Taking travel to the next level

I talked about our trip to Germany back in a May post, and now it's just about upon us.  We leave next week for a month in Duisburg, Germany (that's their downtown above). Mr R-T is going to embark on a work-related project , and I am going along just for fun.  We have a nice apartment near the university, and I'm going to try to live like a local for the month.

My German is coming along. In addition to the sites I mentioned last time, I have found Deutsche-Welle, which is a German site devoted to helping people learn the German language (I think it is subsidized by the German government).  I'm working on my B2 level course, which is sort of advanced intermediate.  My vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds, but without a German speaker to chat with, I don't really feel fluent.  But I'll be jumping in to the deep end of the pool in a few days.

Figuring out what to bring is my next challenge.  I swear that going for a month is harder than either going for a week or going for a year.  In the former case, there are things I would just live without; in the latter case, it would be worth the effort of finding out the equivalent in the local shops.  Luckily, we are allowed a lot of bags on United, so I think we will be able to fit it all.   Whether we will be able to lug that much on and off trains is a different question. And I'm still waking up in the middle of the night thinking of important things to add to the list.

We are going to travel each weekend.  One weekend will be spent with our host, so I don't have do anything for that.  I have discovered that my Nexus tablet is better for reading guidebooks than my Kindle (I have a relatively old, B&W Kindle), because the books are full of hi-res photos.  Current plans have us travelling to Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Cinque Terre region of Italy, but stay tuned to see where we really end up.  I'm also thinking of visiting a friend in Poland for a few days.

There are other logistics too: letting credit cards know not to freeze our account because we are out of the country for so long.  We have credit cards with chip and pin technology (having been unable to pay a road toll once because that was the only way you could pay, we were thrilled to find these), and the same cards don't charge a fee for currency conversion, a big savings.  Finding cheapest way to get cash  -- my bank doesn't charge a fee at its end, but it doesn't seem to have deals with any European bank networks. Finding a gym or Pilates studio, wi-fi access, bike rental to get to places I can't easily walk to, phones and phone data plans.  And more.

Each day I think of one more think I need to look into. The folks at the University have been fantastic -- they are even lending us a printer for things like printing out directions.

Since travelling is (or ought to be) an important part of retirement, at least in the early years, I'm going to post regular updates about our trip on this blog.  Stay tuned.

Retirement -- a time to travel

Photo by Prateek Bahadur

I've been slow in amping up my travelling now that I'm retired.  Mr. R-T and I have a few trips planned (maybe imagined is closer to reality), but since he is still working, he's not as enthusiastic as I am.  However, this past weekend we found ourselves in Chicago.  We have children (a son and daughter-in-law) living there, and we hadn't yet seen their place and how they were faring as a married couple (if either of you are reading this -- we approve.  Not that you asked our opinion.)  It was just a long weekend -- leave Friday morning, return Sunday night.  Probably not the ideal travel plans; if we were both retired, it would make more sense, both financially and airport-chaos-wise, to travel on Thursday and Tuesday, but we are working up to that.

We got "senior citizen" fares from United, but as near as we can tell, they cost the same as regular fares.   We also got to use TSA-Pre for the first time.  This is the special check-in line for pre-approved folks, where you don't have to take of your shoes, take out your laptop, etc.  In our case (not sure this is always true), we didn't have to go through the milliwave detector either.  It was very fast.  We have been using CLEAR, which is one of the private companies that enable you to bypass long lines (they use fingerprint detection to identify you), but you still have to take off shoes, etc., so we found Pre to be faster (and it didn't cost as much as CLEAR, which we probably won't renew).  CLEAR only works in a few cities, of which San Francisco is one. Of course, which is the least hassle can change as more and more people sign up for either service.

We were in Chicago during the Taste of Chicago, but the newlyweds just wanted to hang out around the house, so we missed that.  I figure they will be there for a while, so maybe next year, I'll get to go.  We did go out for a very nice dinner Saturday night, at Spiaggia,  one of Chicago's Michelin 1-star restaurants (our children are definitely foodies).  Other than that, we learned a lot about their local neighborhood and enjoyed their company.

The best part about travelling while retired is after I get home.  No need to rush around trying to squeeze in three days of errands and chores in the cracks before and after work.  Today I did laundry, grocery shopping, garden work, and other things (even writing for this blog) at my leisure. Always before I dreaded travelling because I knew that when I returned, I was going to have 3-4 days of craziness to get caught up.  When you don't have tons of responsibilities, it can be done in one day.  Who knew?

