Sounds glamorous but quite worrisome…

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When we decided to travel the world beginning this upcoming Halloween, Tom’s retirement date, we knew the tasks associated with changing our lives to this degree would be daunting. We have made a purposeful point of not getting caught up in the excitement by staying task-oriented and preparing for endless “what ifs” by playing our own devil’s advocate.  

Doing so has resulted in some sleep-stealing worrying one does at 3:00 am. We are not strangers to this particular effect of worrying. Last night we both lay awake between 2:00 am and 4:00 am, tossing and turning, aware of each other’s state, trying not to talk to further our alertness. Finally, we drifted off only to have Tom’s alarm clock startle us both at 6:50. We got some good worrying in!

We ask ourselves so many questions, not so much to put a damper on our adventure, but to maintain a sense of the reality of what is yet to come. “They say” that worry is a useless emotion. If worrying prompts or motivates one to take self-preserving measures, then worry has some unmitigated value.  

Fear in itself is a powerful motivator. Overcoming fear is next in line. The healthy self-love and appreciation we experience after overcoming fear are the greatest rewards life has to offer us in our continuing search for personal growth and self-discovery.  

Oh, good grief, does this mean we will zip line or bungee jump when we spend three months in Belize, beginning in February 2013? Or, will we ride an inner tube through the water caves in the rain forest, the roofs covered with guano (gee, I always wanted to find a use for that word, meaning “bat poop”, if you didn’t already know) while I am terrified of bats? Or, will we ride a hot air balloon in Kenya (during our three-month stay) over the Great Migration in the Serengeti National Park? Or, will we welcome a 275-pound warthog into the kitchen where we will live for three months beginning December 2013 in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, living among the wildlife with no barriers?

Warthog in the kitchen doing “crumb patrol.”
We won’t have to do any of these, but most likely we will do some of these, finding ourselves exhilarated by the life-changing experiences, to finally be “stepping outside the box,” taking the risks and reveling in the process together.

What if we show up at one of our many prepaid vacation homes throughout the world to find out that we were scammed, with all of our due diligence when no such owner or house exists? We’ll take a deep breath, get online as fast as possible, and find a place to stay for a few days while we figure it out. We’ll have lost up to three months’ rent, the maximum time we will stay in any vacation home. But, we’ll continue on, knowing full well that we chose this risk as part of the adventure.

What if one of the five cruises we have booked thus far encounters a storm and is unable to “drop us off” to our desired location a day or two prior to the end of the cruise and instead goes to a different port some 500 miles away? We will go to the next port, get off, and find a flight, a train, a ferry to our planned location.

What if one of us has a gallbladder attack requiring surgery while we are in a remote location? We are purchasing emergency evacuation insurance that will take us back to the states to our desired location or at least to the nearest big city hospital.  

What if our passports or wallets are stolen? We are getting second passports to be kept separately from my purse and Tom’s wallet. We have scanned all of our credit cards with contact information, driver’s licenses debit cards, and banking information to a secure cloud. All we’ll ever need is a WiFi location to immediately contact the necessary parties.

How will we, both gluten-free, not eat the homemade pasta, bread and pastries while spending almost three months in a 17th century stone farmhouse in Tuscany, beginning June 15, 2013? We will either try it and pay the price or, we will choose not to try it and instead enjoy the local produce and meats.


So, worrying we will do! And, surely along the way, we’ll be surprised, disappointed, scared, and “ripped off” asking ourselves how we let this happen, how we made this mistake, why we left our family and friends behind to seek out adventure.  

Then again, we’ll be amazed, enthralled, enriched, and enlightened and most of all, grateful, to be sharing this experience together for as long as we choose, and for as long as we can. So we’ll miss the ferry, the flight gets canceled, the mosquitoes are biting, the heat is overwhelming, we can’t get online, and then, the giraffes are hogging the road when we are trying to get to the grocery store!

A herd of Giraffe hogging the road in Marloth Park, South Africa (not our photo).

