Retired and Ready to Go

“Retire from work, but not from life.’ ~M.K. Soon

A week from tomorrow, I will board a plane to Miami, to catch a ship to, well, lots of places, but primarily the Pacific Rim.  This blog will be about that four-month journey. But today it is about getting ready.

Background:  I retired from the workplace in mid-August this year, and immediately set about to sell my condo in DC and move to North Carolina.  It took some prep to get the condo ready, so a good portion of the first months of my retirement were spent on that and on packing up.  I made the move to NC in November, and am now more or less settled into a detached house (for the first time since I left Atlanta in 1999) in the Triangle area. Now that the holidays are over, I have a brief breather to get ready for the big trip.

The big trip?  A four-month cruise on a ship called the Crystal Serenity (with that name, how could I not?).  I'll be going with my "travel buddy" Beth, and we will start out in Miami, sail through the Panama Canal--something I've long wanted to do--and then wind up in San Francisco.  From there will be the start of the what the cruise line bills as a "world cruise" but in fact is a Pacific Rim cruise.  We'll be visiting a number of South Pacific Islands that I've only barely heard of, then on to such countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Cambodia, Viet Nam, South Korea, Japan, China, and a number of others.  Overall, we will be away for 121 days.

Have I started packing yet?  Heck, no.  Things might wrinkle.  But I have piles. Lots of piles.  Sometime this week, those piles will go into suitcases.  Then off we will go.

Take a deep breath......