Countdown to Freedom - My Retirement

This is the story of my preparations to leave the working world and embark on a life of travel. The story starts off slowly recounting the many dreams and preparations, gradually escalating to a hectic and stressful climax as I make the break late in 2011.

MAIL

It was also some time about now when I got a PO Box. It was not at a post office. It was a private one at a book store where I would sometimes stop in on my way home from work. At the time I was ordering lot's of stuff from eBay but I was never at home when it would be delivered and so I would get it delivered to me at the office. But I wasn't the only one at the plant doing this. There were enough others that it was adding up to extra work for the warehouse, so a memo circulated telling us to stop the practice.

What to do?

The bookstore had a sign in the window advertised PO Boxes. Would it be worth it to get one?  Maybe 10 or $15 a month? When I finally asking about it, the prices (back then) was less than $50 for a whole year. I signed up immediately. This turned out to be quite useful when I embarked on my nomadic life and I still use it.

***  2001  ***

GOING DIGITAL

Digital cameras had been around for a while by 2001. I knew it was going to displace the film cameras I had been using for as long as I had been taking pictures. But the technology was still moving pretty fast and I wasn't quite sure how it would work, so I had been hesitating. It was May of 2021 I finally got my first digital camera. It was a very inexpensive Agfa with a mere 640 x 480 resolution, just to test the waters. How would I even get the photos from the camera to the computer? This was actually my very first USB device, so that's how it worked. I loved it and it was only a few months later, in September, that I ordered a much higher resolution Olympus D-510. Photos worked great but it was only able to record a very short video clip at very poor resolution. I played with that feature taking my first crude steps into digital video editing. I was a bit perplexed at the time as to why it couldn't do better video. I figured this out when I got a more capable camera three years later. 

Digital photography would be huge for the long term traveler. Not only saving so much money, but also the shear bulk it saves in film and the ability to carry thousands of photos on the tiniest of devices.

***  2002  ***

MEETING LISA

Divorced and living alone in a very grand but very old house that my brother and I had inherited from our parents I happened to meet Lisa some time around 2002. She was living on her sailboat tied up next door. She had sailed in this 38 foot boat from Germany, crossing the Atlantic years earlier. Though the relationship was quite rocky at times she was undeniably a very interesting person, at least to me. She had what one might call an unconventional lifestyle. It was an inspiration to me. It's one thing to dream of a lifestyle completely re-imagined, ignoring normal conventions and expectations, it is another to see a living example in front of you. She demonstrated to me just how much more open the possibilities of life are than most of us imagine.

***  2003  ***

FIRST TIME IN EUROPE

While Lisa was a big influence, I can thank my job for my first trip to Europe. In July of 2003 a group of us were sent to a week long seminar in Brussels. The company was good enough to allow us one day at the beginning and one day at the end of the trip for tourism. One of those days we walked a long way to be underwhelmed by Brussels famous "Manneken Pis", a tiny statue of a little boy peeing. And I recently found out that, due to the threat of vandalism, the one on display is actually a replica. And souvenir shops in the area also sell replicas, some larger than the original. Still, just walking there was fun, there is something so wonderful about street life in Europe. We also took a train to the charming town of Bruges. 

Then someone figured out that you could get from Brussels to Paris by train in just about 90 minutes. How 'bout those European trains? So our itinerary for the last day was set. First train to Paris in the morning, last one back to Brussels that evening.

It was quite a whirlwind tour. We walked and walked. In those days you could still just show up and get a ticket to go up the Eiffel tower. (Now you must book on-line months in advance). We also went to the top of The Arc de Triomphe and rushed through The Louvre, with a quick stop to see Mona and Venus. We walked through Notre Dame. We had an encounter with one of the famously rude Parisians, but also some who were very nice and helpful. We could see an amazing structure overlooking Paris, The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre. We got close but, by now out of time, we didn't have time to enter.

I knew I wanted to come back.

 ***  2004  ***

I was still living in the house my Grandfather built in 1939. It needed a tremendous amount of work. Yet I had always envisioned restoring it and keeping it for the remainder of my days. I had gotten tired of hearing people describe the house as having "So much potential" and I had actually begun the project of renovation. Replacing plumbing, upgrading the electrical system, installing mini-split air conditioners in all the rooms. I do recall once however confessing to Lisa that, though I loved this old house, in some ways it seemed like "An albatross around my neck". It was a unique property but it was too big for me and was going to require so many resources to fully restore. The property taxes alone were getting pretty expense. One day I complained about this to my brother. He had moved away many years prior and had no interest in keeping the place himself. It was then that he shocked me by suggesting seriously that we sell the place.

I'm not going to tell the convoluted story of how we decided to actually do it. I certainly did not enjoy the process and was relieved when it was finally over. A big adjustment like this, even if it is for the best, can be wrenching. I will mention that in order to buy out his half of the property at a fair price I would have had to take out a substantial mortgage. One broker I spoke to suggested a "Balloon" Mortgage. I did not like the sound of that one bit and I guess hearing that unsavory suggestion was a turning point for me.

In the end it was the right thing to do. The cost and consequences of trying to hold on to this property were too great. I would have basically been living my life and working simply to support it and I would not have been able to retire when I did.

Selling the property jump-started a retirement plan, perhaps more accurately my lack of a retirement plan. Like most people I had been pretty undisciplined and lazy about planning for the future. I guess you could say this was a consequence. Selling the property opened up a world of new possibilities, but I will admit, it was painful to let go. To this day when I dream at night, many of my dreams are set in that old house. Sometimes I awake fully convinced that some arrangement had been made and that I am somehow still living there, waking up in the house. It might take several minutes to remember that this unique and historic house has now been demolished and a painfully plain boxy looking generic structure has taken it's place. I don't even like to visit the old neighborhood anymore because it feels like there is just a gaping hole there.

But with the house sold, the possibility of early retirement was a lot more real, though still remote. I was 48 years old but I boosted my 401k contributions to the maximum allowed. When I turned 50 I took full advantage of the higher "Catch up" contribution limits. 

COULD I AFFORD IT?

