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Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Why'd we choose to do this?
My husband, Joe, has worked at Boeing for nearly 31 years and is ready to hang it up. When he started talking about actually doing it, we thought about how we'd spend our first winter. With both of us (soon to be) retired and living in Seattle, we peered ahead into the gloom and rain of a Pacific Northwest winter and this is what we saw: playing golf in the muck and slime; wishing we could go skiing but knowing that my bad back won't be happy (getting old is really the pits!!); reading lots of books and watching endless movies; doing projects around the house; eating too much and getting fat; and taking little trips around the Northwest just to get out of the house.
None of that appealed to us, so we started thinking about following the snowbirds who head in droves to the south of us. California golf is too expensive, Phoenix and Tucson are too dry and golf is too expensive there, too, and I've spent enough years in Florida to last a lifetime. So we started casting afield: what about going south of the equator? Maybe South America? We've studied a bit of Spanish, so we could bone up on that. But the only places that we can play golf, that we knew of without doing research, were the expensive resorts. That's when we hit upon New Zealand.
Yes, it's a long way away, and it might be pretty expensive, but we both lit up when we thought of the idea. Why not??? We looked into plane tickets and they were doable, so we made our reservations for December 1. That meant Joe really did have to retire, not just keep talking about it. The very next day after we bought the plane tickets, he told everybody at work who had ears that he was leaving Nov. 21, the last Friday before Thanksgiving. Now he was truly committed.
None of that appealed to us, so we started thinking about following the snowbirds who head in droves to the south of us. California golf is too expensive, Phoenix and Tucson are too dry and golf is too expensive there, too, and I've spent enough years in Florida to last a lifetime. So we started casting afield: what about going south of the equator? Maybe South America? We've studied a bit of Spanish, so we could bone up on that. But the only places that we can play golf, that we knew of without doing research, were the expensive resorts. That's when we hit upon New Zealand.
Yes, it's a long way away, and it might be pretty expensive, but we both lit up when we thought of the idea. Why not??? We looked into plane tickets and they were doable, so we made our reservations for December 1. That meant Joe really did have to retire, not just keep talking about it. The very next day after we bought the plane tickets, he told everybody at work who had ears that he was leaving Nov. 21, the last Friday before Thanksgiving. Now he was truly committed.
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