I was relieved to get my first dose of the Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 vaccine recently. Shortly after receiving my jab the friendly nurse at the vaccination centre handed over my vaccination card with a date stamped on it and a space for the date of my second dose. She smiled and with a twinkle in her eye she said… “Here it is, your passport to freedom”. Her words summarizing exactly how I felt.
My husband also had his vaccine a few days before mine and just like mine, it was easy, painless
As we approach the end of 2020, the old quote by German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” makes us reflect on a year of extraordinary events.
This old quote has been used so many times since it first appeared in his book of aphorisms in 1888. Ever since then it has been used as a self-affirming idea during difficult times. We are often eager to rationalize pain and suffering with the belief that it is during hardships and struggles
We are living through such strange times; the world has not lived through a major pandemic for more than a hundred years and here we are experiencing something extraordinary. Our lives in lockdown feel at times totally surreal like we are just taking part in an eery film or a really scary dream, nothing feels real. We step outside our homes to walk on roads devoided of the usual chaotic traffic, town centers that are deserted, shops, and restaurants closed.
What is even more incredible about
Last year in December I wrote a post about our new home “Just in time for Christmas”, about downsizing from our large family home.
Since our big downsizing, we have been happily adjusting to our new neighborhood, as well as getting used to life in a more compact home. It surprised us at how fast we adapted and in fact thrived in our new place, adapting easily to the more cozy rooms and realizing that our petit home is indeed the perfect size for us at this new stage of our lives.
Our townhouse is so easy to look after, ensuring a much shorter list of domestic chores. A communal garden that is blissfully looked after by a gardener is something that has suited us so much better and it has been a joy living in the city center with all the amenities nearby; lovely sandy beaches all within walking distance of where we live. We feel that it is safe to lock up our home whenever we need to travel for long periods of time; our neighbors are very friendly and they keep an eye on things whilst we are away, which is very reassuring.
We have also sold our two cars and bought just one smaller car to share. In fact our car is rarely used and stays parked in our drive most of the time since we live so central it is easy to walk everywhere. Brian has also waved goodbye to his beloved motorbikes, a Harley and a BMW, which were just taking up all the space in our tiny garage and costing us money. He felt that he was not riding them enough to justify their upkeep.
Retirement has also suited us very well indeed, we don’t miss our jobs, not even a little bit. We still often pinch ourselves thinking how lucky we are to be in this a position of total freedom enjoying life on our own terms. At our age, we can’t take time for granted any longer. the time to make things happen is now.
So what is this about a “new home”?
The “new home” I am talking about here is a new proposition altogether, one that will give us the freedom of the open road, the flexibility of changing our travel plans on a whim, with no need to book hotels, flights or research the best transport routes anywhere. A home on wheels.
Meet our motorhome:
Tiny living at a whole new level
Although we have talked about our dream of traveling around Europe and even further afield in a motorhome many times for the past few years, we were unsure of when it would be the best time to take the plunge. On a recent visit to a large motorhome showroom near us, we spotted the above seven-meter Burstner van and loved it immediately. Originally our plan was to buy a second-hand van, but we changed our minds when we realized the many benefits of having a brand new van, in particular, one that was being sold at a very good end-of-season discount price.
Our new motorhome will be ready to be collected on the 4th of January and we have been busy thinking and organizing all the logistics of fitting things like solar panels, extra leisure batteries, wi-fi, gas system, and all the items that it will make the van feel like a home and make us self-sufficient on the road.
There is also a question of deciding where to store the van when we are not using it since our townhouse drive is far too small for it. We have now found a place that is very near our home, it is safe and not too expensive.
Travel plans for 2019
Traveling around the UK and Europe is the obvious choice for us in the foreseeable future. A huge and diverse continent that we barely know, even though it is almost at our doorstep. Time has come for us to remedy that, our newly acquired home on wheels will give us the flexibility we want to explore this vast continent at our own pace.
