There’s a video ad for Princess Cruises with the tagline “Life is Short — Let’s Make Memories.” The stars of the spot are a couple from Maine in their early 60s who are doing their best to embrace that idea.

Cindy Williams and Lee Nelson both worked as anchors at News Center Maine in Portland for more than 30 years. Since retiring, they’ve traveled the world as models, shooting commercials and print ads on Caribbean cruise ships, at Mexican resorts or high in the mountains of Alaska.

Williams and Nelson, married for 36 years, say their new career satisfies a long-standing wanderlust, something they couldn’t easily do while chained to anchor desks at a TV station. Instead of talking into a camera about the next blizzard, steep tax hikes or a fatal crash on the turnpike, they are now being filmed and photographed while living a dream life, with the hope that consumers of a certain age might be inspired to do the same.

“We are part of a target audience that is underrepresented in terms of models, so we unknowingly walked into this,” said Nelson, 63. “There’s a hotel in Tulum (Mexico) that had always featured beautiful, 20-something influencer types in their spots, but the first ad with us exploded, and had so many more viewers. They were like ‘OK, the 20-somethings can’t afford to stay here but the 50- and 60-somethings can.'”

In a video spot for Royal Caribbean Cruises, they were the grandparents of a family on vacation in Alaska, kayaking, flying in helicopters and playing with sled dogs. In an ad for Massachusetts-based SHP Financial, they play a sweater-clad couple sailing their own boat off the coast of Cape Cod, planning their financial future and hugging the grandkids. In the Princess Cruises ad on social media, they stroll by pastel-colored Caribbean beach huts and lounge in bathrobes on the deck of a ship.

Maine fans and friends have been following their modeling adventures on their Instagram account, @cindyandleepics.

Their new jobs allow them to spend a lot more time together. When they were at News Center Maine, Nelson was the morning anchor, going on air as early as 4:30 a.m. Williams did the noon news and was part of the station’s early evening newscast. So Nelson would go to work before Williams and their two sons were awake. By the time Williams came home, it was nearly time for Nelson to go to bed.

“We had about 30 minutes each day to exchange all the necessary information,” said Williams, 62, from the couple’s home in Playa del Carmen, near Cancun on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Williams and Nelson met in the 1980s while working at a TV station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Nelson had grown up mostly in Massachusetts, but his father had been a TV news anchor in Maine in the 1950s and ’60s. Williams grew up in a military family and lived all over, attending the University of Southern Mississippi before getting the Hattiesburg job.

When the couple first came to Portland in the late 1980s, they were on competing TV newscasts for about year. Williams went to work at WCSH, now known as News Center Maine, and Nelson worked at WMTW. Before Nelson retired in 2020, he spent about year and a half anchoring the 5:30 p.m. news with Williams. Williams retired from the station in 2021.

Soon after Nelson retired, he was recruited by a local agency to model men’s clothing for the L.L.Bean catalog. It was the first year of the pandemic, and the firm needed models who were close by. So he donned waterproof windbreakers, quarter-zip pullovers and a whole closetful of menswear. His modeling career had begun.

Once Nelson started working with agents and agencies, he found that during the pandemic, real couples who could work together without being masked were in demand. So he made it known that he had a wife who had also spent 30 years in front of the camera and could read a teleprompter. In the past few years, Nelson estimates he’s done about 100 commercial shoots and Williams has done 50.

One of Nelson’s commercials is seen on Maine TV stations around Christmas. He’s a bearded, Harley-driving Santa Claus hawking scratch tickets for the New Hampshire State Lottery.

Williams said doing commercial work is similar to filming a news story, because shots are set up and planned. But it’s also different because of the creative vibes and the fact that someone else does her hair and makeup. At News Center, she did her own.

“The first time I did this I was like a deer in the headlights. But it was just so much fun and the people we work with are so creative, full of energy,” Williams said.

When Nelson and Williams retired from TV news, they decided they wanted to start a new life in a new place, and had always talked about living in another country. Their list of places to check out as potential new homes included Mexico, Colombia, Portugal, Costa Rica and Belize. But before they could start visiting all those locales, COVID-19 hit. The border to Mexico remained open, so they came to the Cancun area, where they had been before, and fell in love with it.

It’s a relatively short flight to Boston, Nelson says, and it’s a lot cheaper than living in Maine. Nelson guesses their condo in Mexico would cost three times as much in Maine. Plus, there’s a large group of people from all over the world living in the area, so the couple have found it easy to make friends and become part of the community. They come back to Saco, Maine, in the summers.

Nelson says modeling at resort hotels or on cruise ships is considerably less stressful than having to deliver the news, no matter how glum, day in and day out.

“It ain’t rocket science, and there’s something kind of nice about that this late in your working career,” Nelson said. “TV news was not rocket science, either, but it’s not necessarily easy.”