Hmmm…I retired at the end of last year after three careers and 40 years of professional level jobs. Retirement is real and rocks.
My view at this moment … the mighty St Lawrence river
Hmmm. one more old fart retrospective here. I retired in 2011, after 8 years as an Army officer in 'Nam and other fun places, then 38 years of high-level computer work and international standards development for DoD and the US Patent Office. My wife worked two more years while we cleaned up the loose ends of our lives and moved from Alexandria, VA to Sarasota, FL. She then worked three years from down here, with us going up to DC one week each month, which gave us a great transition from the working life to retirement. life.
This is our back yard view, where we finish our bottle of wine every night after supper:
Yeah, it's not downtown DC, but you can get used to it. Daytime's not too bad, either:
I do volunteer computer work (for free) on a small scale for places that interest me, like the country club we belong to, to keep the tennis court operation running smoothly. I'm there playing five mornings each week:
My wife, on the other hand, is a pure political animal, having spent her life working for the Governor of Colorado and a Colorado congressman, then in national-level healthcare management, finally retiring from a senior vice-presidency at the National Health Council. She has become heavily involved in politics down here, especially with the League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, which amount to damned nearly a full-time unpaid job. But she still gets out to the tennis courts for four mornings each week.
And we do travel for 8 to 12 weeks each year, mostly to Europe and fairly long cruises (trans-Atlantic, Hawaii, Panama Canal, with Australia and NZ in the works).
What I would emphasize about retirement is that there's not much point in detailed planning, other than financial. It will become what you make of it on the fly -- we had no idea what we'd be doing, really. You'll probably develop a lot of new friends and relationships that may come as surprises. And there may always be new complications like COVID that turn everything upside-down.
When I retire I will never see 8 am again. Probably not 9 am either. That is unless I am coming home from playing poker all night. Just sayin.
I thought that, too. But then I found out that with thousands of active tennis players in the area, you need to be up by 7:15 most mornings to run your computer programs to beat the tennis club computers and get 8:00 or 9:30 am tennis court reservations to beat the Florida heat. Nothing is ever simple...