Pick the Right Partner

LISA

If you’re going to turn retirement into an adventure, you better have picked the right partner. I know I did.

I met Bob Greenawalt through the New York Flyers Running Club in early 1993. I went to the meeting place for a speedwork class in an old convent a half block from Central Park in Manhattan, and he was the first person I saw. During our first conversation, we covered all the places we had skied, and he talked about how he was going to Alta the next week. I had just been skiing in Sestriere, Italy, the previous month.

We became fast friends, and over the next few months, we trained for a partner ten-miler in Central Park together, went for long bike rides across the George Washington Bridge and up the Palisades along the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. We took trains to Garrison, NY, and rode 38-mile loops across Bear Mountain.

Puerto Rico

Bob atop a 14er

When I moved to Puerto Rico to become a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, he quit his job and came down for the adventure. Mind you, he had already lived in Germany for 4 ½ years.

Family travel
After we got married and started pursuing the adventure of marriage and parenthood, we took our two children traveling from the start. Canada. England. Germany. France. The Dominican Republic. Puerto Rico. Mexico.

Adventurous spirit
Over the past 9+ years in Colorado, he has ridden a number of mountain passes, and has climbed 26 14ers (mountain2 14,000 feet or higher).

So it’s not a surprise that this is a man who will embark on a true adventure of exploring the world with me now!

Pain

I had no idea it would be this painful.

We’re in the home stretch now. The packers are coming tomorrow. The movers are coming on Wednesday. And I am having an emotional breakdown. Help!

Church farewells

Yesterday Lexie and I went to Evergreen Lutheran Church for the last time. I was doing the readings and Pastor Vera and the congregation were giving us a blessing for safe travels.

As soon as we walked into the Narthex, people kept coming up to hug us, wish us luck, ask about our adventure, and say goodbye. By the time we got to our seat in the second row, I already had a huge lump in my throat. When it came time to read, I could barely speak for the swell of unexpected emotion constricting my voice. I went up onto the altar and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, this is very difficult,” I shared shakily from the pulpit. “This is our last time attending this church, and I’m suddenly feeling very emotional. This is a wonderful place and I really love all of you.” Then I took a deep breath, Pastor Vera smiled, and I began.

Her sermon was about answering God’s call and embarking on the journey even if you don’t know the outcome, trusting God and saying yes. From God’s lips to our ears!

More hugs and tears afterward, and the Piecemakers, a woman’s group that makes quilts for people in needs, gave us a quilt as a parting gift, which Lexie claimed for her own.

Aryk’s room

We got home and I attacked Aryk’s room. I took down the pictures on the walls, cleared out the closet, and transformed it from a cheerful bedroom that was my child’s home for four years to a sterile space of boxes and furniture.

That’s when the wave of grief really hit me. I suddenly felt horrible to be doing this to Aryk, and to Lexie – taking away their happy home, leaving them in a place of uncertainty.

Everything we have sorted and purged, every childhood pony drawing and too-small top and old Barbie video game that has landed in the trash or donation pile, has felt like a piece of my soul being stripped away.  The cheerful painted masks from around the world have come off the dining room wall and been imprisoned in a box, and those memories feel boxed up with them. Same with the colorful montage of family photos in the hallway. The old Halloween costumes. The boxes of unwanted books. Traces of our family history, pulled away like a scab and carelessly discarded.

The pain in my stomach is real. The deep exhaustion I feel comes from so much more than hours upon hours of packing. It’s a psychic wringing out. I wish there was someone I could talk to about this, but I know no one on this planet who has made this kind of life-changing decision and told the story.

Bob

Except my husband, my partner in life, who confessed to me that he sometimes also stops and says, what the hell are we doing?

And that, somehow, makes me feel a little better.

The Purge (Part 2)

BOB

I’ve read about people jettisoning everything they own and moving to Mexico with just a couple of suitcases and a dream.

Other people pack all their things up and have professional movers transport them to their new, permanent home south of the border.

We belong to a third category, one we are inventing.  

The Third Category

We love our house and its location in Colorado. We also realize that we won’t be able to travel forever, and its one-level, ranch-style living will be perfect for aging in place someday. Therefore, we plan to come back at some point. In addition, our kids aren’t out of college yet, and they will want their things when it comes time to move into their own places. So we are keeping the house and renting it out to friends. This decision means that we don’t have to get rid of everything. However, it does complicate things by forcing us to decide what we’re going to take with us and what we’re going to store for an extended period of time.

This is where our stuff will live

Filling a Truck

Since we have a truck, we decided to purchase a topper for it so we can take more with us, particularly since we’re also traveling with three cats and Lexie for the first year. At this point, we’re hoping we can get everything we want to take into the truck. (More on how that goes when the time comes.)

Storing the Rest

In the meantime, we’re left with deciding what to put into storage. That’s been difficult for several reasons. First, both and Lisa and I “collect” things. Not necessarily formally collect things, although I do have some stamps and coins that I collected when I was a kid, but more along the lines of accumulating things and keeping them on the off chance we may want them later. We had accumulated so much stuff that when we built the garage at our current house, we had to make it extra big so we could store all of this stuff.

Purging

We fit all our stuff in 3 of these. We are trying to cut down to 2.

Knowing that the more we store, the more a larger storage space will cost each month, which could produce a very large bill over many years, we realized we need to undertake a purge. Actually, it is more like a pare-down. It is my goal to pare down by one-third. I have a decent idea of what that looks like, since when we moved to Colorado in 2009 we moved everything in three 8’ x 8’ x 16’ PODS. Therefore, I’d like to reduce what we store by the equivalent of one POD, or 1,024 cubic feet.

Working backward from that number would require us to rent a 2,024 cubic foot storage unit. We’ve rented a 10’ x 20’ x 11’ (2,200 cubic feet) unit so the math works out. All that leaves is the pare-down. More on that later.

To be continued ...

Prelude

LISA

I know people who have lived in the same place their whole lives. Most people, I suspect. My high school peers. Friends from childhood. People in my church, who tell me stories of their parents taking them to the same church when they were young. I have one family of seven cousins who have all settled down within 20 miles of their childhood home outside of Harrisburg, PA. I don’t know if any of them has ever journeyed any farther afield than the Jersey Shore – or even wanted to. I often envy their closeness, their sense of community. They are there for each other’s weddings, baby showers, Baptisms, every birthday, every Christmas, every Thanksgiving. They never miss. They know every street in their community like it has been tattooed inside their brains.

But that’s not me. That has NEVER been me.

A nomadic childhood

Some of it was by circumstance. The fact is, I never even had a chance to live in one place my entire life. My dad was an accountant for GTE (and various evolutions), so by the time I was born, Number 3 of an eventual eight kids in an Irish/Italian/German/French, very Catholic family, the brood had already moved a couple of times. I started life in Williamsport, PA, my parents’ hometown, but only after they spawned their first couple of kids while living in New Cumberland, PA. We were in Billtown long enough for my parents to have me and my brother Michael before we were on the road again.

Warren, Pennsylvania. Syracuse, New York. Littleton, Massachusetts. Higganum, Connecticut. Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, where I finished high school and went off to Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in South Jersey.

A nomadic adulthood

The first time I made the choice to move, as opposed to being moved, was after I graduated from Glassboro with a degree in mass communications and my parents announced that they were moving again, this time to Vienna, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC.  The opportunity to launch my broadcasting career in the Nation’s Capital was so compelling that I went along.

I got a job in the news department of WMZQ, a Top 40 country radio station, and then at the Associated Press, which was the largest news organization in the world. As soon as I saved enough to move out of my parents’ house, I moved into DC, and then to Arlington, VA. Living in Washington was a fascinating experience, but I found a culture of pursuit of status and government bureaucracy a bit stultifying and champed at the bit to leave.