To be sure this is NOT the way to do it. So few of us plan for the future and contribute while you are young, letting the magic of compounding work for us. I did it wrong and it was really nothing but dumb luck I had inherited resources that partly compensated for my lack of planning and discipline. Was it enough? I had my doubts. I wouldn't have enough for a proper "conventional" retirement. On the other hand, I had no kids to support and I knew that I could live in ways most people might consider unconventional with very low consumption. In fact, maybe I'm kind of a weirdo in this respect, the idea actually had some appeal to me. And I had Lisa's example. You know for a while there (about 15 minutes) it was fashionable for young people to live and travel in a sort of hippy lifestyle on a shoestring. Of course it's easier when you are young, could I do it at my older age? There was a groundbreaking old book, by now sometimes mentioned as a parody, "Europe On Five Dollars A Day". But that was from 1957. Maybe it was possible way back then, not so realistic now.   (By the way,  $5 then would be about $57 in today's money, still hardly realistic today.) 

So I wondered if I should just wait until I was 60, or even the regular age of 65 to think about retiring?

But if there was to be any possibility I would need to save and live as far as possible BELOW my means.

JULY, MY FIRST STEP DOWN

With the house sold I moved from that rambling four bedroom to a much smaller three bedroom rental. It was a huge change of life and the beginning of a purge of material things that would last for years. As anyone who has ever moved knows it's amazing how much stuff we weigh ourselves down with over time. So much of it really unnecessary. A garage full of accumulated stuff was no longer needed, much of it was junk anyway. But this was just the beginning. How much stuff do you REALLY need? I was to step down from the three bedroom house to a two bedroom apartment the following year. Then eventually to a one bedroom. And from there essentially to a backpack... But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

CAMERA TECHNOLOGY

I was saving as much as I could but one thing I did splurge on was an upgraded camera. As mentioned, I had transitioned to digital in 2001 but I could not understand why digital cameras of the day could not record decent video as well as still images. Now I figured out that this was a limitation of memory card technology. Early memory cards were simply too slow to record video in real time. I still remember how, one day at work, I was leafing through a catalog and came across the Canon S1 IS. It used a Compact Flash memory card that was fast enough to record video at 640 x 480 resolution, 30 fps. Not only that, but you could get an underwater housing for it as well. As frugal as I was I had to have one and at the end of September in 2004 I took delivery of my first combination still AND video digital camera. I liked the 10X Optical zoom lens but boy was that thing bulky and the underwater housing made it huge. It was too big for lightweight travel but by the time I made my break I had tried a few different options (all video capable) and eventually returned to Olympus, but now using the TG series, so called "Tough" cameras which are much more compact and can go underwater without the bulky housing.

***  2005  ***

AN EPIPHANY (sort of)

I'm not sure of the date now but I think it was on a weekend in Mid February in 2005 when I had what I describe as an epiphany.

Lisa had her boat anchored off Dinner Key in Miami. There is a convention center there with a huge parking lot but all the spaces are marked for permit parking only and they would ticket violators. So, despite the sea of open asphalt, parking was a difficult issue. I decided to go visit her WITHOUT my car. Public transportation in South Florida leaves much to be desired but we do have Tri-Rail (which we sometimes call TRY rail). I had used it a few times but never Miami's Metro Rail. I studied the map carefully and saw that Metro Rail and Tri-Rail connect and that Metro Rail has a stop very close to Dinner Key. Early one morning I launched off on the trip. After all my research it went smoothly and I stepped down from the Metro Rail station closest to my destination. I had only a few blocks to walk. I had just crossed the busy U.S. 1 road and was walking through a small grassy area next to a gas station. Except there wasn't much grass, the soil was mostly sand and full of sand-spurs. How long had it been since I has wandered over ground like this? It brought me right back to my childhood when us kids used to wander far and wide all on their own (unlike kids today). Our pant legs and socks would get loaded with sand-spurs. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks as I was struck with a strange feeling.

I actually had a moment of anxiety. Here I was on foot, 30 miles from my car. How often are we, as modern Americans, ever this far from our own or a friends car? I thought about it. I had credit cards and some cash. The metro station was right behind me. If for some reason I couldn't find Lisa I could just turn around and go back home. In an emergency I could even find a hotel somewhere for the night, expensive but certainly possible in an emergency. Soon the anxiety melted away and I began to feel a mild exhilaration. I know it will sound very strange to most people but being out in the world like this without being tied to a car somehow felt freeing. It was as if a layer of insulation between me and the real world was peeled away. I guess these days you might say I was "out of my comfort zone", which we now consider a contingent for personal growth. Few people will get it I know, but I decided I wanted to ditch the car and try living and traveling all over the world without one. Oh, I'll admit, sometimes a car is indispensable, you can rent one if you gotta. But I have found that it is surprising how often it is not and how NOT depending on a car changes your perspective. It brings you closer to the world you are in. 

LISA DEPARTS

Shortly after my epiphany, April of 2005, Lisa left the U.S. She had some issues with a visa violation and she will never return to the U.S. But this would not be the last time I would see her. Over the next five years there would be several trips to visit her as she sailed from place to place around central America including Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama. And of course we never had a car on these trips except a few brief rentals when we really needed one. It was great training for a nomadic life to come.

It was also in July of this year (2005) that I stepped down from that first three bedroom rental to a two bedroom apartment. Another big purge of stuff. The new apartment was very close to my job. Never again would I routinely endure two 45 drives each day in rush hour traffic going back and fourth to work.

***  2006  ***

PRACTICING WITH PUBLIC TRANSIT

Now, if I was to actualize life without a car I would need some new skills. Europe I knew has a vastly superior public transportation system than the U.S. but my experience with it was limited. I needed some practice, particularly with buses. My only memory of using a public county bus in the U.S. had been just once as a child, escorted by my cousin. I don't remember exactly what happened except that somehow I managed to mess up putting my money in the change box. I had never ridden a for-pay county bus since then.

We prefer subways and trains and I did have some experience with them but those routes are very limited. Buses tend to have much more complicated routes, that's essential to get passengers those final few miles. I couldn't travel to Europe just to practice using the bus system, but wait, there ARE public buses in the U.S. They certainly have a bad reputation compared to their European counterparts but they do exist and people do get around with them. It was high time I overcame that sour childhood memory and brave the Dade County bus system. If I could master this black sheep of the mass transit world then surely the superior systems in Europe would be a piece of cake.

I started by studying the Dade metro system web site. I learned how to pay and how much to pay. The more complicated question was how to find my way through this labyrinth. If you haven't seen one, take a look at a major metropolitan transit system map. It's kind of daunting. Have you ever seen the movie "Time Bandits"? Do you remember how this group had this map of holes through space-time. With it you could jump around from place to place and forward and back through time. The transit map kinda reminds me of that except you can never go back in time, only forward.