Taking our home with us it should make it easier to travel into the heart of places, making authentic connections with the natural world, other cultures, finding out about local markets, festivals and enjoy meeting other like-minded people. Seeking new horizons, unique experiences, the pure joy of total freedom from everyday routines and chores.
After some trial runs near home we will be crossing the pond into France and possibly heading South towards Spain and Portugal for the rest of the winter, like snowbirds looking for the warmth of milder climates. I hope we find it. Later on, when summer arrives in Europe we will be heading North into Scandinavia and particularly Norway for some fresher weather and to experience the midnight sun.
We are not yet sure how long this first tour of Europe is going to last, but perhaps that is the whole point of having your home with you? A home on wheels gives fluidity and freedom to move without a need for firm plans.
What will the challenges of life in a van be like?
Any reasons to worry? Will we find our groove? I am sure there will be many exciting times ahead as well as many challenges; we are almost total newbies and have not done any real motorhome traveling before ( except for driving a small van around Iceland for 9 days a few years ago, which we loved), but we are up for this new chapter and any challenges that come our way.
I am an extrovert who thrives on meeting people, I love waking up every day in a new place with the promise of something new and exciting. Brian is an introvert who enjoys the company of others in smaller doses. He finds his equilibrium more easily when able to have some time to himself and stay still for a little while. He gets most excited by wilderness and natural beauty, me by bustling cities and history. But we overlap enough to be confident that we can both find enough of what we really enjoy on our travels. We both believe that life on the road traveling around Europe in our motorhome will give us a mixture of both worlds and satisfy mine as well as his personality and desires.
But only time will tell how each of us will experience this new life ahead and this new concept of what “a home on wheels” means.
We are both super excited about this new adventure, new landscapes, experiences, the tastes of new culinary delights, the people that we will meet. Also, we know that traveling by motorhome might not be the only type of travel we are planning to do in 2019 since we are keen to keep open-minded and change plans whenever we feel like it. Stay tuned to find out how we get on.
Thank you all for reading my ramblings here on this little blog and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all great times ahead for 2019. I hope the “New Year” finds you in good health, surrounded by good friends and family, living or working towards living your dreams to the maximum.
Enjoy each and every day, take time to think about what you really want and make it happen.
I leave you with two favorite quotes…
“What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.”
“Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”
Best Wishes for a Healthy and Happy 2019.
I am writing this post from my new home. We moved here only a few days ago, just in time for Christmas. Perhaps not surprisingly Brian and I had underestimated how hard it was going to be, this whole process of downsizing house malarkey. Thinking about not only the logistics and practicalities that took many months of planning, the financial implications but also and perhaps the hardest challenge was the emotional rollercoaster of closing a life chapter. It was harder than we thought to let go of the memories that we had associated with our home.
For Brian perhaps even harder than for me, since the house had once belonged to his parents and there were still many lingering memories of their lives there, in particular of Brian’s father who has passed away a few years ago. Brian’s mother now lives in Scotland, and interestingly when I invited her to come over for one last visit to her former home she turned down my invitation. Wisely she told me on the phone “It is not the house, but the people that matter the most and as long as we are together it does not matter where we live“. Very wise words indeed.
We sold and/or gave away most of our stuff and even after a major downsizing we realized we needed to downsize some more…we still had too much stuff. Nothing can prepare you for how stressful and exhausting the move is going to be. Once our house was on the market we had to ensure that the house and garden were clean and presentable at all times…no easy task when we were both still working our full-time jobs. Particularly when Autumn arrived and with it, a season of falling leaves that nearly drove us to despair…blowing leaves out of the drive became Brian’s second full-time job. Selling our house took a lot longer than we had expected which just added to the stress and worry. It is true that however long you think the whole process is going to take you can be certain that it will be a lot longer than you had expected.
On the day of the house sale completion, we went back to the house for one last goodbye and I took some photos of the empty rooms. Stripped of all our belongings suddenly the house did not feel like a home any longer, without furniture the empty rooms looked huge and soulless. One of our lasts tasks in the old home was to write a note to the new owners to inform them about things such as when to feed the pond fish, also explaining about my beloved Araucaria tree from Brazil, plus all the different house keys and codes for the alarm etc.
