Tag: nomad

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Pick the Right Partner

LISA

If you’re going to turn retirement into an adventure, you better have picked the right partner. I know I did.

I met Bob Greenawalt through the New York Flyers Running Club in early 1993. I went to the meeting place for a speedwork class in an old convent a half block from Central Park in Manhattan, and he was the first person I saw. During our first conversation, we covered all the places we had skied, and he talked about how he was going to Alta the next week. I had just been skiing in Sestriere, Italy, the previous month.
We became fast friends, and over the next few months, we trained for a partner ten-miler in Central Park together, went for long bike rides across the George Washington Bridge and up the Palisades along the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. We took trains to Garrison, NY, and rode 38-mile loops across Bear Mountain.
Puerto Rico

Bob atop a 14er

When I moved to Puerto Rico to become a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, he quit his job and came down for the adventure. Mind you, he had already lived in Germany for 4 ½ years.

Family travel
After we got married and started pursuing the adventure of marriage and parenthood, we took our two children traveling from the start. Canada. England. Germany. France. The Dominican Republic. Puerto Rico. Mexico.
Adventurous spirit
Over the past 9+ years in Colorado, he has ridden a number of mountain passes, and has climbed 26 14ers (mountain2 14,000 feet or higher).
So it’s not a surprise that this is a man who will embark on a true adventure of exploring the world with me now!
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Pain

I had no idea it would be this painful.
We’re in the home stretch now. The packers are coming tomorrow. The movers are coming on Wednesday. And I am having an emotional breakdown. Help!
Church farewells
Yesterday Lexie and I went to Evergreen Lutheran Church for the last time. I was doing the readings and Pastor Vera and the congregation were giving us a blessing for safe travels.
As soon as we walked into the Narthex, people kept coming up to hug us, wish us luck, ask about our adventure, and say goodbye. By the time we got to our seat in the second row, I already had a huge lump in my throat. When it came time to read, I could barely speak for the swell of unexpected emotion constricting my voice. I went up onto the altar and took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, this is very difficult,” I shared shakily from the pulpit. “This is our last time attending this church, and I’m suddenly feeling very emotional. This is a wonderful place and I really love all of you.” Then I took a deep breath, Pastor Vera smiled, and I began.
Her sermon was about answering God’s call and embarking on the journey even if you don’t know the outcome, trusting God and saying yes. From God’s lips to our ears!
More hugs and tears afterward, and the Piecemakers, a woman’s group that makes quilts for people in needs, gave us a quilt as a parting gift, which Lexie claimed for her own.
Aryk’s room
We got home and I attacked Aryk’s room. I took down the pictures on the walls, cleared out the closet, and transformed it from a cheerful bedroom that was my child’s home for four years to a sterile space of boxes and furniture.
That’s when the wave of grief really hit me. I suddenly felt horrible to be doing this to Aryk, and to Lexie – taking away their happy home, leaving them in a place of uncertainty.
Everything we have sorted and purged, every childhood pony drawing and too-small top and old Barbie video game that has landed in the trash or donation pile, has felt like a piece of my soul being stripped away.  The cheerful painted masks from around the world have come off the dining room wall and been imprisoned in a box, and those memories feel boxed up with them. Same with the colorful montage of family photos in the hallway. The old Halloween costumes. The boxes of unwanted books. Traces of our family history, pulled away like a scab and carelessly discarded.
The pain in my stomach is real. The deep exhaustion I feel comes from so much more than hours upon hours of packing. It’s a psychic wringing out. I wish there was someone I could talk to about this, but I know no one on this planet who has made this kind of life-changing decision and told the story.
Bob
Except my husband, my partner in life, who confessed to me that he sometimes also stops and says, what the hell are we doing?

And that, somehow, makes me feel a little better.
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The Purge (Part 2)

BOB
I’ve read about people jettisoning everything they own and moving to Mexico with just a couple of suitcases and a dream.
Other people pack all their things up and have professional movers transport them to their new, permanent home south of the border.
We belong to a third category, one we are inventing.  
The Third Category
We love our house and its location in Colorado. We also realize that we won’t be able to travel forever, and its one-level, ranch-style living will be perfect for aging in place someday. Therefore, we plan to come back at some point. In addition, our kids aren’t out of college yet, and they will want their things when it comes time to move into their own places. So we are keeping the house and renting it out to friends. This decision means that we don’t have to get rid of everything. However, it does complicate things by forcing us to decide what we’re going to take with us and what we’re going to store for an extended period of time.
This is where our stuff will live
Filling a Truck
Since we have a truck, we decided to purchase a topper for it so we can take more with us, particularly since we’re also traveling with three cats and Lexie for the first year. At this point, we’re hoping we can get everything we want to take into the truck. (More on how that goes when the time comes.)
Storing the Rest

In the meantime, we’re left with deciding what to put into storage. That’s been difficult for several reasons. First, both and Lisa and I “collect” things. Not necessarily formally collect things, although I do have some stamps and coins that I collected when I was a kid, but more along the lines of accumulating things and keeping them on the off chance we may want them later. We had accumulated so much stuff that when we built the garage at our current house, we had to make it extra big so we could store all of this stuff.

Purging
We fit all our stuff in 3 of these. We are trying to cut down to 2.
Knowing that the more we store, the more a larger storage space will cost each month, which could produce a very large bill over many years, we realized we need to undertake a purge. Actually, it is more like a pare-down. It is my goal to pare down by one-third. I have a decent idea of what that looks like, since when we moved to Colorado in 2009 we moved everything in three 8’ x 8’ x 16’ PODS. Therefore, I’d like to reduce what we store by the equivalent of one POD, or 1,024 cubic feet.
Working backward from that number would require us to rent a 2,024 cubic foot storage unit. We’ve rented a 10’ x 20’ x 11’ (2,200 cubic feet) unit so the math works out. All that leaves is the pare-down. More on that later.

To be continued …
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