While I love visiting family, my desire to travel is mostly about seeing places as much as people.  I need to spend a week or more in Chicago to see the sites on my list, and that will have to be done without my museum-hating son.  And there are so many other places I want to spend time in.  It's time to leave Mr. R-T in the lurch.  A similarly retired friend and I are talking about going to Santa Fe, and there are several places along the West Coast I want to take short trips to.  Of course, there are also longer trips to Europe, New Zealand and South America on the bucket list (we had a conversation yesterday about going on safari in Africa, so I think that's going on the list too). Now I just need to make time for these, and figure out how best to budget for them.

If I'm retired, why is my professional life haunting me?

While a lot of people want a soft transition from whatever their career was to their retirement life, I don't.  I'm not sure why.  I loved what I did for a career -- all my roles from academic researcher to UX practitioner to programmer.  When I considered retiring eight years ago, the main reason I didn't was that I was having trouble imagining not doing what I did every day (even though at the time, I was sure I wanted to leave the job I had).  I had lots of ideas of how to do things in a pro bono capacity (many of which I am still aware of, though I think that now more of them would actually come up with at least some sort of payment). But this time around, I'm ready to move on.  I have such a long list of things I plan to do, and I'm not making fast enough progress on them (in my mind), but I still get sucked into things that relate to my professional life.

Right now I am: working on a short article about an interesting methodological 'incident', making final changes to a book chapter, reading the reviews of a rejected conference paper and deciding if there is any value in rewriting it for a different conference, advising a couple of colleagues who have come to me asking  what to do in their current job or what to do in their career, writing some code that will go in the mailman3 open source project, and starting a new electronic community.   I just finished doing a review of a new book for the publisher and in the early spring I reviewed a journal article. That doesn't count several projects I have turned down.

Had I not made it clear to people that I wasn't just retiring to work part time or work pro bono, there would be several more projects on my plate, more on the practitioner side than the researchy things that dominate the list above.  I'm sure this varies as a function of what one's area is, but I also think that this would be true of any area where consultants are common.  My father retired 30 years ago as an OSHA safety engineer (about as different as you can get from my career) and had a similar experience.  Of course, unless you really take a consulting career seriously, your expertise decays pretty fast in this day and age, and for him, at least, the opportunities went away in about 3 years (he wasn't trying at all to keep his knowledge up to date).  I hope it's faster for me.

I do enjoy these projects, though they tend to engender more guilt (and more date-driven deadlines) than most of my other projects, which is one of the things I want to get away from.  Maybe I do want this professional identity to stick around more than I publicly admit.  Or maybe I just can't say no....

Keeping Active: Take 2

Now that I've been at this retirement thing for almost four months, let me give you an update on how this exercise thing is working out.  The previous post on this was Taking Better Care of Myself. Overall, I'm pretty happy with being able get in significant exercise every day.  I've lost 20 lbs., so it's doing something.  (Haven't been to my doctor in this time, so I don't have any other numbers.  I have lost 2 pants sizes too.)

I've settled down; I'm no longer so rabid about needing to get in my 10,000 steps a day (lots of what I do doesn't involve things my step counter counts, so I'm using other metrics), and I have also quit tracking food input for a while.  I'll probably have to go back doing to the latter eventually, as the things I was concerned about -- fiber and protein -- have probably not increased enough. But it was beginning to feel a bit OCD when I was tracking things that carefully.

I have settled into an exercise routine.  I spin two days a week, do yoga and pilates each one day a week, work out with a trainer once, hike once a week, do a 3-or-4-hour 40 mile-with-hills bike ride once a week (my  attempt to push myself), and do a more social bike ride once a week.  (Yes, that's eight days a week).  That's kind of the baseline.  This week I'm hiking three different times (the first ended up as an 11.5 mile hike covering 2000 ft of vertical, but some of that was an unplanned detour).  I skipped my serious bike ride this week, in part because I decided that I wanted to bake bread (more on that in a later post), which conflicted with the meeting time for the biking group I was joining, and in part because my muscles were hurting everywhere (so I did an extra yoga session and pilates instead and called it a day).  Other weeks have led to extra bike riding (I did a 100km ride about 3 weeks ago) and a few times my busy social schedule has interfered with all this exercising (it's supposed to be fun, so when it's less fun than something else, out it goes)

This feels really good.  I highly recommend it to all new retirees, whether you retire at 70 or 35.  I figure eventually I won't be able to do this, and the satisfaction of watching myself get stronger -- possibly stronger and more aerobically fit than I have been in my life -- and of making time to do things I enjoy on a regular basis has been immense.  Since I've had to do 3 rounds of recovery in the last 4 years (two ankle surgeries and a round of chemo), feeling healthy and "younger than my age" is very rewarding (18 months ago I was using a walker and cursing it roundly.  Not much makes you feel older than a walker.  You see 20 year olds in wheelchairs, but not using walkers.) So whatever enjoyable exercise means to you, if you haven't done enough of it when you had work as an excuse (and you know whether that means you, I'm sure), DO IT NOW.