Our former home now just soulless empty rooms
As we drove out of the front house drive for the last time we sat inside our car in silence for one last look at our family home. There was sadness for both of us, but our sadness did not last long as we drove towards our new home we felt reassured that we had made the right decision for us. A house is just bricks and mortar, we take all the memories with us and we are now looking forward to starting building some new memories in our new home.
The process of unpacking, building furniture, connecting phones, wifi, satellite TV etc has been exhausting but we are getting there and our house is now starting to feel like a proper home. We love it and we already feel that it is perfect for us. We are only a very short walk through pleasant and well-kept gardens to the town centre with all the amenities such as a wide variety of restaurants, shops, cinema, theatre, gym, coffee shops, supermarket etc. We can also walk to the beach and there are many beautiful coastal walks within very easy access.
The house is a lot smaller than our previous home, but that is precisely what we wanted. We still have enough bedrooms for our two children ( now adults with their own homes) and a spare bedroom with a comfortable sofabed doubling up as a study room. The kitchen/dining room/sitting room is all open plan, with three bathrooms and a small garage. We have a very small outside space facing a communal garden. It is a perfect lock-up-and-go type of property, low maintenance and it suits us well for this next stage of our lives. We could not be happier.
Open plan kitchen/dining/sitting area
Retirement Update
It has only been two months since I have taken early retirement from my job as a Dietitian working for the NHS. My office farewell party was organized by my line Manager and other work colleagues who threw a travelling themed party at a local restaurant…..they certainly know me well, I felt totally spoiled.
My office send-off party
I also got invited by one of the GP Practices I have worked closely with for many years to join them for a farewell meal at another local restaurant.
Another farewell party
Another very thoughtful farewell do was at the Community Hospital, where they surprised me with flowers, chocolate, cards, etc. I came away with so many lovely and thoughtful gifts and enough flowers to open my own florist shop. Goodbyes are always emotional and a little bit sad, but I am sure that I will be staying in touch with many of all these wonderful people.
Recently friends and family have been asking me how I am getting on with being a retiree…bored yet? I can report that it has been great, I have not had a minute to get bored…moving house might be to blame for that. Seriously I am loving it, my mornings have been so much more relaxed as I take my time to get ready for the day ahead. Gone are the rushing around the house to have a shower, get dressed, have breakfast, drive to work often in the dark, cold, raining mornings. I no longer get that awful Monday morning feeling anymore.
To ease me back into a life of no commitments I did enrol myself in two very interesting courses which kept me out of mischief for a little while. I have just finished the said two courses which have been running for the past 10 weeks. A WordPress course, which has helped me to better understand how to fix and sort out some of my blog issues, although I did find this course was a bit too technical for me and I did struggle to make sense of it. In any case, I did enjoy the learning environment and also got to meet some like-minded people and make some lovely new friends. I also attended a Photography course, which I absolutely loved and although it was only a beginners class I feel that I have learned a lot and hope that my newly acquired photography skills will help me to improve the blog photos.
Plans for 2018
We are sadly saying “goodbye” to 2017 in few days time and what a year it has been for us.
We started the year spending 3 amazing weeks Down Under visiting our wonderful cousins Yvonne, John, Lexie and Maddy in Perth. Also cousin Carol in Caloundra (near Brisbane) and we could not have been better looked after and totally spoiled by them all. We also visited Hamilton Island, the Whitsundays, the Great Barrier Reef and finished off in gorgeous Sydney. It was an epic trip with great memories to last us a lifetime. I have written four blog posts about our trip.
A Koala hug with Brian and our cousins Yvonne and Carol
We returned from Australia and started the hard and painful process of downsizing, looking for a much smaller property and selling our large family home. We spent the summer working hard towards these goals and I requested early retirement from my job. My last day at work was October 19th just before my Birthday.
In September we decided to leave it all behind for two weeks of fun, sun and delicious food in the stunning Mauritius Island. I am yet to write more about our exploits there, but I did write a post about our hike up Le Morne Brabant which was very hard work but very rewarding.