Traveling woman

I started traveling. I visited San Francisco, England, Scotland, France and Switzerland. I backpacked through the Loire Valley and southern France. I joined the Ski Club of International Journalists and skied in Colorado, Italy and Spain.

Turning point

When I was 30, I decided it was time to pursue work abroad. An opening came up on AP’s World Desk in New York, the news agency’s way station to becoming a foreign correspondent. I considered a stint in New York a necessary evil to reach my goal - it would be crowded and loud, all skyscrapers and their shadows, with no nature in which to recharge. I would hate it.

Instead I fell in love

I fell in love with Central Park

From the moment I arrived in NY, I was hooked by that dirty, cacophonous, unpredictable, multicultural, over-the-top, awe-inspiring city. I could almost feel the creative pulse flowing into my body through the soles of my feet the moment they touched the ground at Penn Station. When I went for my first glorious run in Central Park, I almost flopped into the grass on the Great Lawn weeping with joy. Something inside me was opened up. The world got bigger. I got the job, and the Upper West Side of New York became my personal nirvana.

Three and a half years later, I was posted to Puerto Rico as a foreign correspondent covering the Caribbean islands. I had finally done it!

But oops, love

Alas, love interfered with my “travel the world” dreams in the form of Bob Greenawalt, a fellow adventurer whom I met a few months before I was posted to PR. Bob also had lived in many places, including Germany, while serving as an officer in the US Army. He followed me to Puerto Rico, but there was no work for a high-powered IT consultant on that perennial depressed island. So after a couple years we returned to NYC, a city we adored that offered employment for us both.

We got married and started a family. The adventure of parenting two gifted, autistic kids kept our feet on the ground for a while.

But after a decade or so in Manhattan and nearby Mamaroneck, the 2008 recession hit and Bob lost his job. We packed up the kids and the cats and headed across the country to the rugged mountains and of Colorado.

And that’s where we’ve been for almost 10 years. We’ve cycled up mountain passes, camped beside lakes, skied down black diamonds, hiked 14ers and drunk our fill of what this state has to offer. But the last kid has graduated from high school, and the next adventure awaits.

Life is short. The world is big. Let’s go!

Hasta La Vista

That’s it, we’re doing it.

Our oldest child Aryk is off at university in England. Our youngest son Gavin has just graduated from high school. Rather than be empty nesters, my husband Bob and I are stepping off the treadmill and hitting the road to spend the next decade or two exploring the planet. 

We are relatively young and healthy, and the stock market has done good things with our investments over the last few years. So we are renting out our house just outside Denver, putting our stuff in storage, and packing up a few suitcases, three cats, our daughter (for a gap year) and our musical instruments and heading south of the border to explore Mexico for the next few years. We plan to spend three months at a time in different communities, mixing up cities, mountains, coast and historic pueblos, to really get beyond just a taste of this glorious country.

I know people think we’re crazy. Whenever I tell them the plan, they look at me uncomprehendingly.

Why are we doing this?

Because travel opens your eyes and heart in ways nothing else can.

Because meeting all kinds of different people expands your horizons.

Because learning a new language stretches your mind and keeps your brain supple.

Because settling in one place forever feels limiting.

Because the ocean is beautiful and the mountains are glorious.

Because thanks to social media we can stay connected to old friends and dear communities while we make new friends and create new communities.

Because Mexico has a low cost of living and a high quality of life.

Because … salsa and mole sauce.

Because … bougainvillea and pelicans.

Because … waves and reefs.

Because … whales and dolphins.

Because … ruins and festivals.

Because … the Day of the Dead and Three Kings Day.

Because … tequila and mezcal.

When we’re done with Mexico, we plan to move on to Central America and South America.

When we’re done with Central America and South America, we’ll give the cats to the kids, ditch the truck, fly across the pond and begin exploring the rest of the planet.

Because life is short. And the world is big. Join us on the adventure!