Jill Dobbe
I love my life and I love being 50! Entering my 50s has not stopped me from doing the thing that I love the most…traveling. For the past eight years I have been country hopping as an overseas school administrator and since hitting the 50 mark, I have lived and worked in three different countries.
I was in Cairo, Egypt, working at an international school when I first turned the big 5-0. After two years, I left there to work at another international school in Gurgaon, India. A few years later, I moved back to the western hemisphere and continue to work at an American school in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where at the age of 55, I am now attempting to learn Spanish. Getting older has not slowed me down, nor has it stopped me from enjoying the many exciting sights, cultures, and countries across the globe. There is still a great deal of the world that I hope to see and many things that I hope to experience throughout the rest of my 50s, 60s, and beyond.
My family and I began our travel adventures in 1990, when my husband, Dan, and I were hired to teach on Guam, an island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Dan and I were both teachers and wanted the experience of teaching internationally. Despite having two very young children who were only one and two years old at the time, we signed up to attend a hiring fair and were offered jobs on the spot. After Guam we then moved on to Singapore, Ghana, West Africa, and Mexico. Ten years later we found ourselves back in Wisconsin where we gave our children a taste of the American life.
It was after our children were off to college when the travel bug hit us once again, taking us to Cairo, Egypt. It was also around this time when I wrote and published my first travel memoir. I wrote my memoir about our earlier experiences of traveling across the world with our two small children in tow. During those 10 years we also visited many more countries and saw amazing sights in Europe, went on safaris in South Africa, and swam with the humpback whales in Mexico. Writing my memoir was a way to educate others about our lifestyle as overseas educators and to let people know that a life of travel is possible, no matter how old you are or how old your children are.
I will be turning 56 this year and plan to continue my life of travel and writing. I am presently in the process of writing my second travel memoir about living and working overseas, but this time without kids in tow. My publishing date won’t be for a while though, as I continue living this unique and charmed overseas life of mine.
Jill Dobbe is the author of HERE WE ARE & THERE WE GO: Teaching and Traveling With Kids in Tow