For that first trip I decided to go to the densest section of downtown Miami, I had wanted to explore downtown but traffic and parking there was sure to be brutal. Why not let the bus driver deal with it? It's his job and he had to go whether I was on board or not.

I was living in the Miami Lakes apartment and there was a bus stop just outside the parking lot. I remember thinking how, with the right knowledge and a willingness to travel VERY light, this bus stop, practically at my door, could be a portal to the whole world. From here I could go all around the city, to train stations, intercity bus stations, airports and (now that I think of it) cruise ship ports as well, all just a few steps from my door and all without relying on a car. I know most won't get it, but to me it was kind of magical.

I still remember that day, it was a Saturday the 4th of March 2006,  and all the study and planning I did to prepare and the strange feeling I got stepping onto that bus for the first time, at once so mundane yet also so strange. For every other person on the bus this was just another boring ride to get from point A to point B, nothing but a nuisance. They had no idea how new it all was to me.

I covered a lot of ground that day and, like a tourist in my own town, I saw parts of Miami I had never seen before. And I learned a few things. Public transportation is not hard but it can be rather slow. It's not the rides themselves that take time but anytime you have to make a connection, get off one bus and connect to another, that's where there is a time penalty and where it can go wrong. It's not so bad in places where the bus runs very frequently and on time (New York, Paris, San Francisco) but in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale you are lucky if the bus comes every half hour, sometimes they come only once per hour or miss a run entirely. 

Despite it's annoyances this small adventure was a great confidence builder and I really enjoyed this day. I'm still proud whenever I get someplace by public transport. It saves money and greenhouse gases. It can be a hassle but so can a car. No need to look for a parking space in some busy city center if you arrive by bus or train.

I have found that all the systems are similar yet all slightly different. The biggest variation is in how one pays. Some use cash, usually (but not always) requiring exact change. All system nowadays also have other methods. Tokens have faded from use, now it might be a paper or plastic card or ticket with a mag stripe or non-contact chip, purchased from a vending machine at a station. In Paris the best deal for us was a special system wide pass only available at the airport station, to get that particular pass we actually had to provide tiny ID photos of our faces. Thank goodness I had researched all this before we went and we were well prepared before we arrived. With that pass we could go anywhere by train or bus in Paris.  In recent years there is a trend to use smartphone apps employing QR codes on screen to pay transit fares. These days train and airline boarding passes commonly have this option as well. The annoyance here is that one must load and learn yet another new app for each system you use. In coming years it may be possible to use more universal systems such as Apple Pay or Google Pay which would be nice. A little internet research before you use a new system is a requirement, certainly for time and route information and also for the payment method. Once you have used a particular system a few times it becomes very easy. 

PHOTO AND MOVIE SCANNING, THE NEVER ENDING PROJECT

As I continued to imagine this nomadic life I was thinking of all the things I would need to do to prepare for it, and some of these things would take time. Modern technology was a key factor in some preparations. For example; one of the most irreplaceable objects we have are our photo albums. I had a TON of old photographs, both prints and slides from the pre-digital age, not to mention a pile of old family photos, there were a few that looked like they went back to the civil war! 

I have a note that late in 2006 I was getting more serious about converting all the old photos to digital format though this project would come along slowly over years.

I had a scanner and scanning prints was no problem but many of the photos were in the form of negatives and slides. I found a guy on eBay who offered the service of scanning negatives and I send a small batch of them off to him to convert. The results were good but it was kind of expensive and I would look at other options over the next few years.

***  2007  ***

A SHADOW OF MY WEB LOG BEGINS TO FORM

Back in the early days of the internet I had a web page, I think it was on Geocities. It was pretty simple. It had information about 3D photography, a subject I was interested in, commentary on a few favorite but obscure movies and I tried to create a comprehensive list of science fiction movies up to some arbitrary date. Something I learned was almost impossible to do.

Geocities is now long defunct. But now that I was thinking about doing lots of travel I wondered if I should document that on-line. They call it a BLOG, short for weB-LOG, but I never liked the sound of BLOG. It sounds kind of scatological to me. So I try to spell it out as Web Log or Travel Log as much as I can. 

In looking for a host for a web log I came across a web site called STIXY, I think it was sometime in 2007. The innovation here was that you could insert a rectangle, inspired by a post-it note, anywhere on your page and make it any size. The note could hold text or a photo. You could size them to whatever and "stick" them anywhere as well. Text and Photos, that was all I needed for a travel log. For large groups of photos I could link to a web photo album on a Picasa web album. Picasa web has since been discontinued and subsumed into Google Photos, the photo system I use currently.

I didn't start actually using Stixy to publish a travel log until I retired in 2011 but I was testing and practicing well before then. The pages, well, it sounds cool to have the flexibility to "Stick" your text blocks and photos anywhere on screen but they were a bit awkward to edit. I was okay with that, I just wanted to document stuff. But I also don't think these pages rendered very well on a narrow phone screen, which may be one reason the system never became popular. They never did try to monetize it and it eventually disappeared. I have the old pages archived. I might try to find a way to re-post them or redo them somehow, someday.

SMARTPHONES

It's hard to even remember what life was like before the smartphone, yet it was only in July of 2007 that the first iPhone came out. That was just four years before my retirement so the concept was still quite new.

I had a friend who got one of those early iPhone's and showed it to me. I was very impressed but in the beginning they were only available through AT&T and you had to sign a pricey 2 or 3 year contact to even get one. Remember, I had become very cost conscious and I thought; this would be great for travel, but as much as I may have wanted one I simply could not justify the expense at that time. Besides, at that time you probably could not have roamed outside the U.S. like you can today. 

But that phone did get me very interested in some sort of very portable computer/communications device, like a smartphone, but cheaper.

You may not know this but a couple of years BEFORE the iPhone, Nokia came out with an ultra portable "Internet Device" that was not much bigger than a smartphone would be when they later came out. And it would do a lot of what a smartphone would later do. It was not actually a phone but would connect by WiFi. It had a microphone and speaker and someone had gotten a version of Skype to work on it and using that you could make phone calls with it. 

I actually bought one of these used, a Nokia N770 on eBay late in 2007. I took it with me on a trip to Honduras and I remember walking up a hill in Utila to find a WiFi signal at a resort there and making a Skype call to someone in the states, just because I could (Hi Johanna). This seemed to me to be the new paradigm for making phone calls when away from home. Instead of looking for a pay phone, one would look for a WiFi signal. It was not clear to me before I got one that smartphones could also use WiFi for these functions so in a way this seemed almost better. No long term contracts and no problem with roaming since it used WiFi not cellphone data, anywhere in the world. You just had to find WiFi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

But of course the iPhone ended up totally eclipsing the Nokia "Internet Device", a triumph of marketing by Steve Jobs. My Nokia went by the wayside and I got my first smartphone shortly before my departure as I will mention later.

***  2008  ***

YET MORE SCANNING

By July of 2008 I had acquired a transparency adapter for my scanner and could now scan slides. Back in the day when I was shooting film, slides were a lot cheaper to develop than prints and I had a ton of them. I could now do a good job at home with prints and slides but photographic negatives were still problematic. 

I had prints of many of the negatives, but not all. And I wondered if the negatives might have better preserved detail, at least in some cases. If this was going to be a truly thorough job I thought I should scan the negatives as well. My adapter would scan the negatives but reversing the negative image into a viewable positive seemed to be very complicated, requiring a slow manual process and the results weren't all that good. Perhaps I simply lacked the correct software to do it but it seemed a daunting task especially when combined with all the other projects I needed to do. I still needed a solution to this.

   ***  2009  ***

MOVIE FILM

Then there were the movies! I had home videos on VHS and 8 mm tape. Going further back I had numerous reels of Super 8 movie film and going back even further we had old family home movies on 16 mm film, some old enough to show me and my brother as babies.   

For a while I mulled over the possibility of transferring the video myself. The company I worked for still had a 16 mm movie projector that was never used anymore and my boss was able to let me borrow it. I experimented with using a digital camera to shoot video of the screen, but I decided that a professional transfer would be a better option which would come later this year.

GIVING AWAY MY RECORD COLLECTION

Then there was my record and CD collection. Digitizing CDs was pretty easy. The process of "Ripping" a CD was still relatively new but well established and so I proceeded to transfer all my CDs to a compressed but lossless digital format call FLAC. I also scanned all the sleeve inserts. I forget what I did with the original CDs. Maybe I just gave them away or maybe sold them cheap to a used CD store.

I still had many old vinyl records as well. I had the idea that I should set up the sound card on a computer and play every one of my records all the way through, converting them to digital. My turntable had been packed away, unused for years. When I pulled it out I was reminded of an unpleasant fact. I had bought this turntable many many years previous and had noted at the time that it seemed to have a lot of "Rumble" (low frequency noise). It wasn't so bad that you couldn't kind of ignore it but honestly, I should have either returned that turntable to the store or bought another one. But instead I had just put up with it for quite some time. As CDs started to take over the point became kinda moot and I just forgot about that lousy turntable I had lived with. Now when I unpacked and set up the old thing I was reminded just how bad it was. This was gonna be a long and inevitably tedious project and there was no way I was gonna undertake it using that crappy turntable. I suppose I could have bought or borrowed another one but, with CDs and digital music already dominant, there weren't many around. This disappointment lead me to loose what enthusiasm I had for this project, but I did take photos of every one of my album covers. This would be a reference to what I had if I ever wanted to replace them from some digital source. And I would never have to suffer that lousy turntable rumble again.

I recall what I did with the records themselves. There was a used record store in Lauderdale called "Radioactive Records". On 29 June of 2009 I brought my stack of records in to sell, I didn't really expect or even want much for them, I just didn't want to drop them in the trash. The guy started looking through them sorting them into two piles, ones they would buy and the ones they would not buy. The "won't buy" pile was getting pretty big. It was taking a while and the clerk was pulled away from time to time to do other things. I realized I was only gonna get a few dollars and I would still have a stack or records to get rid of so I just quietly slipped out of the store leaving all the records behind. Vinyl has never quite died, lately there is a resurrection, but I got the feeling that this store was struggling and I figured instead of selling the records I would simply make them a donation. I didn't want to throw them out but if the used record store didn't want to keep some of them, even for free, then they could be the ones to put them to the dumpster. At least some of them would end up is a collection somewhere. As of 2023 Radio-Active Records still exists in Ft. Lauderdale though moved to a different location.

A NETBOOK

In the day before the iPad very small and inexpensive laptop computers, perfect for travel, called "Netbooks", were popular. So in July of 2009 (a little over a year before the first iPad) I bought a Netbook. Relatively cheap it was a little more than $200. It came with a version of windows. It was a little under powered for windows but never mind, I soon had the more efficient Linux OS running on it and it worked fine that way. I would end up traveling with it for years, though I have since switched to a laptop with a larger 14 inch  screen.

THE NEVER ENDING SAGA OF PHOTO AND MOVIE TRANSFERS - CONTINUED

In July of 2009 I moved from the two bedroom to a one bedroom apartment. More downsizing. That year I found a company called "Home Movie Depot" (now defunct). They had a deal where you could get a specific size FedEx box, fill it with any kind of media you wanted, photos, slides or negatives, movie film (any format) or video tape (any format). Whatever would fit in the box they would transfer it for a flat fee and return it with digitized copies on DVD. Such a deal!!! The videos and the photo negatives all fit into a couple of FedEx boxes and were sent off.

The results; not perfect, but good enough. The video came out pretty good as did most of the photo negatives, now viewable as positive images. A few individual images didn't work but I redid those few with my slow manual process so everything I sent out eventually got done pretty well. I still had a Herculean task to complete all the photo prints and slides myself. For a while I would sit at night with two scanners running at my desk. I would load one while the other was scanning. I remember that it seemed like every time I thought I was finally done I would dig around and come across yet another shoe box of old photos and I would have to get busy again. These images would be scanned at a high resolution, backed up on multiple memory media, The originals would be no longer critical.

The very oldest most valuable photos I planned to send to my brother to keep.

  ***  2010  ***

LISA'S BIG BOAT WREAK

Lisa had a life changing event in January of 2010. She was anchored in the bay at Utila, an island which is part of Honduras in the western Caribbean. She was in the dinghy doing some work to the outside of her boat when she noticed a powerboat approaching at high speed. It was headed straight for her and wasn't changing course. At the last moment she dove into the water and swam for her life. The powerboat smashed the dinghy, went up on top of her boat cracking the mast in half.

The owner had been drinking and had fallen overboard while his boat continued unmanned at full throttle. Fortunately this irresponsible person also happened to be a very wealthy person. The accident was reported to the local authorities and a settlement was reached.

Lisa was determined to repair Barmina with that money and moved it to a boatyard on the mainland in Puerto Cortez where she proceeded to work very hard on repairs. Repairs that would never quite be completed, at least until I came along almost 4 years later. But that is another story.