I also highly recommend both yoga and pilates for the ageing body.  Yoga I have done on and off for 20 years, but I'm doing it more regularly now, and really reaping the benefits in overall flexibility and lack of aches and pains (other than those I can attribute to a particular exercise session).  It's also done wonders for rehabbing my ankle.  Even physical therapists don't have exercises to strengthen ankles, but the balancing exercises (everything from Eagle Pose to Vasisthasana Pose) have really made my ankle much more stable and stronger. It's important to find a yoga teacher who doesn't push you to do things that are unsafe, but I can't say enough good about (safely done) yoga.

Pilates I am newer to.  I have been wanting to take it up for several years, but couldn't fit it into my schedule.  The first few times I said to the teacher "this really looks and feels like a medieval torture device" (her answer: "everyone says that"), but I've done about a dozen sessions now, and I can feel that it's doing a lot to strengthen my core, which is important for many things that "go south" as we age.   While I'm getting to a level that I find strenuous (Pilates instructors, or at least mine, start you out very gently, and it was only my progress from week to week that convinced me that this was really exercise), it never hurts (or at least isn't supposed to).

I'll keep posting on how this evolves.  Maybe a year from now I'll be a couch potato, but I doubt it. It doesn't hurt that I live in California, where I can do outdoor exercise year round.  And I'm doing my best to stay out of hospitals and other medical facilities -- starting this from near zero was damn hard, and I'd rather avoid doing that again.

Travel adventure: playing Hausfrau in Germany

We are going to spend a month in Germany this fall.  Mr. R-T has a fellowship that will have him working in a lab at the University of Duisberg for a month, and I plan to go along (this is much more interesting than his work trips to Columbus, OH or Schenectady, NY).  I'll be working on becoming a competent German conversationalist, biking and hiking in the local woods, and shopping at Markt's, Bakerei's and the like. And in my spare time, maybe do a little Open Source coding. We expect to be able to spend Friday - Sunday each weekend touristing.

I'm working on building up my German vocabulary and grammar. (I spoke semi-competent German as a child, but with the grammatical skills and vocabulary of an eight year old -- not too useful as an adult.).  I've found two sites on the web: livemocha.com, which enables you to pracice speaking and writing with your work reviewed by native speakers, and duolingo.com, which is a great vocabulary builder (and also teaches a reasonable amount of grammar).  I also went through the entire Rosetta Stone German series.  I'm still not particular competent, and also absolutely freeze when I have to freely generate German sentences, but I'm working on it.

I'm just getting started thinking about these weekends; not sure whether to spend them visiting parts of Germany or to go to Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen and the like.

So here's a shout out to the collective wisdom of those of you who read this blog.

1. Do you know of other sites on the web that are useful for learning a language (specifically German).  I especially could use more speaking and pronunciation practice.
2. If you were living in northwestern Germany, where would you go for a 3-day weekend?  Why?
3. What quintessentially German activities should I make sure I get a chance to do?  I mean more or less everyday things, not go to Okobertfest or the like. 

Why are cars so seductive?

I made a commitment to do as little travel by car as I can (as I described in a previous post). This is, of course, for things like daily errands -- I live in a world where public transportation for long distance travel (other than airplanes, which are arguably worse than cars in terms of greenhouse gases) is just not practical.  It's turning out to be harder than I thought.

Here have been some of my excuses recently:

• I have too much stuff to carry.  This was for weekly grocery shopping (4-5 heavy bags) and for leaving and picking up things at the dry cleaners.  Maybe the first could be somewhat solved with panniers, but I haven't gone that far.  I have no idea how people carry most dry cleaning very far either walking or on a bike.  I suspect the answer is not have clothes that need dry cleaning.  The major grocery shopping trip isn't too bad, as I only go once a week.
• I need to bring home things that need refrigeration, and if I go by bike, they will melt/spoil (this was for a grocery trip that only involved quantities that would fit in my backpack).  I suppose I need to invest in some sort of insulated container, but I'm not yet convinced that these happen often enough to make that worthwhile.
• I don't have time.  This happens more than I thought it would.  My retired life isn't completely non-clock-driven.  Sometimes I really do need to get to the next appointment quickly.  This week it had to do with an appointment with other people (I barely got back from my bike ride in time to drive as it was).  I probably could plan better to not have back-to-back commitments, but my use of other transportation should be enjoyable, not a source of stress, right?
• What, bike/walk to the gym at 5:30am?  Are you crazy?  (Actually, I don't bike to the gym even when I go at other hours).  This is probably my biggest weakness.  It just feels like it makes the exercise take too much time (it would probably add 40 minutes to each session).  OK, I admit it.  I'm a wimp here. 
• It's cold/it's raining/it's too hot.  I haven't used this excuse too much, but that's because we are in the Season of Perfect Weather.  But I expect it to come up.  
• It's dark/it will be dark when I come home.  This hasn't been an issue much because of daylight savings time, but it will be in the winter.  I do not like to bike even on our suburban roads after dark (I have good, but not great, lights on my bike)
• I have a flat tire/bike not working/can't find my helmet.  Hasn't happened yet, but it will, I suppose.

What brings this up is that I realized that I haven't used my bike for errands at all this week (I did use it twice last week -- both times to meet friends).  Why is it so hard to use something other than the car?  I know people -- in the US -- who don't have cars.  I don't think that their surroundings are more "compact" than mine (it's easier to walk or use a bike when the distances are small), but they aren't seduced by the notion that a car is justifiable "this one time", because they don't have that option.  And they have the busy lives typical of non-retired people.  Even though I commuted by bike (part of the time) to my last job, I would never have considered going "car free" when I was a working person.

This is really making me question my commitment to a minimal-car lifestyle.  Has anyone reading this made the switch?  What gave you the inspiration to work through these issues?  Or how did you make these problems go away?

  

Getting back to (the new) normal

OK, I know, I fell off the blogging wagon.  I definitely need more discipline here.

My excuse is that I was gone for a week to my son's wedding (though that doesn't explain why it took me a month to get back to this blog -- procrastination, I guess).  I haven't discussed the wedding here, as a wedding is really not relevant to being retired (unless you think that planning for larger wedding expenses than you predicted should be part of retirement planning :-).  But it was a beautiful wedding and we had a great time. Marrying off a child is an important milestone; it definitely makes you think of your child as an adult more than before.

Before the wedding, which was on the East Coast, we went to New York City to take in a few shows, eat in nice restaurants, and do normal touristy things. This is definitely something we want to do regularly in retirement.  We went to see "Book of Mormon" (which was good, but not as good as the hype) and "Mathilda" (which was excellent -- definitely better than the hype, but then there wasn't much hype around it).  I came away with at least three more shows I want to see this season. (For those wondering which shows caught my eye, they are: "Kinky Boots", which got lots of Tony nominations; "Anne", a one woman show about Anne Richards, the larger than life Democratic governor of Texas;  and "Pippin", which is nominated for Best Revival and apparently is practically a Cirque du Soleil-style show.) We also love museums, walking in Central Park, visiting less well known tourist attractions, and just soaking up the New York ambiance.  I am very glad that I don't live in New York, but it really is a great place to visit.  I hope we can arrange things to visit at least once a year, for a long as I can handle cross country plane trips.

Once we came back, I started getting more seriously retired.  While I still have a large number of things on my "must-do" list, given the time constraints of dealing with the various administrative retirement-y things and the wedding, I wasn't taking on even one-day projects.  I now have more of a routine (I have a hiking day and a biking day, and I've moved a bunch of my regular errands into the weekday to free up more weekend time; I go to lunch with someone at least twice a week), but I am also taking on more garden and cooking projects.  I've been making jam and artisan bread (soup is up next); my very small garden is in full flourish -- we are having salads using lettuce from the garden every night, my green onions are just about ready, and I can see small tomatoes on the tomato plants (so maybe cherry tomatoes in July; that would be fantastic).  I didn't plant enough of the sugar snap peas; so far they just generate enough pods that I can snack on peas each afternoon, but not enough for a meal, even for just two of us.

While I think that the specific things I spend my time on will change a lot ----I'm right now exploring things that I haven't had time to do recently; I'm sure I'll get my fill of baking and cooking -- what I am enjoying most is that much of my day is driven by activities I select.  I still have errands to do -- dry cleaners, laundry, bill paying, trying to sell some furniture we are no longer using -- but I am able to make sure that my day is more than 50% things that I am actively looking forward to. That definitely wasn't true of my work life, where a lot of my work was driven by deadlines, but it's my model of an ideal retirement.