Background
I began planning in earnest for retirement in 2016. I have been thinking about it for much longer than that, but I finally sat down with Excel and began laying out discrete year-by-year plans starting in 2016. There are several things I want to do in retirement, principally coalescing around travel, photography, writing, and continuing education. All of this requires financial wherewithal, of course, and that requires the accumulation and prudent savings of income for many years. I have heard it said that one should retire from one’s career when two conditions are met: 1) You have enough, and 2) You’ve had enough. It seems to me that this is an exceptionally concise and accurate perspective.
When I finally “got down to cases” to plan this next chapter of my life, here is what I developed for a kind of mission statement:
My top 5 objectives for retirement are to:
1. Travel, photograph, and write about the places and people I encounter. I’ll probably continue to write spy novels and/or murder mysteries, and I may also do some travel magazine writing.
2. Attend classes and workshops to educate myself about things that interest me (Shakespearean Literature, Comparative Religion, and Art / Photography.)
3. Stay as healthy as possible by remaining active through membership at a fitness facility and activities like hiking and bowling. (I recently substituted gym memberships with my own in-home equipment.)
4. Remain involved in the lives of my family members by attending family sporting events, social occasions, and holidays.
5. Deepen my spiritual life through improved dedication to worship and prayer, and by volunteering for community service.
I retired from Emerson on December 31, 2019. I was at Emerson for eight-and-a-half years, but my career has been both long (43+ years full-time) and varied (private enterprise, public companies, and government service.) A more extensive review of my career is available at www.billduncanscareer.com. My end-of-career exit interview is available at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEj4X4IRRwQ
The purpose of this website and this blog is to document my adventures in retirement related to Objective #1 (travel). I’m hoping that what I capture will be useful to others, and perhaps entertaining to my grandchildren one day. If done properly, it may offer evidence of a life well lived, or – at least – a life fully lived.
Travel
I’m excited about this next chapter of life, but I can now see that it will take me a while to get my bearings. My trip planning for retirement includes discrete plans for 67 domestic road trips, 11 domestic rail trips, 3 international cruises, 6 international road trips, 13 international destination trips, and 9 international guided tours. I’m sure I won’t get through them all, and I may well do others that are not on my list if they are opportunistic. But this list seems like a great starting place. My first travel initiative was a short excursion to the Natchez Mississippi area, and it was very instructive. It taught me a little about what my personal limitations are, and some important lessons about the information I need to collect in order to effectively and usefully document my adventures. That trip was “Pre-COVID” – which I am pretty sure is going to be the next major division of life, after BC and AD.
My research for the planning retirement travel came primarily from these sources:
- The Most Scenic Drives in America (hardback book published by Readers Digest)
- Drives of a Lifetime (Hardback book published by National Geographic)
- Off the Beaten Path (Hardback book published by Readers Digest)
- Sacred Places of a Lifetime (Hardback book published by National Geographic)
- Secrets of the National Parks (Hardback book published by National Geographic)
- National Geographic Guide to Scenic Highways & Byways (Paperback book)
- National Geographic Guide to State Parks of the United States (Hardback book)
- Ghost Towns of the Old West (Paperback book published by Varney Hinkley)
- United States on the Road (Paperback book published by Insight Guides)
- The Road Trip Book: 1001 Drives of a Lifetime (Hardback book published by Universe)
- Conde Nast Traveler (Magazine)
- American Road (Magazine)
- Travel & Leisure (Magazine)
- National Geographic Traveler (Magazine)
- Special Magazine Publications (Especially issues from Life Magazine like “Places of a Lifetime”)
My advice: If you can afford to invest in only one of these, make it the first one. The Most Scenic Drives in America is excellent. My second choice – if you can afford to invest in only two – would be Off the Beaten Path. The United States on the Road is also quite good in its own way, rich in descriptive detail, but basically limited to text and photos. You won’t find the kind of detailed route planning, maps, and ratings that Most Scenic Drives and Off the Beaten Path provide. It does earn the purchaser of the book access to a “Walking Eye” app for your phone that offers tips and advice about accommodations, entertainment, food, etc. by destination. The app, like the book, is quirky and pretty limited. Its orientation suggests to me that paid advertisers are the core of the information presented. Also, if your travel interests are outside the United States, you would benefit most (in this collection) from “Drives of a Lifetime,” in which I have placed more than 40 bookmarks, and “The Road Trip Book”. “Road Trip” is a tome, but to be fair, it is international in scope. Like “United States on the Road,” is much more limited in materials presented, relying almost entirely on brief write-ups accompanied by one or two photos each. Over the last few years, I have built and maintained a Facebook page called Burgundy Lane Photography. It serves as an on-line gallery of photos I took on various short excursions, mostly in and around Missouri – although there is the occasional from adjacent states when an excursion splashes over the border.
From the many hundreds of comments I have received about my photos there and on Facebook group sites such as Forgotten Missouri, Amazing Missouri Photographer, and so on, I’ve come to realize there are a good many of us baby boomers who have reached the point in our lives where we’d like to travel but many of us just can’t. Financial constraints, health issues, family responsibilities, and other factors simply won’t permit it any longer. Many times, I have been blessed with unsolicited assistance from my viewers who help me get straight on the name of an old grist mill or the location of an old barn and fill in the blanks about the history of a place I’ve photographed. I am truly grateful. But there is a recurring theme that has become increasingly common in the comments lately. It is manifested in words like: “Do you ever permit people to ride along when you go out to take photos of these places?”, and “I wish I could attach myself to you coat tail and visit these places with you.”, “This reminds me so much of the farm where I grew up. I wish I could still get out, so I could go back and see the old place again.” Now that I’m on the back side of my sixties, I know that time is coming for me, too. So I’d like very much to provide this blog as a window for those who’d like to use my photos and my descriptions as a way to step back in time, or reach visually into places they would otherwise never be able to see for themselves. I hope it works out that way.