Lisa ended up moving back to Europe. At that time there were still some cheap properties available in former East Germany and, with some of her settlement money, she bought a couple of acres with a large, but long neglected, barn and house about 30 miles west of Berlin which she has been updating and restoring ever since. As of 2023 she is still living there.

WALLET

There were momentous events like the boat wreak but also seemingly trivial ones to consider for this new life that I was contemplating, even to the level of the type of wallet I wanted to carry. I have never owned a motorcycle or been a biker but I have noticed how many bikers have a chain to attach their wallet to their belt. I seems very practical when riding but also very practical for any type of travel. It's a big nuisance to lose your wallet while living at home, but it becomes a huge crisis if you are in another country. Pickpockets (rare in he U.S.) are quite common in some cities in Europe where they target the throngs of tourists. So one little project was to find a high security wallet. A friend who rode a motorcycle told me that few bikers buy chain wallets pre-made, most make then using a chain from a dog collar. I didn't think I needed a chain, a cloth lanyard strap would do. I also wanted a wallet that would zip up all around and would be just big enough to hold my passport. Hunting on line I found that some wallets made to hold a checkbook inside would do all that. Checkbooks are virtually obsolete but thank goodness they still make checkbook wallets. I got one and attached a strap to it that would attach to my belt. I have worn out a few of these by now, but I still use the same system. It has saved me a few times from leaving my wallet on a bus or some other distracting place. And, by the way, I also strap my phone in a similar way and for similar reasons.

NEWS OF BUTCH

There was another event that helped firm up my resolve to take the plunge. My boss, when I had joined Schering, was a fellow named Butch Warner. We shared some of the same interests and I thought we got along pretty well. He was kind of a key man in plant operations and when he wanted to retire they had persuaded him to stay on for a few more years. He finally did retire to a home in Lake City, Florida. He got a big truck and 5th wheel RV to travel around in. After he left I happened to meet up with him when he visited Miami and it was remarkable how his demeanor had changed. I think he actually looked younger and I was very happy for him. I still remember him saying his only regret was that he had not retired sooner. But then, what seems like just a short time later in August of 2010 we got sad news. Despite appearances he must have had something going on, presumably cardiac, and my old boss and friend Butch died suddenly. He only got to enjoy his lovely retirement for a couple of years.

As a side note, the conventional retirement age is 65 and that is about the age I was when I had my own big health emergency. I survived it but that was, to a large extent, a matter of luck. The thing that happened to me is notoriously hard to diagnose and had I been in even slightly different circumstance it could have easily killed me. Imagine if I had decided to wait until the regular retirement age, I might have dropped dead just shy of retirement.

YET ANOTHER DEADLINE PROJECT, SCANNING DADS PAPERS

My father had been a writer all his life, he died in 1995, my mother in 2000.

One of the things I did after she passed was to go through her house and collect all the typewritten pages I could find. I was busy with settling the estate and it was far too much material to read through so I just packed it all in plastic bins and carried it down to Ft. Lauderdale where it sat for many years. I had moved three times and each time I carried these plastic bins with me but never really tried to read through them all. My mother had once told me that Dad had been working on his memoir before he died and I absolutely wanted to read through that as well as the other material, but I never seemed to get around to it. Now I was faced with a deadline. If I were to live out of a backpack there was no way I could carry these boxes of paper with me. What to do? 

Well, as luck would have it, the office where I worked had recently installed fancy new copy machines, but they would do more than just copy. They could also fax and, most important to me, work as high speed scanners with automatic sheet feeders! This was yet another project that had to be done before I left the workforce.

I owned a briefcase that I almost never used, but now I began using it to bring a load of typewritten pages to work each day. Even though I was on salary I was still conscientious about punching out at the end of the day before going back to the office to spend a couple of hours scanning those pages. Some were very old and brittle and the machine would often jam, but I was patient. I found a setting which stored the scans in a format used for faxes, a highly compressed TIF format which required a remarkably tiny 35k bytes or so per page. In the end the whole project fit in about 1 gig of disk space. That would have seemed an enormous amount just a few years earlier but in today's world it's tiny, fitting easily on even a small thumb drive.

Still more years would pass before I finally began to delve fully into the contents of those papers. When I finally did it initiated another huge project. But that is a story for another time. 

A PORTABLE PHONE NUMBER OF MY OWN

Another of the many many things to consider was the question of a telephone number. These days it's pretty common for folks to forgo a land line and just use a cell phone, but back then the trend was just starting. I could see that I was going to need a "Virtual" number that I could use anywhere I had a WiFi connection. The obvious answer at the time was Skype, they had the option to set up a "SkypeIn" number. Though there was a fee, both to keep the number and per minute to make calls to land lines. An alternative was Google Voice. I'm pretty sure Google set up it's voice calling system in a bid to eat Skype's lunch. They were offering the service for free temporarily. They would announce that there would be no fee for the following year. Then, when the year was up they would announce once again, no fee for the following year. This went on year after year and so far there is still no fee to use Google voice to call domestic land lines and cell phones. Fees for calls to outside the U.S. vary by country but are quite low. So in December of 2010 I decided on a Google voice number and I still have it and use it today.

NOSTALGIA AND PHOTOBOOKS

I guess when you get ready to make a dramatic life transition it's normal to look back on the past. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that I had been scanning all my old film photos, wallowing in nostalgia as it were. I found myself wanting to share the nostalgia with some of my old friends and this took the form of yet another not-so-small side project to complete on a deadline. A photo-book. Now it happened that the safety program at work awarded "points" for participation. I wasn't a particularly energetic participant but I guess I did what was expected and I had some points. We received a catalog of items we could order with these points. Nothing much interested me except gift cards for a company called Shutterfly. On their website you can upload photos and design photobooks to order.

The period that interested me was the late 70s and 80s, after college but before everybody got married, when we seemed to have a lot of freedom. My friend Alex worked at a dive shop as an instructor then later had a dive shop of his own. He ended up certifying almost everyone we knew in Scuba Diving. I had a couple of different boats during this time and we would frequently go diving and fishing, either out of Port Everglades or down in Key Largo. I had an underwater film camera even then and had a lot of photos of this era which I began compiling into montages. There were also some very out-of-control Halloween parties and lot's of other stuff we did. 

I called my book "A Particular Time in our Lives", which is exactly what it documented.

