About Us!

Hi! We’re Nikki and Wayne, a quirky, retired Canadian couple who have been married for 20 years and are still crazy in love!

Table of Contents

• Quick Intro!
• What are we doing?
• A Different type of blog…
• Super-brief About Us:
• How we Met:
• Summary of our goals and life in general until now:
• Lifebook
• Present Day

Quick Intro!

Hi there! We’re Nikki and Wayne Slade, a retired Canadian couple who will have been married 20 years (as of October 2021) and are just about to step into our next life vision – living and travelling in Southeast Asia – while sharing our experiences on this blog.

Happy Together Anywhere is about lifestyle creation: about achieving your dreams while living within your means. For Wayne and I, that means having an amazing love relationship while living and slowly travelling in warm climates and being successful in all aspects of our life. 

We’ll show you that you really can plan, create and live a life you love…right now! And, if you want, we can help you do just that (more on that later).

We’ve always believed that we have the ability to envision and create any life we want, and we’ve done that multiple times over our life together as our dreams have changed.

Our newest life vision is a life of slow travel in a warm climate (so long, Canadian winters!), so we’ve spent the last few months planning an initial 6-7 month trip to Southeast Asia, leaving in the Fall of 2021. If we love it, we plan on selling our stuff and travelling for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, we’ve started this blog as a journal, hobby and way to connect with friends and family, old and new. Wayne is also learning about videos as we also plan to vlog about our travels on our Youtube channel. And since we can work online, we can continue our work as Certified Lifebook Leaders during our travels, helping others envision and create a life they love!

What are we doing?

So! What’s it all about? Well, this winter we’re planning to go to Southeast Asia for 6-7 months and explore Thailand and (hopefully) Vietnam. We say “planning” because it’s 2021, and our travel really depends on Covid travel restrictions, but if we can’t go to SE Asia we’re thinking maybe Mexico for this year … we’re definitely going somewhere warm if it’s at all possible! 

Ultimately, if this winter goes well we plan to sell off everything we own and begin travelling as a lifestyle, continuing on in Southeast Asia and then likely moving on to India.

During our travels, I’ll be posting once a week on this blog and Wayne will be doing vlogs on our Youtube channel, as well as writing most of the financial blog posts. Both of us are complete novices when it comes to writing and anything to do with video, but we’re teachable! You all can watch us grow and laugh at us 🙂 

Since we’re not travelling yet, our first posts are going to be about where we’re going, what we’re bringing, and what we have to do before we leave (all our prep work). As we travel we’re going to talk about our experiences (good and not-so-good), the mistakes we make, any stumbling blocks, the things we learn; basically we’re going to blog about our life and lifestyle and all it entails! We’ll also tell you about where we are: things to do, area reviews, apartment costs, search for vegan eats, travel etc. 

While we’re not adventurers by any means, we do plan on pushing well outside of our comfort zone, and we’ll let you know what we’re doing! Parasailing, hot air ballooning, snorkelling (diving is very, very unlikely due to Wayne’s shark paranoia lol). I guess we’ll see what comes our way!

This is not going to be just a travel blog, although I am planning to write about travel because we’re now stepping into our new life vision, which includes slow travel as a lifestyle. If you want to see why we want to travel you can check out this post. There will also be a fairly strong focus on finances and building a strong love relationship.

Why? Finances, because (a) Wayne’s previous career of over 23 years was as a financial counsellor, and (b) living the life of our dreams means living within our means.

As for the love relationship, our love is the very foundation of our life, and we take it seriously!

The primary and underlying focus of this blog is to show people that it is possible to plan, create, and live your dream life, whatever that means to you!

We’ll also be doing some mentoring on Lifestyle Creation. We’ve always believed that we create our own life and we’ve always done just that, but during the past year we’ve really stepped up into the practice of designing, creating and living a life we really love. 

We believe that living a life you love shouldn’t be something that happens if you’re lucky, because it’s not! – It’s being deliberate about your life, and we’re passionate about showing others how to do just that!

I hope you will find Happy Together Anywhere a source of entertainment, information, and inspiration.

A Different type of blog…

Another thing about this blog is it’s going to be *personal*. Did you know that studies show personal blogs are out of fashion because people don’t want to read anymore, and anything they do read has to be short because of their attention span? It may be true, but I don’t believe it! 

I believe that people want to *know* people. We want to feel that we can trust others to be honest and authentic. People want to connect.

