We’ve been on the road nearly nine months of a planned your-guess-is-as-good-as-ours. So, because we’re at a year boundary, and we’re like that, we offer some reflections about what we’ve learned.
First, we knew we liked travel, but we had no idea what it would be like to move every few months. And so far it’s been grand! We’ve enjoyed getting to know new places, and the pace has been about right. Our quick trips to Stockholm and Helsinki made us want more: visits of two or more months make us feel like temporary locals (as Rick Steves says).
We’ve been in cities so far, but are now spending two months in different island paradises. We’re really enjoying the slower pace. In other locales there has been so much to do that we have accomplished little of the novel-reading and television watching we planned on in retirement. There’s still plenty to see in Cyprus, but we find ourselves spending a lot of time just sitting outside looking at the water, thinking deep thoughts.
Both of us love languages. We hoped we’d be able to pick up enough of them to communicate as we traveled about. That hasn’t happened so far: the Norwegians really all do speak English, better than we do, and we found Turkish challenging. But we’ve been flexing our language muscles in Cyprus, where we have a (very) rudimentary knowledge of Greek, and we’re looking forward to Italy, with a language we’ve actually studied. And we think we’ll take Italian lessons while we’re there too.
There have been a few challenges. Travelling light means we really can’t buy anything unless it’s edible. (That is some – but not all! – of why we seem so food-obsessed.) In Istanbul, we ran into a thing we covet every few days. But we’ve promised ourselves that if we ever settle down, we’ll swing back through to get all of those lamps and rugs and platters. And simplicity requires discipline. More is not better, however much we sometimes think it is.
And, finally, some reflections on reflecting: we love being retired! It’s given us a real wealth of time to figure out what’s important. And the quality of our lives really is up to us. That’s true for most people most of the time, but it’s become blindingly clear to us over the past months. We are coming to know what matters, and so we spend time on those things every day.
So: we miss our family and friends, but right now we wouldn’t be anywhere else!