By Christmas of 2010 I had gotten a number of copies printed. So right after Christmas I got as many of the old gang together as I could, trying not to tell them what I was up to. It's not so easy 30 years on but I managed a fairly good turnout and gave each one attending a copy. We posed as best we could in the same arrangement as on the cover of the book. Anyone who wasn't there got a copy by mail and each copy included a set of DVD ROMs (remember those) with all the source material and video transfers of the old home movies.

I guess I'm kind of still at it, documenting the events of my life, which is what this web log is all about to this day.

DAYDREAMING 

You have to understand that, even though I was making all these preparations at the beginning of 2011, I still had not set any plan in stone. It was still just kind of a dream and I really didn't know if I would have the guts to actually do it. But I could still imagine what my last day at work might be, should I actually pull the trigger. What would it be like to walk out those glass doors for the last time? Sometimes on an especially beautiful afternoon with a clear blue sky I would imagine that it was my last day as I strode confidently to my car. But reality does not always match imagination. I'll mention this again when I describe my ACTUAL last day.

I also spent some time, perhaps a little too much, at my desk imagining and planning my first trip with Google Maps. I figured I would go straight away up the Eastern side of the U.S. Many folks I had known had moved away from South Florida and were now scattered through that area. Some close friends, a couple of relatives and other people I barely knew or had almost lost touch with. One guy, Fred, who lived down the street from me as a kid, lived in Asheville, North Carolina. You can create personal maps with lines and landmarks on Google Maps and I used this feature to plan a trip, going mostly by Greyhound bus across to the west coast of Florida and up to the north part of the country visiting people and a few tourist attractions along the way. I planned to rent a car to drive the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. For some reason one silly landmark stands out in my memory. I like coffee shops but I much prefer to avoid Starbucks when I can, by my lights it's kinda sterile and "corporate". I prefer a funky independent coffee shop. Near the southern end of the Blue Ridge there is a touristic area, associated with an Indian reservation. There was a coffee shop there called "Tribal Grounds". I marked it as a place to stop. Tribal Grounds, while owned by Indians, was a bit of a letdown. It's pretty much just a Starbucks clone. But it was a strange feeling to finally fulfill that plan after discovering this shop (of all things) on line and planned to visit for a year or more.

***  2011  ***

COUCHSURFING

I had heard about a website called COUCHSURFING.ORG. 

The biggest expense of travel is not transportation, by far it is lodging and I was very conscious of this.

Since I was especially unsure how things would work financially,  I became very interested in a website called Couchsurfing.org. It was started by a couple of young idealists to connects persons willing to host travelers for visits in their homes free of charge. The travelers, many of them young and short of means, get to save the expense of lodging. The host gets the experience of, well, hosting and meeting new people from around the world or even just from another state. It's a cool idea. I hoped I might make good use of this system.

Hosts and guests review each other and I figured that if I was hoping to be a guest I should start by building up some good karma (Reviews) by first being a host myself. I set up an account and verified my identity in Jan 2011.

Most of the guests were from Europe and mostly students but my very first couchsurfers happened to be Americans, Andrea and Ty. Most of the guests simply came and went though I still have a few on Facebook. But Andrea, my very first, has stayed in touch and we have had a few travel adventures together since then.

I only hosted for about four months. It was fun meeting these people. My only regret is that I did not start much much sooner.

I used the system as a guest a few time in the early days, but it's been a long time now. I think it might work better for younger people. But I will make one important note. While couchsurfing.org might work better for youngsters, I think house/pet sitting works better for older people. It worked great for Ann and I when we traveled Europe. That huge European trip in 2015 is documented on the web log.

IT ALL BECOMES REAL

I don't have an exact date but it must have been sometime in March 2011 when things became real.

I guess the company was going through a phase, as companies do, of wanting to cut expenses and personnel. I knew that my boss liked me and one day she called me in with a quandary. I suppose she was facing pressure to reduce staff. There were two of us in the department with similar job descriptions and she was searching for ways she could justify keeping us both. Did I have any ideas?

It felt almost like an accident. Somehow I shared with her that I had been considering an early retirement this year. She brightened. She liked me, she had told me as much and she certainly did not want to get rid of me, but the prospect of having to fire someone must have been very unpleasant to her and if I WANTED to leave !!!

Now you must understand that up to now this had been a kind of private obsession with me. I hadn't really told anyone about it and I certainly hadn't made any kind of actual commitment! But once I had spilled the beans... Well, it was almost like my mind was made up for me. I had walked into her office dreaming about early retirement doing all this preparation just in case; and when I walked out I was COMMITTED to it.

And I still had so many issues to resolve:

MY STORAGE UNIT

I had a few old pieces of furniture which seemed to me to qualify as genuine antiques. A writing desk, a chest of drawers, Also a number of sentimental items, some going back to childhood.

I was not a hundred percent sure that I could part with everything, so I rented a storage unit, the smallest and cheapest I could find. I didn't know if I would need it or not. With the mandatory insurance (nearly as much as the rent) it still came to a reasonable sounding 27 dollars a month, cheap as these things go. But I did some calculations. Even if I kept it for only three years that low cost would add up to almost 1000 dollars. I asked myself; is anything I might store here really worth 1000 dollars to me? I kept the unit for a while but resolved to try very hard to avoid using it.

I will make one interesting observation here about things we don't actually need anymore but hang onto for sentimental reasons. We do this because there is a memory attached to the item. What I have found is that in most cases if you have a good photograph of an object, that picture can illicit almost the same memory as holding the actual object. I noticed this when going through pictures taken in the old house, Sometimes little objects in the background would seem almost as significant as the subject of the photo. One photo that happen to include my messy desk seemed to transport me right back to the hours I spent there working on my little projects. I really wish I had many more pictures of everyday things from my childhood, adolescence and even my college years. So much of that stuff is gone forever. Pictures would mean so much. As I was purging I went through and took photos of all the little things in my apartment. Sometimes, when I feel like wallowing in nostalgia, I browse through those photos, they recall many memories of things long past. And it takes up a lot less room than trying to preserve the physical objects. And I still take picture of things I no longer need before getting rid of them. And you know, the digital photos don't yellow and crack with age as the real objects would. Too bad I didn't do that right along through childhood since so much is now long gone.

MY FIRST SMARTPHONE

As I mentioned, I had held off getting a smartphone and it's just as well, I have never been an "Apple" person and in the intervening years Google came out with Android. It became feasible to buy a phone outright and contract free pay-as-you-go plans became available. I took the plunge and bought my first smartphone in May of 2011, just 3 months before I left the working world, so it was yet another way in which life changed for me. It was an Android phone made by LG. Nowadays of course a smartphone is seen as essential in everyday life. But I remember how remarkable it seemed that it could replace so much other paraphernalia. 

For example, who tries to use wake up calls in hotels anymore? They were never reliable. I had searched and searched for the perfect tiny travel alarm clock, I was thrilled to find one that had a little flashlight built in so it could do double duty. It wasn't quite perfect though since the light turned on with an easy-to-press push button on the side, so how to keep it from being pressed accidentally and draining the battery in a tightly packed suitcase?

I like audio-books (even before podcasts existed) and, I had carried a small CD player with attendant power adapter and cables and disks. It was small but still a lot of junk to carry when you want to travel light. I had subsequently bought a tiny MP/3 player with a whopping 1 gig memory (Paid extra for that). It would barely hold one audio-book.

If you are out exploring you need maps and guidebooks, and it's not a bad idea to have a compass as well. Sometimes you need a calculator. I was searching for a very tiny one that could slip in my wallet or something? There were also calculator like devices that could store names and addresses, like a digital Rolodex (for anyone old enough to remember those). I experimented with these as well. I had also spent a lot of effort to print my address book on thin vellum paper that I could staple into a tiny booklet sized just right to fit in my wallet.

With smartphones now ubiquitous all these issues seem so quaint. All these functions are now just "on the phone".

Alarm clock, Map, Compass, Flashlight, Calendar, Address Book, Music/audio-book player, Voice recorder, Calculator. And a pretty good camera to back up my regular camera (Which is waterproof and has it's own story)

All in addition to many computer and communication functions like texting and email. And I have witnessed over the years the ever more common use of QR codes on smartphones for transit boarding, tickets to theaters and other event. And, imagine this, you can EVEN make phone calls! I guess we have already totally forgotten life before the smartphone, but I sometimes try to remember.

One thing I have NOT replaced with a smartphone is my camera. Cellphone cameras have improved a lot since then and make a great backup but I still carry a dedicated camera with f/2.0 lens and optical zoom. It's a so called "Tough" camera, one that can be immersed in water. My most recent one is rated for a depth of 50 feet. I have seen people snorkeling with smartphones in plastic pouches, but I would not trust one of those to any depth. As good as cellphone cameras are, I still prefer to hang on to my standalone camera. 

OFFICIALLY NOTIFIED OF INVOLUNTARY TERMINATION

I wasn't officially notified until a few months after that discussion with my boss, it was on 15 June 2011. I was called into the office. I knew what was happening and that my boss had arranged everything but I was a little unsure about one thing. The term for it was "Involuntary Separation". Was I technically not supposed to know about this ahead of time? In her office she had an HR person from New Jersey on the phone; was I supposed to act as if I didn't know what was coming? So I just took a kind of stoic attitude saying as little as possible. Afterwards I went back to my office and told my co-workers. One of them was a little upset. I tired to sooth him but I wasn't sure if I might get someone in trouble if it got around that it was all prearranged with my consent. Later on I saw the plant manager and he congratulated me like all this was a totally open "secret". I guess you could say I had volunteered for an involuntary separation. The severance package was much better than if I had simply quit and indeed I continue to this day to get some nice benefits from the company.

MY APARTMENT LEASE

My Apartment lease was up at the end of July. The manger assured me that I could prorate for some extra time without extending for a full year. I did considered briefly renewing for a full year but it was a lot of money and I did want to get it all over with, even if the process was a bit stressful. In hindsight I should have extended by two months, but you never expect things to take as long as they do.

TICKET TO GERMANY

I had originally planned to make a trip up the East Coast of the U.S. then visit Lisa near Berlin in Germany. But Lisa strongly advised me to visit her first because summers in Berlin are quite pleasant but the winters are bitter cold.

So it was that on July 20 of 2011, about three weeks before my last day at work, I bought a ticket to Berlin, my departure date was September 10, 2011. I had given myself less than two months to be ready and the pressure was on! You know what a rush it typically is just before you leave on any kind of trip. Imagine what it would be like to close out your whole previous life... EVERYTHING!!!

Even with all my preparations there were still so many loose ends to tie up and I kept thinking of more.

A mailing address was actually not much of a problem. I mentioned that I had that PO Box, originally just to receive packages by mail order. But since I had moved from the old house I been using it for everything including bank accounts and credit cards. Even my drivers license had that address, though that's not strictly allowed.

One crazy little thing I had was a realistic model of a human skeleton of a type used by medical students. This was way before skeletons were sold at Home Depot. I mentioned some out of control Halloween parties we had way back in the day. One of our friends back then was a med student and somehow she "acquired" this model (his name was Clay Adam) to be used in our haunted houses. Many years later I still had Clay under my bed. How do you find a home for something like that? We have lost track of Karen the med student but about six weeks before my flight, our friend Rick (her former boyfriend) took custody of Clay. 

OH, MY WISDOM TEETH

My dentist had told me several times that I ought to get some remaining wisdom teeth removed. She said they were bound to cause trouble some day. I had visited an oral surgeon for an evaluation and he had confirmed that I needed to do it. "They always seem to flare up at the worst possible time, like when you are out on a cruise" he said. He also told me that as you get older an inflamed wisdom tooth can easily become a medical emergency requiring hospitalization. "Get 'em out now", he advised. Yet somehow I didn't make the appointment to do it right away. Now, with my departure eminent, it was crunch time and it became yet another deadline. I made another appointment, they checked my records and found that a full year had passed since that prior evaluation. A whole year? Why, it's as if extracting teeth is not a fun thing . Why would anyone procrastinate like that?

But finally on July 29, just 11 days before my last day at work I experienced something called twilight sleep. I wasn't completely out but the memory is dim. Time seemed to go very quickly. I think I remember when they finished the right side and switched over to do one on the left. I guess the drugs worked well, it wasn't painful at all. Thank goodness my recovery afterwards went pretty easily.

WINDING DOWN AT WORK, WINDING UP PREPARATIONS 

It seemed like there were a number of folks leaving about now and it was common to go to little celebrations. Sometimes it was free pizza at lunch, sometimes a company sponsored dinner, sometimes folks would get together for happy hour after work. I didn't rank a company dinner but as the day grew near, I remember one happy hour at a Mexican restaurant where they made me put on a big sombrero and get my picture taken.

It was a strange feeling those last days. Wrapping up projects, making a list of things to do on that last day, like turning in my badge and a few keys, keys I had carried for 16 years.