Snail mail solution…Tasks piling up…

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I don’t like snail mail. Every day between noon and 3:00 PM, the white rickety US mail trunk comes bobbing down our bumpy private road, the driver bouncing about, oblivious to the numerous potholes, the narrow road, and the little dogs.  

Living on a private road of six homes, situated on a narrow peninsula, the little dogs can roam freely. Sorrowfully, about 15 years ago, our little five-year-old Aussie, Bart, was run over by the then mailman who later commented, “Yeah, I’d thought I hit something but didn’t think I needed to stop to investigate.”

Had it not been for the second kiss goodbye to Tom that day that inspired me to follow him outside and kiss him through the open car window, I wouldn’t have noticed Bart lying dead behind Tom’s back tire. He would have backed up driving over him, assuming he had killed him. Thank goodness, Tom was (and still is) deserving the second kiss. 

That’s one reason I don’t like the mailman, the truck, or the mail itself, an endless barrage of junk indicating we are on some kind of arbitrary, categorical list that perpetually invades our privacy. 

The second reason I don’t like the mail is simple: about halfway through every vacation, I start thinking about the fact that this glorious experience has to come to an end. And, what is the first thing you do when you get home from a vacation??? GET THE DARNED MAIL!!! The therapeutic benefit of this much needed time away turns into a dreadful experience of wading through the annoying pile of useless paper. (We went paperless years ago on all of our monthly/annual/quarterly obligations).

After rifling through this mess, there remains perhaps one item worthy of a toss into the pile on the kitchen counter, which invariably requires some type of task in order to warrant its eventual disposal. I hate mail.

In my mind, one of the major contributors to my desire to travel the world is this: We won’t have to come home to the mail! Ah, but who are we kidding? Do you think it’s easy to get rid of mail?  Mail is relentless! Mail seeks and finds. There is no freedom from the mail!

So, when we started making the daunting “to do” list that will make this many years-long adventure possible, at the very top is “what do we do about the mail?”  

It’s not that simple. One might think we should get a PO box, sending all the mail there. No, this won’t work.  It piles up and then what? Have a family member collect it, go through it, and send it to us? No, that’s too much to ask with everyone’s busy lives and their own mail to contend with. 

Every dilemma has a solution, right? We’re assigning a mail forwarding company the task of our mail. They give us an address, receive the mail, toss the junk, scanning, and sending by email anything we may need to review and assess its value.  

If we choose to touch it for some odd reason, they will snail mail it to us anywhere in the world, overnight if need be. It’s not costly and requires little time commitment plus, partial mail freedom. Full mail freedom only occurs a period of time after one’s demise. We’ll settle for partial. Cost: about $10 month plus additional fees for scanning mail and for sending us anything oversees. One task, resolved. 

Now back to the required second passport for obtaining visas; the visas themselves; the scanning every photo we’ve ever taken; the international health insurance issues; the medical evacuation insurance; the immunizations; the process of renewing prescriptions; the packing of two suitcases each with enough to last us for however long; the disposal of everything we have owned for 26 years; the estate sale at the end; the international cell phones and new computers with an external hard drive loaded with 100’s of movies, TV shows, e-books; the ability to have Internet access worldwide; Tom’s retirement party; the comprehensive spreadsheets of all projected expenditures including fixed expenses, taxes, banking, exchange rates and of course, the itinerary including cruises, ferry rides, air travel, train travel, vacation home rentals, the safari, all of which is already booked out to January 2015.

Oh, oh, I just heard the mail truck bouncing down the bumpy road, the bobble-headed driver behind the wheel. I’d better go check it out!  Just think, only 7 months and 21 days left to partial mail freedom. Yeah!

Changing clocks…Changing life…

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Sunday morning we both jumped out of bed at 6:00 am with a peculiar sense of urgency to begin the painstaking process of changing the myriad clocks in our home. Daylight savings began during the night.  