Mauritius Le Morne Brabant Moutain
I will be welcoming 2018 at the beach in the South of Brazil with my daughter Chloe and my Brazilian family. Sadly Brian and our son James are not able to join us there this time due to work commitments. So it is going to be a mother/daughter trip again.
Brian and I hope to travel a lot in 2018, but we don’t yet have any firm plans, therefore, watch this space as it all will be revealed when we have made some decisions at the beginning of the year.
To all of you who have been following my journey, who have supported me through reading this silly little blog, commenting and offering friendship I am immensely grateful and I want to wish you all plenty of health, loving relationships, success in all your endeavours and safe travels for 2018.
I leave you with a beautiful and peaceful Mauritius sunset and two inspiring quotes for 2018:
As the sun sets in 2017 I wish you all the most wonderful New Year…cheers to 2018!
I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination. Quote byJimmy Dean
What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail? Quote by Robert H. Shuller
A gondola ride in Venice…can it’s popular appeal put you off?
It was a recent conversation with my son James that has inspired me to write this post. We are having a cup of tea in the garden during the recent British August Bank Holiday weekend, one of the warmest ever recorded in the UK. Our mother-son bonding chat goes towards our love of travelling….. when he hits me with this sentence “I don’t like travelling to popular places”… Me: “Are you serious? What do you mean?” He: “when everyone goes travelling
World…come into my arms!
I am taking voluntary early retirement from a job I love, but so far have no regrets on my decision. I am now working my “notice” and will finish work by the end of October. A scary thought? Not at all, since I have considered this decision very carefully.
I went back to University to study Dietetics later on in life (after working in a soulless job in a Bank) and from the very start of my course, I knew I had finally found something that I was passionate about. For the past 11 years, I have loved the interactions with patients, the camaraderie of working with other health professionals learning from each other, the feeling of being valued, and the rewards of doing something meaningful that can help improve people’s quality of life.
But it is now with thoughts about my own quality of life, longevity, new passions and how to better spend the great commodity of “TIME” that I have started feeling the urge to make changes, shake things up a bit, move on to the next stage of my life. As much as I have enjoyed my work, I feel I lack control of my own time, I am time deprived, I hear a clock that is ticking so fast and there is nothing I can do to stop it. And energy; work can be so draining and leave so little energy for anything else. Work takes so many hours of our everyday lives, at times I feel cheated and robbed of my very existence. As I get older time becomes even more precious, forces me to confront my longevity, realising that I am not here for all eternity.
“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.” Harvey MacKay
The funny thing is that when I tell people about my early retirement plans I get strange looks, people say “but you are too young to retire” or they ask me with in a slightly nervous tone “so what are you going to do now?” , a question loaded with anxiety, suspecting that my free time will be wasted, that I will NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO, that I will be bored. Is that a possibility? Being bored with too much time on my hands? In reality, I don’t really understand this concept since there are so many things that interest me, but at the moment I lack the time to pursue. This very blog, for instance; being able to write more, being able to read more….. there are so many books I want to read, places I want to visit, travelling, hiking, taking advantage of other learning opportunities such as learning more about photography, yoga, meditation, exercise more, meet up with friends and family, have time to think…to just be. The list is endless and time is short. I will most definitely not have the time to be bored, I am sure of it.
I feel extremely lucky to be in good health, to be financially independent, no longer needing to work for a living. I have worked since I was 18 years old, so now I feel I have paid my dues. I do not feel any sense of guilt about taking early retirement. In fact, I feel very entitled to it, excited about it. I have worked hard (paid and unpaid jobs), at times having many jobs at once, I have so far lived a very productive life and have contributed to society, paid taxes. I know that I will continue to contribute to the world around me in many other ways, such as voluntary work opportunities or spend some of my free time helping others….and paying more taxes no doubt.
