Baby Boomers Hit the Road for an Adult Gap Year
The Decision That Changed Our Lives
It was early 2022.
The world was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and my wife and I were into our sixty-second year on this planet. We had met travelling around Europe in the late 80’s and had travelled together for another two years before we got married and settled into domestic bliss.
But Covid-19 had made us rethink the rest of our time on this earth.
What Prompted Us to Take a Year Off?
On one of her trips back to New Zealand to see family and friends, my wife had found an interesting book while browsing through the bookstore at Auckland International Airport.
Written by Martin Hawes and entitled “Twenty Good Summers”, it was an eye-opening read.
Basically, the author found himself up a mountain in New Zealand celebrating his 55th birthday. In a moment of clarity, he realized he probably had no more than 20 more summers before doing the things he loved — like hiking up mountains — would become almost impossible for him to do.
The book goes into a lot more detail on how to approach these 20 good summers, but suffice to say, this got us thinking.
We were already into our early sixties, so our 20 good summers was probably more like 12 or 15 good summers — if we were lucky and our health held out.
We were also acutely aware of the many stories we had heard or witnessed firsthand of people putting grand plans on hold for a multitude of reasons, only for something major to intervene (death/major health issues).
Sadly, in most cases, those plans and dreams were never fulfilled.
We decided we didn’t want to go down that path and be left with regrets.
So a dream started nudging towards reality — in small steps, one at a time.
And Then Came the Doubts
It’s one thing to talk about heading out for a year at this stage in your life.
All the possibilities light up your imagination and your dopamine production goes into overdrive. Destinations, flights, trains trips, new experiences and new places become subjects of animated discussion and prolonged daydreaming.
The practicalities are far more mundane and can be quite intimidating — if you allow them to be!
But as the self-help guru Stephen Covey advised in Habit No 2 of his book “7 Habits for Highly Effective People”, we started with the end in mind.
Still, even with that thought upmost in our minds, the doubts still chipped away at our dreams.
- What should we do with our house?
- What should we do with our furniture and vehicles?
- How would we finance this all — especially given that our earnings were in a third world currency, and we were cutting short our most lucrative income earning phase of life.
- Where should we go?
- How much should we pre-book?
The doubts and challenges continuously swirled around, but somehow, the reality of time marching on kept us focused on what needed to be done and not what might go wrong.
How We Prepared for our Gap Year
As we mulled over how we were going to do this, we considered many options and made some decisions.
- Fortunately, both our kids were off the parental payroll and earning for themselves so supporting anyone other than ourselves was a (hard earned) reality.
- While Covid had devastated many businesses, it had in fact been beneficial to my wife’s consulting business. It moved her and her clients online and no one even blinked. That meant she could work from anywhere in the world as long as she had her laptop and phone and an internet connection.
- I was employed full time as a State Veterinarian, but having passed sixty, I could take “early” retirement without incurring any penalties. My monthly pension would be reduced but we figured we could always make more money, but we couldn’t stop the march of time.
- Our home is a treasured place. However, with both kids living and working on another continent, it was no longer the center of our family universe. And besides, in years to come we would have to give it up either due to infirmity or passing the great divide. So the decision was made to rent it out while we were away.
- Our house was full of “stuff” gathered from living there for over twenty years. A massive clean out was due irrespective of taking a gap year or not. An unexpected bonus of doing this was that by selling all the non-essential stuff, we actually raised enough money to pay for our air tickets to our first destination!
- All our good furniture, kitchen ware and precious valuables were identified and packed up for putting into storage.
The Last Month Frenzy
As the countdown to our departure date rolled closer, so timing became everything.
I put my retirement notice in at the end of December 2021 with my last day of employment being 31 January 2022. Not an ideal time of year to try get a whole bunch of paperwork through a typical red tape bound government department.
Thankfully the first of February dawned, and all was well on the pension payment front!
With that hurdle cleared, February became a blur of activity.
- We needed to rent out the house but stay living in it until we departed.
- We had to move the stuff we were going to keep into a storage unit but still have enough to live with until we left.
- We needed to get rid of all the excess stuff we no longer needed. We got to know the local Facebook marketplace and some local auctioneers very well!
Cardboard boxes became a valued item. The local supermarket went above and beyond the call of duty by keeping decent sized, strong cardboard boxes aside for me to collect daily.
My wife packed and numbered over 100 boxes that were earmarked for storage.
And so it went — one day rolling into the next.
We leased 2 storage units and got a small local mover to help us move 100 plus cardboard boxes and large pieces of furniture (beds, dining room table etc.) into them.
One car was sold and the second measured to ensure it would fit into one of the storage units.
We signed a rental lease for the house starting 1 March 2022.
Travel insurance became a hot topic. Since we would be gone more than 3 months, the normal travel insurance that comes with buying air tickets on a bank card would be insufficient. The options were numerous and comparing apples with apples was virtually impossible.
What about chronic medications? We are generally a healthy couple but I have borderline increased intraocular pressure which I keep at bay with one drop of medication a day, but that has to be kept cool in a fridge. How to keep it cool and how to access it while out the country was another little conundrum that needed to be solved.
We also still needed proof of Covid-19 vaccination. We had ours, but rumours swirled about them not being accepted by some countries and airlines. The rules seem to change almost every day, but most people seemed to muddle through.
And then it was the 28th February!
We handed over the keys of our house to the new occupants, packed our two suitcases and laptop backpacks into our remaining car and headed to some friends where we would spend the last few days before getting on the plane.
Lift Off
The first few days in March went by in a flash as we made final preparations.
We learned to accept that, on some issues, we were just going to have to go with the flow. The world was in a state of flux and there was nothing we could do to change it.
And so, on 10 March 2022, we got a lift to the airport and caught our flight to our first destination — Dubai.
Both our kids lived and worked in Dubai, and due to Covid, we hadn’t seen them for nearly 2 years. Our plan was to irritate them for about a month and then head onto Italy to indulge in la dolce vita.
Of course, it didn’t quite work out like that.
But that’s another story!
