Early Retirement 2012 In Review

From top left, clockwise: At our OLLI holiday party, with my two daughters after completing the Santa Barbara Wine Country half marathon, hiking with our oldest daughter this summer, our February cruise to Hawaii, the family at Mike's retirement dinner, soaking up the sun after hiking to Rosalie Lake in Mammoth.

With Mike joining me in early retirement this past May, 2012 turned out to be a great year. Our goals in dual early retirement were to crank up the intensity with which we tackled life, continue to focus on activities that would grow our bodies, minds and spirits, and spend half our time traveling.

We made tremendous progress on all fronts. We launched ourselves into several satisfying new activities - backpacking, learning to play the recorder, studying Shakespeare, and beginning bridge. We made advances in several other fairly new activities - tennis, Spanish and long distance bicycling. We ended up achieving a 45% home vacancy rate from the point Mike retired - 102 days on the road from May through December. We vow to do better in 2013!

Here are the highlights from 2012, along with links to the appropriate blog entries:

January/February

• Spend Martin Luther King weekend at Malibu RV Park with friends, and decide the time is right to upgrade to a hard sided trailer in preparation for Mike's early retirement later this year. Within a week of returning home, we order our 2417 TrailManor hard sided folding trailer.
• Explore vegetarianism and discover we quite like it. Moving away from meat results in a 16% reduction in our grocery spend, the surplus which we move over to our Travel allocation. 
• Embark on a two week cruise to Hawaii and back on Cunard's Queen Victoria. Have a wonderful time, but decide that with Mike's retirement delivering more time to explore the world slowly, perhaps cruising will stop being our get-away two week vacation of choice. For the cost of a typical two week cruise, we can spend about 60 days on the road in our RV. 

March/April

• Take delivery on our trailer, and enjoy our maiden voyage to Crystal Cove Moro State Beach. Discover there is a bit of a learning curve we will need to overcome, much to our chagrin.
• Celebrate the one year anniversary of my early retirement.
• Wagon master my first ever RV trip for my camping club at lovely Lake Casitas.

May/June

• Enjoy a very, very special weekend with my daughters, running the Santa Barbara Wine Country Half Marathon.
• Mike retires!
• We take off in our new trailer for a 10 day trip up the Central California coastline. 
• Spend Father's Day weekend with our RV in Big Bear, California, enjoying many wonderful miles of hiking, including a segment along the legendary Pacific Crest Trail.
• Fly to Lake Tahoe to experience the wedding of our youngest daughter.
• Celebrate our 30th Wedding Anniversary in Las Vegas seeing shows galore. (This post, by the way, due to a couple of snarky comments about our packing some good ole PB&J makings to conserve on both calories and spend, leads to a very entertaining follow up post about the value of PB&J vs. fine dining when traveling . . . )

July

• Discover there is a learning curve to being together 24/7. Spend several days discussing our feelings, after which they seem to pretty much fade out and become a non issue. Whew!
• Spend our first ever holiday weekend at home to avoid the 4th of July crowds now that we are both retired. We can now wait and head out after the holiday! 
• Depart on our longest RV trip so far - 24 days through the coastal, wine country and Sierra mountain ranges of Central California. Have a fabulous time, and return home excited to start planning for an even longer trip in the summer of 2013. (See July blog entries)

August/September

• Purchase a cargo trailer for Mike's bicycle as part of our commitment to drive less and bike more about town.
• Spend a long weekend in the Bay Area, fall in love with Mill Valley while hiking the scenic Dipsea trail. When we return we reserve an apartment in Mill Valley for a one month stay in the spring of 2013.
• Close out the summer with two back to back beach RV trips to Newport Beach and San Diego, California.
• Kick off the fall semester of OLLI at our nearby university.
• Spend a fall weekend in Yucaipa, RV'ing and enjoying apple picking season.
• Mike goes on his first ever backpacking trip, three nights in Kings Canyon National Park. He's enthusiastic enough upon his return that I commit to joining him on a one nighter, my first, in 2013.

October/November

• Spend my 50th Birthday weekend in our RV with a return trip to Crystal Cove Moro.
• Enjoy a wild and crazy Halloween celebration weekend with our camping club at the Santa Paula KOA. 
• Travel to China with Gate 1 Travel, a unique tour group that allows guests to intermix organized and independent sightseeing. 
• Travel to Newport, Rhode Island to celebrate Thanksgiving with our just-married daughter and her spouse.

December

• Fill up our calendar with twice as many fun-filled holiday events as in years past, because we no longer need to set aside Sunday as a rest day in preparation for another stress-filled week at work.
• Perform a Christmas song with my Spanish class at our OLLI holiday concert,  killing two birds with one stone:  Singing in public, and doing it in Spanish. Both are a first!
• Spend a week in our RV at beautiful San Elijo State Beach in San Diego, just before the final Christmas countdown begins.
• Plan to end the year attending a ballroom dancing gala at our dance studio. We have so much fun dancing together now that we have a few years under our belt. 

When I look back over the year, a couple of things really stand out: First, we never stopped looking for ways to enrich our lives. Second, each new thing we committed to delivered a tremendous degree of satisfying stimulation we would likely not have achieved otherwise, and often led to other opportunities to expand our early retirement lives. And finally, by remaining so committed to engaging life, our downtime, when we experienced it, was truly enjoyable and pleasant by contrast. 

The net result of the above is that we are absolutely having the best time of our lives. Retirement today, some 20 months after I retired, and 7 months now for Mike, is continuing to evolve and get better with each passing week. We have some wonderful adventures already lined up for 2013, and we are eager to ring in the New Year and get going!