T MINUS 31 DAYS - MY LAST DAY AT WORK

And finally, there it was. The 9th of August 2011, my last day of work. Somehow I don't remember much of the day itself, but one thing stands out. I punched out for the last time and turned my badge in to security. I had often imagined this day, usually during a cool winter day as I walked out under a sparkling clear blue sky. But when the actual day rolled around it was summer and there was a typical Florida afternoon thunderstorm raging outside. Instead of striding confidently out into brilliant perfect weather as I had been imagining, I had to hesitate at the door waiting for the rain to slack off, then run to my car. I remember thinking how ironic it would be if I were to be struck by lightning in the parking lot as I was leaving on my last day.

So here I was, done with work, only one month until my flight to Germany and still oh so much to do!

I was busy with eBay. I had several old cameras, including a 3D camera my brother had gifted me at a time we were both interested in such things. Maybe not worth much in the digital age but I could not bear to just throw some of these things away. I just wanted someone to have them so they wouldn't end up in a dumpster. A few other items of note:

GUNS

There were two things I could not sell on eBay. Some years earlier my wife had considered a job with the immigration service. She was not a "gun person" but had she taken this job she would have been required to qualify with a service pistol. She wasn't even sure if she could pull the trigger on a gun. A friend from work took us to an indoor shooting range to give her a lesson. She did it, but in the end did not take that job. I however became interested enough to buy a revolver from that friend and later a little .22 automatic target plinker.

My interest in such things had tapered off over the years and, going through my stuff, I realized with a start that I still had two firearms to dispose of if I was gonna travel the world. Firearms aren't allowed on eBay. So sometime in August with less than a month until departure I rushed down to the target range. The guy said that actually this range did not normally buy and sell guns but he had a look at what I had and made an offer. I might have done better but by now I just wanted to get rid of the things, and quickly. One more item checked off on my long list of things to do.

At T MINUS 26 DAYS; I sold my Scuba Gear via eBay.

At T MINUS 24 DAYS; Also on eBay I sold my brothers old Gibson guitar, with his permission, which he had gotten some time in the early 60s. But he had long ago lost interest in it. It was a huge thing to pack and ship to a buyer in Germany, of all places.

At T MINUS 23 DAYS; I mailed a couple of boxes of keepsakes to my brother in San Francisco . They contained some of the very oldest photographs including a couple on metal plates of someone in a civil war uniform. And a telegram received by our mother from our father during world war II and a few other items I could simply not bear to dispose of. I guess even the most ardent reductionist has limits. It wasn't much, just a plastic bin or two.

T MINUS 9 DAYS  MY PARENTS ASHES 

As I was going through my closet I came across something else I had almost forgotten. It was a large ornate ginger jar from pottery barn containing my parents cremains, yikes. They had been gone for 11 years by now. My mothers wish had been that their remains be blended together for "a while", then scattered in the water off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale where Dad used to fish. After eleven years I guess the first part of the wish had been fulfilled and it was time to fulfill the second part. I no longer had a boat but, even better, I had a friend with a boat. Cary; a gnarly sea dog if ever there was one. When I explained the situation to him he was immediately game to help. He set up a trip for September 1st 2011, just 9 days before I was scheduled to fly out. He and I and another friend, Mark, set out from the dock early in the morning, destination; the gulf stream off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale. There I said a few words and, with a hammer I had brought along, I set my parents free in the Gulf Stream, which Dad and crossed and fished with such pleasure many times, oh so long ago. 

My obligation completed we then set about fishing ourselves. No point making a trip to the Gulf Stream without doing some of that. We trolled around looking for signs. Soon we came to a likely looking spot with seaweed and birds wheeling overhead. Cary and I both had a hit. We were both fighting a large fish but something was strange. It turned out the same fish had taken both our baits! It was a whopper of a Mahi. Mark ably manned the gaff which was really needed for a fish this size, It weighed in around 33 lbs. It was as if my parents has somehow sent us a gift from above and we called out our thanks to the sea and to them. 

T MINUS 7 DAYS The never ending job of Photo scanning finally did end. The date on the last of the scanned photo files is Sep 3, 2011, a mere 7 days before my departure date. Talk about cutting it close!

T MINUS 2 DAYS    SHIPPING FURNITURE TO EDDA

After the somewhat inevitable bitterness of divorce had worn off I had gotten back to friendly terms with my ex wife. She had agreed to take a couple of the older larger furniture items. She was living in Puerto Rico and somehow, just 2 scant days before I was to leave for Germany, I got a pallet full of stuff to a freight company to ship to her.

The rest of the furniture... Well, there was a writing desk that I am sure was an antique. But probably not a $1000 antique. And if I had stored it for the last 12 or so years it would have cost at least three times that much in rental fees by now and I still don't have a place to put such a thing. Instead I dropped it off at the Salvation Army. I hope someone got it who appreciated it and restored it. But I'll never know.

In the end I didn't use that storage unit. The cost to keep it simply couldn't justify keeping anything I might put there. I discontinued it the following month.

10 SEPTEMBER 2011, LIFTOFF

So I mentioned that I had reduced my life to a backpack. To be exact it was a "Carry On" sized bag, no wheels and it did have backpack straps that could hide away in a pocket. But I didn't use the straps much because I also had a small "Personal Item" sized backpack which I typically carried on my back.

The thing is I wasn't quite down to that level at this point. I had been doing so much work to put so much of my life on the computer, photos, videos documents, management of all investments and banking, even my CD collection was all on computer now. I guess it was still hard to imagine that all that could be done on my tiny netbook and I so decided to carry a computer system (actually two) including two screens, some external disk drives and a digital projector to leave with Lisa in Germany. She now had a house there. So that first flight out was quite overburdened with luggage.

I have since learned that, while it is a luxury to have a large screen or even two, you can in fact get done what you have to do with just a laptop. Many people these days forgo even that in favor of a tiny phone screen. But as I headed off on the initial trip I had not yet fully internalized that idea as I have now.

I went to the airport with extra time, anticipating a stiff excess luggage fee. It turned out that one of the suitcases was too heavy even for the overweight category and there was no way to redistribute the weight so they would take it. The only answer was to buy another suitcase in the airport and move some of the contents to it. I spent $37 for a the cheapest duffel bag, or something like that, and paying over $200 in luggage fees for the three suitcases. The woman at the counter was sympathetic. By the book she could have charged even more but she deliberately overlooked a bit saying, "You paid enough!".  It was a stressful beginning after months of escalating stress and final preparation... but I made it!

I got onto the plane and my life of post employment travel was begun.