I just left my office at Evergreen Park and Rec District for the last for the last time. I feel really sad. There’s a pain in my stomach.
I’ve never before left a job that I still loved.
Last night there was a farewell party for me. I had to get a picture with everyone I cared about – Liz and Laura and Marissa and Ann Marie and Heart and Heather and Jason and more. Before I left today, I printed out some of the pictures, wrote personal notes, and left them on their desks — just saying thanks for making work here such a wonderful experience. I hope I will be remembered with affection!
Then I drove (choking back tears) out of lovely Evergreen, with its elk and its mountains, its iconic lake and its charming old west downtown, and hundreds of familiar faces, many of which I will never see again.
I know I’m going forward to the next adventure, and the next phase of my life. But wow. I have to get through all this emotion first.
There’s no getting out of it. I just have to feel it.
We’re about to start an adventure. We don’t know where it will lead. It actually took a fairly extensive conversation just a few days ago to even reconstruct the evolution of how we got to where we are now.
I remember first starting to think about what it would look like when our kids graduated high school nearly 12 years ago when we lived in Mamaroneck, NY, just outside New York City. At the time, we lived in a 2400 sq ft house which, even then, had yearly taxes of $15,000. We saw the school district continue to raise taxes and saw that this forced some lifelong Mamaroneck residents from their homes as they could no longer afford the taxes. We realized then that we couldn’t afford to live there once we stopped working so began thinking about what we might do when that time in our life arrived.
Our Lake House in central Vermont
At first, our plan was to go live in our vacation home in Vermont. However, after thinking about that for a few years, we both came to the realization that we wanted more than that, and living in rural Vermont would be pretty boring, and colder than we would want at that stage in our lives during the winter.
By the time we moved to Colorado 8 ½ years ago we had already begun thinking about “hitting the road” in retirement. We began talking about buying a big RV and a big truck to haul it. We talked about traveling the country, exploring and seeing many of the great places that exist in this country. We talked about spending up to a couple weeks at each location, being in the south in the winter and north in the summer. We talked with people about what it would be like to spend the summer in one location and be camp hosts. We even talked about being seasonal Amazon workers. We looked at RVs at RV shows and found some that would work for us.
I was excited about that plan. I had a goal of visiting every national park and hiking and exploring every day. I thought we were set. All we needed was for Lexie to graduate from High School, go off to college and we would be off too.
A book changed our direction
That all changed a year and a half ago when Lisa went to the library to get some travel books for an upcoming trip to Belize. She came back with the book “The International Living Guide to Retiring Overseas on A Budget.”During the exceptionally rainy vacation inBelize, I read the book and immediately told her she needed to read it too.
From that moment our “set” plans changed. We realized that we could expand the traveling and exploration we had planned for the US to the world. We realized that we could really get to know parts of the world that people usually rush through in a few days and we realized that there were just so many places that we wanted to experience. We also realized that if we explored the world while we were still young, we could still come back to the US and explore it in our RV.
That’s it, we’re doing it. Our oldest child Aryk is off at university in England. Our youngest child 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.
The family in London
Our oldest child Aryk is off at university in England. Our youngest child 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 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 back to the kids, ditch the truck, fly across the pond (Atlantic Ocean) and begin exploring the rest of the planet.
Because life is short. And the world is big. Join us on the adventure!
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.
DC was beautiful
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
God, I loved 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 perennially depressed island. So after a couple of 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.
Posted by Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt
