Two Retired Executives. Six Continents. One Leisure Travel Van. No Plans to Stop.

Last updated on April 11th, 2026 at 11:00 am

The Aegean stretched flat and silver below the hotel terrace at Kavala, Greece, and the fishing boats in the harbor had not moved since dawn. Karla was editing photos from the day’s drive through the Macedonian wine country near Drama — nine provincial winegrowers producing vintages within sight of the ancestral palace of Alexander the Great’s father. Tom was finishing a draft about the 29,000-year-old cave of the spotted hyena in Kilkis. The laptop balanced on a table still warm from the afternoon sun. Two cups of Greek coffee sat between them, half-finished, forgotten.

This is what a Tuesday looks like when you trade a career for a compass.

How We Got Here

We’re Tom & Karla. We retired from executive careers in public service. Our friends on Facebook liked our travel stories and kept telling us we should be writing for travel magazines. So we did. RoverTreks launched in 2014 as a place to share the stories, photographs, and practical insights from a life spent moving — country to country, coast to coast, season to season.

More than a decade later, RoverTreks has grown into a travel content platform citing stories about culture, history, food, and the open road. Our stories appear in Food, Wine and Travel Magazine, Hellenic News of America, Travel World International Magazine, and across print, radio, and broadcast media.

How We Travel

Our travel splits into two modes. When we travel internationally, we stay one to three months in each country — long enough to move past the tourist surface and into the rhythm of a place. We travel off-season by design: fewer crowds, better prices, and the kind of access that lets us sit down with locals, winegrowers, historians, and fellow rovers whose stories deserve telling. We’ve filed stories from Northern Greece, South Africa, Iceland, Shetland, Southeast Asia, the United Arab Emirates, and across Europe.

When we're home in North America, we explore the continent in our Leisure Travel Van (LTV). As members of the LTV Leisure Explorers Team, we write destination stories for the Leisure Travel Van blog. Our LTV Unity lets us reach the two-lane roads, coastal backwaters, and small-town smokehouses that beckon our stories. We’ve driven the Sea Islands of Coastal Georgia, the Great River Road through Louisiana’s plantation country, and points in between — always looking for the story the interstate misses. See our bylines in other publications here.

What This Life Looks Like

It looks like walking Hellenistic-era roads of granite blocks at the UNESCO site at Philippi, then tasting wines from the new generation of growers near Drama in Northern Greece, all in the same afternoon. It looks like watching seals sunbathe on rock outcroppings in Shetland while the North Sea throws spray across the headland. It looks like standing on the volcanic moonscape of Iceland and understanding why NASA trained astronauts there. It looks like pulling the LTV into a live-oak grove on the Georgia coast and waking up to the salt marsh at low tide, the pluff mud exhaling its sulfur-and-sea smell into the morning air.

We chase stories the way other travelers chase stamps in a passport. The cave of the spotted hyena in Kilkis, Greece — 29,000 years of human habitation. The centuries-old synagogue in Veria City, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have coexisted since the 16th century. The andouille smokehouses of LaPlace, Louisiana, where German settlers adapted Rhineland sausage-making for French-speaking Cajun Country three centuries ago. These are the stories we tell.

Follow the Journey

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Start exploring: browse our latest destination stories, follow us on social media, or check out our work on the Leisure Travel Van blog. We publish new stories regularly — from the places most travelers overlook and the roads most guidebooks skip. And above all, see our story, “Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Rover?” and ask yourself, is this lifestyle for you? If you love to cruise, take a look at our story on how to cruise your way to a new life. We love taking repositioning cruises across the world. It's the best way to get change continents in a stress-free, enjoyable manner.

The road is long. The stories are better. Come along.

— Tom & Karla