Over the 21 years that Tom and I have joyfully enjoyed life together, we seem to have assigned ourselves, which clocks we each change, two times each year. We scurried about the house, mumbling to ourselves as we adjusted one clock after another, realizing that this will be the last time we will change clocks in this house, in this state of Minnesota and perhaps in this country.  

In 7 months and 22 days from today, our journey will begin. Tom retires on Halloween after 42 years on the railroad (I retired 16 months ago) and off we go to the adventure of our lives, time being relevant to us in the future only in terms of the time of our next cruise, the time of our next flight, the time of the next ferry, or the time when we move into yet another vacation home.  

As we each finished our last clock, oddly about the same moment, I said to Tom, “We need a domain name for our future website and blog.”  

He chuckled, and said, “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.” It’s equally odd how couples often have thoughts simultaneously. We never cease to be amazed by this phenomenon.

We had been mulling over some names the past month, as we booked our plans well into the future, knowing the time to document this process was coming near.

Last year, I wrote my first blog, WorldWideWillie.blogspot.com as our beloved Australian Terrier, WorldWideWillie’s precious life came to an end, finding solace in the process. With over 400 followers, we found comfort in their invisible, lurking presence as I wrote almost daily from Willie’s perspective, his final days, days filled with love, humor, and tears.  

When Tom returned home each night, I read him the daily postings, often crying a river through the sobs that welled up in my chest. Tom cried with me, unashamed by his vulnerability, a charming aspect of his manly demeanor that which I have always adored.

We chose to honor Willie by using part of his name, WorldWide, by adding a 3rd word beginning with a “w.” Sitting at our computers we looked up all the “w” words that may be available as a domain. We stumbled across “Waftage,” a word that means “travel gently by water or air.”

How perfect a word when in fact this blog will be about us leaving our well-established lives here in Minnesota to travel the world, leaving our grown children, including our six adorable grandchildren, other family members, our longtime friends, our amazing neighbors and all of our “stuff,” to be sold off at an estate sale… days before we leave on Halloween, 2012. 

This blog will document a journey that at this point knows no end, a journey meticulously planned to be affordable and yet rich in comfort, visually stimulating, surrounded by nature, filled with history, all the while enjoying that which we have enjoyed the most, simply being together.

We’re lousy photographers, but we’ll post photos. We don’t like tourist traps, but we will visit some. We don’t care to buy trinkets, but we’ll surely buy a few.  

Ironically, neither of us has ardently enjoyed “sightseeing” but, we will seek out those that appeal to us. We don’t like crowds, gridlocked traffic, loud noises, or waiting in line, but we will experience all of these.  

We are both gluten-free, wheat, grain-free and sugar-free. We won’t eat bread, croissants, or pasta. I don’t drink alcohol, Tom drinks a little, but doesn’t like wine. Tom doesn’t like to go for walks. I love walks.  Occasionally, we’ll walk.

Then why will we do this? 1. Because we have figured out a way to afford to make this possible with some creative planning, which we’ll share with you along the way. 2. Because we want to!  

More than the concept of world travel in itself, we relish in the concept of stepping outside the box; getting out from behind our computers with fingers flying across the keyboard with our latest preoccupation; getting out of our comfy chairs while watching one of our big flat-screen TVs playing a popular premium hi-def series; playing another rambunctious competitive game of Wii Bowling or looking forward to the next great homemade meal.  

We have loved every minute of our lives, whether hanging out with family or friends or looking out the window for another delightful morsel Mother Nature tosses our way: an eagle swooping into the trees outside our house, a beaver building a den along the shoreline, a pack of coyotes looking for “little dog lunch.” We have loved it all.

So, we registered our domain name early Sunday morning. We poured ourselves a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, topping each cup with a dollop of real whipped cream, and sat down at the bar in the kitchen. We both smiled, eyes locked on each other. The little crinkles around his eyes made a wave of something wonderful wash over me.

We both looked up at the same time to notice we hadn’t changed the time in the big clock in the kitchen. We both jumped up simultaneously, and said, “I’ll get it!” We laughed. We have all the time in the world.