Retirement Is A Permanent Vacation

In many ways retirement is a permanent vacation.  When you think about how much you looked forward to your vacations back in the days that you were working, you begin to appreciate what a gift retirement is.  But the thing that many people get wrong about their retirement becomes apparent when you look back to those greatly anticipated vacations that you scheduled back when you were working forty or more hours a week.  Remember the research?  Hunting for the best hotels and the best restaurants?  Planning out your time to take advantage of every minute?  They made the vacation experience better and you came to realize that planning for that little escape from work was almost as much fun as the vacation experience itself.  I’m a firm believer that retirement should be the same way.  Just because you have more free time doesn't mean you shouldn’t be careful about how you spend it.  Retirement is a permanent vacation and the opportunities for fun are nearly endless.

Make the most of every day.  Take a moment to think about all the activities you had to put on hold while you were busy building a career.  All the hobbies that you couldn’t get to because you had to work overtime for extra money just to pay the bills.  Those places you dreamed about traveling to can now become a reality if you use your time wisely.  Always have a list of places you want to visit and new things you’d like to experience.  I met an eighty-year-old army veteran on our last trip, and he always had a little notebook (about 3x5) that he carried in his shirt pocket with a pen.  I asked him if it was for his grocery list and he laughed and explained that he had always carried it with him.  It was his “wish list” he said.  He made a list of all the places he wished he could go to as soon as they popped into his head.  He wrote down books that people mentioned and quotes that he liked.  These became his inspiration for future travels and places he wanted to see.  We were on a river cruise going up the Rhine and he had booked the trip for one specific reason.  Last year he had attended a reunion of his old army buddies, and they were talking about their days during the early sixties when they work on the engineering crews that built bridges in Germany during the Cold War.  He loved doing the work and he wondered if any of the bridges still existed.  I could tell by his smile that he had found what he was looking for.  He planned out his trip and had a lot of fun recalling a great experience in his life.

Retirement is a permanent vacation and as much fun as want it to be.

I have many friends who use their retirement to relive moments from their youth.  We live on a lake in New York state, and it’s filled with fisherman every morning who are reliving the time from their youth that they enjoy the most.  If you go near them, you’ll usually hear a little music playing softly and, quite often, it’s music from the sixties or seventies.  They’re content just with reliving a time they truly enjoyed and that is what retirement is all about.  Living in a rural area, some of these fishermen become hunters in the fall and capture another time from when they were younger.  Many of them tell stories about taking trips with their family to some log cabin and they seem to become younger just talking about it.

Something interesting happens when you regard retirement as a permanent vacation.  You begin to appreciate it more.  Vacations were always a big deal for us when we were kids because we didn’t have the money to go anyplace far.  Disneyland was out of the question and the theme park in Orlando wasn’t even built yet.  My grandfather came to visit us one summer and being an avid baseball fan, he wanted to go to Cooperstown to see the Hall of Fame.  It’s in a beautiful little town with a lake and mountains in the distance.  Being from Long Island, which is as flat as far as the eye can see, I was mesmerized by the mountains and still am to this day.  It’s no accident that we ended up living on a lake with a view of the Catskills.  In a lot of ways retirement is a permanent vacation and I relive my memories from youth every morning as I gaze out onto the lake.

I didn’t like fishing when I was growing up and I had no desire to hunt but what I did spend my time daydreaming about was seeing far off lands and the ruins of ancient civilizations.  I knew I would travel to these places someday.  I had no idea when because I was always working and I had no idea how because I never had the money.  But I happen to believe that if you can imagine it, you can make it happen.  I am fortunate enough to be able to live that out every day and am always planning the next trip because we live by the philosophy that retirement is a permanent vacation.  It’s time to get out and see the world.  It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!

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