Retiree versus Business Person: Travel Choices

Many retirees are booked solid with volunteer work and babysitting, sometimes raising grandchildren, toting them from here and there via sundry car seats and strollers.

Or their dance cards are filled with golf and/or pickleball and/or tennis and/or bowling… Whatever sports float a person’s boat and—and this is key—don’t cause us to fall down and break something, or keel over from dehydration, or dizzy us due to inexplicable vertigo because we stood up too quickly.

Many retirees are vacationing their way around the world, or at least to our kids’ and cousins’ homes due to free lodging. We’re cruising, bus tripping and adding to lines through airport security, causing Business Persons great duress.

Of course breakfast, lunch, diner, cocktails or coffee dates (raises hand to all) catapult seniors (gross exaggeration [refer to the Slow Rise]) toward travel. Not to mention the lure of Bridge or Euchre, casinos, Mahjong and/or other gaming enticers.

Oh, and doctor appointments. Sigh.

Most aforementioned activities are a choice compared to the confines of a 9-5 job that pays the rent, the price of Susie’s braces and that fancy latte. Plus car repairs, child care, electronics and counseling to learn how to deal with their aging parents.

In other words, The Retiree could schedule a Bridge game for 4 p.m. at Frank’s house but if it’s sleeting or looks like it might, bow out.

Ring-ring.

“Hello?”

“Frank, I won’t …”

Frank, “I know. Everyone else has already canceled. Don’t know what I’m going to do with the giant punch bowl of  rum drinks. Lois has already warned me about too many dips into that pool."

Or say The Retiree (okay, me) has a lunch date scheduled and by ten there’s already three new inches of snow on the ground and it’s still near white-out conditions. Depending on my desperation for either the listening ear of a dear friend or chicken fried steak, I have the decadent choice to cancel or bundle up and fire up the ol’ Subaru whereby I tighten that seat belt, pat the dashboard and say, “Let’s go, Greyhound!” which is what, yes, I’ve named my Minnesota-ready vehicle since, well, I have time for such folderol.

But if I’m a thirty-five-year-old with a 2 p.m. meeting with my boss at the office when, according to Very Excited early morning weather persons, ten inches of snow are piling up, it’s pretty clear I won’t feel a choice. I’ll throw kitty litter in my trunk, pack a snow shovel, make sure I have my AAA card in my wallet, fill my coffee tumbler, leave early and white-knuckle my way to the office.

Now that my husband and I live near a bridge over the Mississippi River connecting Minnesota and Wisconsin, I find looking out the window a better barometer of roads than staring at one of my three phone weather apps, two complete with radar. If a steady flow of cars continues moving over the bridge at a decent pace, I figure Mother Nature is civil. Yup, I will absolutely head to Frank and Lois’s to help them with that rum punch. But should there only be an occasional creeper up there on the bridge—and no sedans, just giant pickup trucks that populate this area, some with snow plows—I’ll stay put. Even though George’s Lounge (several televisions, slot machines, deep fried hot dogs, good whiskey brands and Shake of the Day) is just across that bridge. If I’m thirsty enough for company or a libation, I can always walk one block south or east of our condo to a nearby watering hole.

Since the theme of this post is travel among Worker Bees vs Retirees and all I can seem to talk about is booze—and especially since it’s five o’clock not just “somewhere” but here—I find I’ve now chosen to travel from my office to my liquor cabinet to make me a cocktail!

If you’re a Retiree, please join me in a toast to those who are still working. We shall safely stay put and clinky-clinky to their One Day.

For Better or for Worse: The Traveling Life

After my Great Went-Septic Appendix Eruption in 2017.

A recent post by bloggers Dan and Cassie Cramer got me to thinking about all the times I’ve traveled sick. Or sickly. Or feeling like I’m about to become that way—you know what I mean.

We also just rendered a big “Happy vacationing!” to two condo neighbors, one who’d been hacking for two weeks, enough so to send him to the doc AND get me washing my hands after each condo elevator ride, once sneakily (HA!) covering my nose and mouth and holding my breath for two whole floors when he hopped in the elevator and began chatting with me. (Hey, it’s FLU SEASON!) He said he was feeling much better and was ready for his adventure, I hoped enough better to avoid airline head compression severe enough to explode his nostrils.

All together now in a grand chorus of Eeuuuuuyuckysnotbucket.

Decades ago, in the dead of winter and under my first book deadline, I packed up my Portable Vectra (pre laptop days, weighed nearly twenty pounds and used a 5-1/4” boot disc—picture HERE) and road-tripped up to a friend’s cabin in Wisconsin where I became wildly ill. Fever. Twenty-four/seven chesty cough. I sought out an emergency room where I was given bold amounts of drugs. Which I took while soldiering on with the writing since, well, book deadline. (Read payment after manuscript was turned in.) The only thing I had energy to cook was frozen pizza, which sat on the counter as I nibbled from it for two days. All alone. No neighbor to bring me soup. Out of my own home state.. No room service or husband to field my bitchety-bitch demands.

In all cases, we do what we must to survive.

Which circles me back to Dan and Cassie’s most recent post about vacationing when one of you is living with noncurable stage four metastatic breast cancer. Their post reminds us we never know what someone’s going through, so BE NICE to strangers on the road, including those who seem whiny and self absorbed. Including cranky security folks, tired parents and snooty gate peeps. Perhaps even check yourself from overreacting to a slightly bungled hotel reservation or a luke-warm baked potato. Dan and Cassie’s entire blog, Meaning & Stuff, is dedicated to the down-and-gritty real thoughts and trials and celebrations one must live with after a terminal diagnosis.

No, we never know what the person next to us is going through, or what we might soon be enduring. I repeat: BE NICE. Karma and all that.

Since we lost our daughter-in-law to the same illness last May Day (for two months we helped our son care for her in home hospice) and I adore Cassie and understand her journey from the shoes of a helpmate, I read every post. She and Dan make us think. Our son and DIL posted their entire journey—hilarious and gut-smacking--on Caring Bridges. People with terminal illnesses have some important stuff to say, something for each of us! Among all the truth and horrors the Internet wields our way, it also delivers the opportunity for us to know what’s happening in the lives of those we care about, and gives those walking through tough times one singular place to dispense updated news without having to repeat it fifty times a day via exhausting phone calls.

To all you road warriors out there, and to those feeling no warrior vibes but who simply enjoy wandering, I send you wishes for that old Irish Blessing about the road rising up to meet you, which means "May your journey succeed", or "May you succeed [in the journey of life]" or even simply "Good luck!"  Through good health and bad, I know you’ll travel on until one day that Great Road will come to a Dead End, which, who knows, might eventually lead to a brilliant new Rising Up Road the likes of which you could never ever imagine, even after reading every travel brochure on this planet.

Every day in which you’re on the road with nothing major happening in your health or the health of those you care most about, give thanks. Gratitude makes any trip oh so much more enjoyable. Let that gratitude spread from your inner being to your face until your lips give a few strangers a smile. That little chard of bright might be just the thing that helps them push through their next trying moment.