In this blog, Wayne and I will be open, vulnerable and authentic, because that is who we are and this is our life we’re sharing. We’re up-front and honest, telling you about places we’ve actually been and experiences we’ve actually had, how we create our lives daily in all the important categories. 

We aren’t extravagant. Neither are we great adventurers. We’re simply a low-key couple with the goal of consciously creating and living a life we love, and we hope some people may be inspired to follow their own dreams.

This blog is also meant to be a creative outlet, a way for us to keep in touch with family and friends, and hopefully make new friends. A way to share what we’re learning, and perhaps inspire others to live their own lives a different way, if that’s what they want.

Super-brief About Us:

How we Met:

I was working in Nova Scotia at a veterinary hospital with a boarding kennel, and Wayne started boarding his 3 dogs with us during the day. At first, it was a total work thing until we made arrangements for me to rent his condo. Immediate whirlwind love affair! Met his family on our first date (I had no idea they’d be there), started staying over/spending every spare moment together from day 2, moved in together within 2 months, engaged at 6 months and married 18 months from our first date!

Summary of our goals and life in general until now:

Pretty much as soon as we got together we decided what we wanted our life to look like and set goals on how to get there. As the foundation, we knew we didn’t want to have children (especially handy as I don’t know how we’d have had time for kids, with all our animals)! Together we started our “family” with 9 animals, and that number grew quickly. We also knew we wanted to retire early (we were 26 and 34 when we married) with enough savings to live on until pensions kicked in.

But what would we actually do when we retired? At that point in our life, we decided that we wanted to have a small subsistence hobby farm with a couple of horses to ride as a hobby, and we made plans for exactly how to achieve that life. Within 8 years we’d achieved all those goals with the exception of Wayne’s retirement: we owned a small hobby farm outright, had a couple of horses, had planted a small orchard and had a large garden. 

I cooked our meals from scratch, canned and preserved our produce, had a small medicinal herb garden, made soap, took care of our (17!) pets and landscaped like a crazy woman. Wayne worked full time plus had a 2-hour commute, then came home to more work on our little farm. After 8 years, we came to the realization that our dream life was no longer our dream life. It was time to start over!

After much discussion, we decided that our next life vision involved travel; specifically, us biking around the world. This obviously wasn’t going to happen soon because of our pet responsibilities, but we could start planning! 

We discovered two websites that allowed us to meet and host travellers who needed a place to stay: Warm Showers, which was designed for cyclists, and Couchsurfing. We opened our home to many people from all over Canada, the States, and Europe, sharing our home and meals in exchange for friendship. 

We also worked on downsizing from our farm, rehoming our horses with a friend, researching what we’d need for our round-the-world adventure, etc. Finally, we sold our farm and moved to a smaller home closer to Wayne’s work. Wayne decreased his working hours to part-time while we continued working towards our goals.

By this time we only had five pets, but those remaining still had many years left; it was obvious it would be a while before we’d be free to cycle the world. In the meantime, the travel bug had bitten, but where to go? 

We decided to become Snowbirds, travelling to the States in the winter months, and returning to Canada for the summer. So we bought an RV and truck, downsized to a smaller home, and moved yet again.

Before we ever had a chance to go south for winter, one of our pets became very sick and the travel plans were halted. The next few years can be summarized very quickly: care for our sick parrot for 3 years, move to care for a family member, then move again to be near more family and wait out our last pet, an 18-year-old diabetic cat.

Lifebook

After our last pet died last winter, Wayne and I took a personal development course called Lifebook; we felt that we’d fallen in a bit of a rut and wanted to feel more in control of our lives. And did we ever succeed!

As a very basic description, Lifebook gets you to closely examine your life in 12 categories so you know who you are, who you want to be and the life you want to live; it then guides you step-by-step along a path of creating and achieving your own perfect life vision. Thanks to this program, we developed a clearer life vision than we’ve ever had before, and we’re already well on our way to achieving it!

This program caused us to make so many positive changes in our own lives that we became Certified Lifebook Leaders so that we could help others create and achieve their own dream lives.

If you’d like to know how we can help you achieve clarity on exactly who you are and what you want, so you can live your best life, contact us!

Present Day

Now, finally, we’re at a point where we can travel! While some things are still up in the air due to Covid, we’re both forging ahead strongly with research, purchases (so many purchases!), and planning, all to be shared in upcoming posts and videos.

We’d love for you to follow our journey! Please be patient as we get up and running, and learn with us as we share our experiences!

If you’d like, you can like/follow/share our Facebook Page. We’d love to hear from you 🙂 

Most importantly, remember to create a life you love, every day!