After much decision making, planning, anticipating and dreaming we are finally taking that next big step into making our move. We spent the last nine months building our retirement home and we have finally closed and got our keys.
We aren’t new to moving that’s for sure, we’ve moved from Washington to Tennessee and back again and then again, not by choice mind you, but thats a different story for a different day, anyways, we’ve bought, fixed and sold a few homes and came real close to moving to Idaho, but this move is so much bigger than anything we’ve ever done. We are leaving our kids, our grandkids, our extended family and a huge circle of friends. All of our comforts of a life of living in the same town and same community for the last twenty six years is now coming to a close in these last chapters of this part of our story to start that next new chapter.
So with saying that and knowing that this is going to be the hardest thing we have ever done in our lives, voluntarily separating ourselves from the people we love the most, we also know we want to experience this life while we can.
We are hoping this is the last move we will make but we are also taking this step always knowing that the road runs both ways, and if the heartache of living away from our children and grandchildren is far too great for us to handle, we can always move back.
I spent sixteen years as a flight attendant, Gene twenty six years as a delivery driver. I started working at thirteen years old babysitting after school and on weekends, picking strawberries and cucumbers in the Summers and working in restaurants and then doing retail by sixteen years old.
Gene started working around the same age, he told me how his dad would hire him out to the neighbor farmers for hay season and other miscellaneous jobs. Working for both of us was part of growing up, and you still had your chores at home. So for the last forty six years like so many of our generation, we worked. And the reward for working hard your entire life, if you plan is retirement, and our idea of retirement was to live someplace warm and sunny and a beach was always part of that plan, and we hope to do more travel, some road trips and to see and experience as much of this world as we can.
Sitting in a chair and watching life pass us by was never part of our vision for retiring and as hard as this is leaving, its also fulfilling a life time dream. We are excited and looking forward to new experiences, making new friends and having new adventures.
We’ve found a church in our new community, we’d been watching online for a couple of months now, and even though we haven’t officially moved here yet, we visited the church, really liked it and have already signed up to do some missions. That has always been on my heart to do but never had the time to do certain things so now that we do have the time it is important to us to spend some of our later years giving back. Even our new community has an activity director that plans opportunities to do volunteer work, which I’m very excited for the chance to get involved. Sign me up!!
So now the next step is to wrap things up in Washington and to start the journey across this great country of ours to get to our new home that will be waiting for us. I can’t believe it’s finally here!!!
We are almost there…..
theroamingretirees.net 