There is NOT a lot to rant about
I first downsized my life almost 30 years ago. The impetus of being young and single, a bit of cash in my pocket, a backpack full of dreams and a taste for adventure was all I needed back then. Fast forward a lifetime lived in a first world country full of the trappings of a capitalist society, how easy is it to downsize my current lifestyle? What are the compromises my husband and I are prepared to make to design the future life we want to live?
We have been pondering these questions for some time now, as the clock ticks on eating into minutes, days, months and years; making us realise that a big chunk of our lives is now over and we are not getting any younger. We most certainly have lived more than fifty percent of our life expectancy and no doubt the most healthy years of our lives. A huge chunk of a life spent working, earning money and accumulating stuff that now feels like a pile of clutter and things we no longer need. It is often so ingrained into our brains to believe that progress is directly related to bigger, better…more is more… that downsizing can feel like going backwards.
For us this is intentional downsizing, we feel very lucky that our downsizing is not due to necessity, poor health, financial issues, divorce, or any other distressing reason. It is mostly because we both feel that the time has come to shed some of the no longer needed things and stuff that have kept us pedalling at full speed on the hamster wheel in order to maintain a lifestyle. Living in a large house, the expense of having more than one car, motorbikes, and buying things that we don’t actually need. Although we have never been slaves to the keep up with the Jones type of mentality or caring at all about designer gear, expensive clothes, handbags and shoes. There have been times in the past when we did not think so carefully about our expenditure and have parted with our hard earned cash without a second thought. Our jobs have afforded us a comfortable lifestyle. Something that we are very grateful for. In recent years though, there has been a shift towards being savvier with money, save more, invest better, planning for a future of not needing to work for a living. We have started appreciating more the many things that can be enjoyed for free, like being outdoors surrounded by beautiful nature, spending more time hanging out with friends and family, choosing activities that are good value for money.
Our house in a leafy, quiet road in the suburbs is for sale
We are selling our home
A large For Sale sign is now placed in front of our home. When I first saw it there, coming home from work one evening, it did make me stop in my tracks and feel a little sad. It is, after all, our home, there are many happy memories lived here; our children playing in the garden, barbeques on the deck., parties with friends, large family gatherings with enough room to easily accommodate everyone. We have enjoyed the seclusion of living in a private, quiet, leafy road, surrounded by a forest of maple and pine trees, wild flowers, a nearby protected heathland. Wildlife such as squirrels, fox, bats, rabbits and deer are often spotted in our garden eating our plants and grass. And a variety of birds including robins, owls, jays, woodpeckers tweeting away like a symphony waking us up in the early spring and summer mornings.
We have invested a lot of time, effort and money into our home, but in recent years we started resenting the time and effort spent maintaining a large house, a high maintenance garden with lawns to mow, hedges to trim, weeding, planting, pruning, patios and driveways to clean. The never ending tasks that take many hours to complete, eating away into the little free time we have in the evenings and weekends. Brian works full time, a stressful job with long hours. I have recently reduced my hours and my job is less demanding and stressful, but again I find most of my spare time taken up by domestic chores. We know that we are no different than most other families around the world who find themselves in the same situation with a poor work and lifestyle balance. One can argue that we could pay for a gardener, a cleaner and at times of desperation we have done that, but for how long do we want to continue feeding the monster?
Time has come to stop thinking about it and to start taking action, we are now in a position to begin making the necessary changes to take better control of our lifestyle. But what kind of lifestyle do we want? I have for years now followed the blogs of people who have taken the plunge to live a simpler life. Some who have sold all of their belongings to live a free and nomadic lifestyle, when all they have is what they can fit into their suitcase or backpacks. Others who have moved to less expensive parts of the world are renting cheaper accommodation, are living off their savings or working part time. People who have swapped a house for a motor home or RV and are living a life of travelling and adventure, seeing the world and living life on their own terms. Some of these people have taken retirement, some have simply quit their jobs and are using their savings to fund a new lifestyle, some are working harder than ever, but doing more satisfying jobs, spending less money on stuff and having more time for experiences and relationships. A huge variation with many shades of downsizing and lifestyle changing decisions.
Quitting my job will be hard for me since
I