An empty nester is proving it’s never too late to have a gap year, after selling everything she owns to travel the world solo.
Rachel Stump, 49, always knew she wanted to do ‘something big’ when her daughter, Wynter, 20, left the family home to go to the University of Hawaii in August 2021.
The recovered alcoholic had been putting money she previously used for booze aside into an envelope since getting sober nearly 14 years ago – saving $10,000 (£8,185) for an adventure.
She topped up funds by selling ‘everything [she] owned’ and in April 2022, Rachel, a waitress from Kentucky, US, started her midlife gap year in Spain.
She’s since hopped around Europe visiting Italy, Sweden, Albania, Lithuania and Bosnia – before heading to India and Vietnam. Now, still on the road, she hopes to inspire other ’empty nesters’ to solo travel and ‘live your best life’.
‘The months leading up to my daughter leaving were so hard. I felt lost when she was gone,’ said Rachel. ‘I would go to the grocery store and wouldn’t know what to just get for me.
‘Planning my trip was a nice distraction. It was terrifying leaving, but I’m living my best life.
‘I’m on my midlife gap year. I hope to inspire others facing this.’
Rachel said she’s ‘best friends’ with daughter Wynter and the pair have taken month-long trips together every since her daughter was a teen.
‘We’ve always been barebones travellers,’ she said. ‘I never felt the urge to come home. I felt I could be away for a year.’
Rachel, who is proudly 14 years sober in May, said she’s spent the last 20 years focussing on ‘being the best mum’ she could be and knew she’d find it tricky when Wynter moved out.
Her travel plans became a welcome ‘distraction’ and she set off in April 2022 on the anniversary of her grandma, Lillian Frances Stump’s, death at the age of 61.
‘My grandma raised me,’ Rachel said. ‘She wanted to travel when she retried but she passed in a car crash just weeks before her 62nd birthday.’
Rachel spent the first few weeks of her trip in Spain before meeting up with Wynter in Venice, Italy.
From there she hiked in the Theth mountains in Albania, which she says was ‘spiritual’.
She’s immersed herself in culture throughout the trip – experiencing the pyres of Varanasi – a ritual in India where the community cremate the bodies of lost ones on the side of the Ganges river.
She said: ‘I’ve made friends and had amazing conversations along the way. I’ve been on amazing cruises.
‘I saw people burn bodies at the Ganges river. I’d never seen anything like it.’
The mum is now running out of funds but is looking at getting certified to teach while she travels, or to buy a cheap van to live on the beach in Hawaii.
Although it was ‘terrifying’ to leave the home she had made with her daughter and ‘all the memories,’ she’s glad she took the plunge.
‘I want to inspire other empty nesters,’ she said. ‘You can do something big. You can do it by yourself
‘People ask me all the time – “how do you do this by yourself?”
‘I’ve learnt that you take yourself wherever you go.’
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