anybody just want to stay home?

Ms G. and I were lucky enough to chose the location of our last megacorp move. So we decided on a location that we thought we would retire to. After 8 years of big city life we ER'd and moved to a remote place within the same state.

I am a homebody, gee just shopping is a 2 hour round trip all day extravaganza. I have plenty of land to roam on, get quiet with, and enjoy the natural beauty of my homestead.
 
52andout said:
When DH left work after 30 years of rotating shifts, weekends, holidays etc. as he was walking out the door someone said "so where are you going?"

He replied "home."
Click to expand...

I can relate - 18 years of rotating shifts, weekends, holidays and so on. Working in the Fraud Section/Computer Crime was the only time in my life I've had a "normal" day work Mon. - Fri. job with weekends and holidays off.

During that time I did travel within the U.S. for training/teaching about 3-4 times a year and at the time that was enough for me. Although about four years ago I was the one who suggested "Hey, let's take $3k out of the bank, load up the car, and just head west 'til we hit the Pacific." DW didn't want to do it. Sigh. At the same time though, I never had an interest in living out of a suitcase most of the time.

But for the most part we are introverts, DW more so than me, and during the winter I have little interest in outside activities. She enjoys having all the free time she wants to spend with family (at this writing she is baby-sitting an 18-month-old and a four-year-old).

We don't have a 2nd home for the simple reason that we don't want one - one house is enough expense/work to maintain, and at least from my perspective it seems that many people with them spend half their vacation time maintaining it.

So I ended up getting a job, I enjoy taking day trips or occasional overnight trips, but for the most part there is plenty to do and see within a couple of hour's drive from here.
 
For a while did a lot of travel around USA for work.
Went no further than Cincinnati for ~15 years.
Actually did air travel in Dec '10 to be with a friend.
Really don't care for travel, but will endure it to meet certain people.
 
We spend a lot of money to have a home and yard that we love, and that keep us more than occupied.

If we could travel by Star Trek transporter, then we'd probably travel a good bit. But the sheer hassle of travel turns us completely off.

It is tiresome to be asked at work, "So, you were on leave? Where'd you go?" and see people's faces fall when I say, "Nowhere. Just stayed home, relaxed, caught up on stuff that needed doing." They simply can't reconcile my smiling face, with what they'd consider sheer boredom! Someone even said, "Oh, the dreaded 'staycation,' huh?" like I was looking for their sympathy :nonono:

Amethyst
 
Amethyst said:
If we could travel by Star Trek transporter, then we'd probably travel a good bit.
Click to expand...
This made me laugh out loud! I have said that so many times! :LOL:

I'm more of a homebody. I don't mind a couple of trips a year, but wherever I go, I'm always anxious to get back home. :)
 
Amethyst said:
(snip)If we could travel by Star Trek transporter, then we'd probably travel a good bit. (snip)
Click to expand...
All of us except Lt. Barclay.

ST-VOY_6_10.jpg
 
Given that losing my lousy and often sickening commute on the trains was the main reason for my ER 2 years ago, I had lost my desire to travel many years ago.

Furthermore, living on Long Island, to get off the island by car means dealing with traffic and the delays at the bridges and tunnels (I don't have EZ-Pass, of course). To get off the island by train means returning to the same lousy trains I was so glad to have abandoned. To get off the island by plane means dealing with the airports which I have no desire to deal with. The only major travel I do is with my dad and ladyfriend to my brother's place in MA, 200 miles away, using my dad's car which has EZ-Pass.

I have my local volunteer work which requires minimal travel and almost exclusively outside the rush hours. My local outside-the-house hobbies are in the evening so I stay out of the rush hour traffic. My ladyfriend lives very close by (walking distance), too. Meanwhile, my car spends most of its time in a heated garage.
 
We have always travelled a lot over the years, in 2010 even though we went no-where I managed to take 18 flights and clock up 53,000 miles.

5 years ago I would have told you that the lifestyle of Billy and Akaisha was the direction we were heading.

2 years ago I scratched that plan, new plan was we would have a base and take off every 3 months for a 3 month trip to 1 location.

Today after getting back from Australia I have a totally new outlook and that is I don't really want to go anywhere. Whilst I enjoy the destination when I get there, travel is not fun but if I am going to do it there will have to be a certain level of travel involved. That is no economy class, business class has fallen off my screen and now first class is required. Allows you to skip to the front of line for check in, security and you don't have anyone sitting on top of you for a 14 hour flight. I need my space. At the end of the day I want to go back to a nice room to relax.

So our latest thinking is we might do 1 trip a year for a duration of 1 month. Luckily we have accum. enuf FF points to do 2 trips to Europe in First, one to Japan in First and 1 to Argentina in First so that will cover us for the first 4 years of retirement. If we don't have points to get us what we want we will stay home quite happily in our condo in Hawaii.
 
scrabbler1 said:
Given that losing my lousy and often sickening commute on the trains was the main reason for my ER 2 years ago, I had lost my desire to travel many years ago.
Click to expand...
Do you mean that you picked up colds and flu and stuff from your exposure on the trains? I think something like this might have happened to my GF a few weeks ago. We were on a bus and some guy got on and immediately had a coughing fit, of course not bothering to cover his mouth. 3 or 4 days later, GF had pneumonia.

