint as a school librarian when our boys were school-aged. In addition to travelling, scuba diving, reading and a good bottle of wine rank high on her list of things that make life worth living.

Howard worked as an IT consultant for 40 years. He took us all over North America, competing on the World Fast Draw circuit, and still holds the title of Fastest Gun Alive. He was world champion 19 times and currently holds 18 world records. More on that can be found at howarddarby.com. Now he mainly uses a camera to shoot, having developed his photography skills over the last few decades. He is looking forward to documenting our travels both on land and underwater, which you can follow on our Instagram page.

We did a 4-month nomadic-life test run at the end of 2021 that confirmed this was the lifestyle we wanted to pursue, so returned to Calgary and sold our house, cars, and almost all our possessions. We turned over the keys to our house to the new owner May 2nd, 2022, hitting the road with a backpack and carry-on suitcase each.

After almost 5 years of fast nomadic life, and having visited almost all the places on our wish-list, we made a change of pace by purchasing a century-old Dutch barge, and will be spending the foreseeable future winding our way through the 41,000km of European inland waterways aboard our floating home, Change of Pace. We’ve created specific pages for our canal travels, which you can follow along on Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram.

How’s it going?

The nomadic lifestyle is pretty great so far, and we’re enjoying it. Here are a few stats of our travels:

Please visit our Spending page for more details on what it costs to live this type of travel lifestyle.

How did I create these maps and the Dashboard? If you want to create these maps for your travels and get a template to start your own planning you can read the post where I wrote about it: Tracking and reporting our spending & stats

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