Ha
 
DangerMouse: your stategy with FF points ia similar to ours. Agree it's impossible to fly economy more han a couple of hours. Use our points for 2-3 long trips per year(usually Europe or Asia). Still enjoy it but I can see that eventually once you have been just about everywhere, it could start to get tiresome. Our longer trips are usually 10-25 days in duration and often include a biking tour or perhaps a cruise. Doing Tuscany biking in May and Burma river cruise in Sept. Was supposed to do Viet Nam/ Cambodia/Thailand biking in April but they cancelled that trip.
 
DW and I discussed travel today. We agreed there are always things competing for those spare dollars -- fix up the back yard deck, for example. This is weird coming from her as she's more emotional and I'm the one doing the responsible act.

We agreed that international travel is not all it's cracked up to be. Lots of myths. When we meet relatively well off friends the talk might turn to "what's new in your life?" So often this demands a mention of an "exotic" trip. It's a lifestyle and ego thing I guess. She's told friends we went to the canyonlands in Utah last spring and nobody's interested to hear any more. They're unimpressed. That means we must be on to something -- those geologic formations were fabulous and people come from all over the world to see them.

We live in a beautiful house in a highly desirable area of the country. It's hard to leave when I can do a run or walk in a great state park just out my backyard gate. The birds and assorted creatures provide a lot of entertainment.

A happy thought -- when we get older and stop most travel we can have dogs and cats because we don't have to board them. :D
 
People say to me- "what's new." I usually say, not much. But I am not bored by this; on the contrary I am happy about it. What matters is not how you life sounds to others, but how it feels to you.

People sometimes say that you have to travel to see how the rest of the world thinks. Good luck! You are a tourist, usually with poor if any language skills and no connections who are going to be around for at most a month.

It takes much longer than that to get the feel of a new neighborhood in a city where you have lived your whole life.

My Swedish dance partner, married to an American and having spent at least 25 years here tells me she doesn't understand Americans. :) 25 years and she still is guessing what is going on! According to her, Swedes say what they mean, while Americans appear open but actually hide their intentions. Beats me, I are one!

I look at most non-business travel as consumption. If travel makes you feel better than other forms of consumption, do it. Otherwise, not much point.

I will go to Spain for language study fairly soon, and stay 2 months at least. After my GF retires we will likely go to Italy, as she is a native speaker and has some connections. If I can afford it maybe a museum focused trip to London, same to DC and NYC from time to time. And since I love gold, El Museo del Oro in Bogota.

Like others here I no longer enjoy the process of getting there, even by car. GF wants to visit Indian battlefields in our West, and I will try to work up some enthusiam for this. But overall I would rather just go down to Lake Washington and go swimming in the summer.

Ha
 
haha said:
Do you mean that you picked up colds and flu and stuff from your exposure on the trains? I think something like this might have happened to my GF a few weeks ago. We were on a bus and some guy got on and immediately had a coughing fit, of course not bothering to cover his mouth. 3 or 4 days later, GF had pneumonia.

Ha
Click to expand...

I did not refer to catching colds. I was referring to my often having to run for the train and being nauseous once I boarded it. Or the freezing cold days which also left me nauseous while waiting in the sometimes-heated waiting rooms on the platforms. Or those hot days in the summer when you could barely breathe on a train whose A/C was not working well, or in those underground platforms where the summer heat stuck around until October.

Then there were the mental annoyances all year round, mainly the horribly growing use of cell phones on the trains. The loud and lengthy conversations by the endless supply of rude passengers made what was a peaceful commute in the 1980s and most of the 1990s into a loud talkfest of inane and TMI conversations. I wrote the Long Island Rail Road several times over the years about this, begging them to create separate "quiet cars" to spare us riders from the obnoxious ones but it was to no avail. I am now very proud to be among those who have voted with their feet, being part of their lost riders. :)

Now you see why I referred to it as a sickening commute? :)
 
A lot of us have children that live far from where we live so unfortunately travel is a way of staying connected .
 
We've visited all the places we wanted to go. We visited the Celtic Lands, roamed Edinburgh, drank in the pubs in Ireland, wandered through the palaces and mosques in Istanbul, got just close enough to polar bears to take pictures, and marveled the penguins (whose poop is the color of whatever they ate at the time). We rode horses in Palo Duro Canyon and stood under the biggest Sequoia in the world. We've been to Vicksburg and Gettysburg as well as family reunions. We looked at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (surprised at how small it was) and watched the sun set in O'ahu. We looked up at the Rockies from Colorado Springs and understood why the song was written. We held the first newborn child of the first child in California. We are grateful for this amazing world.

Our preference now is to just stay at the ranch. As our grandson says "home is more better".
 
East Texas said:
We've visited all the places we wanted to go. We visited the Celtic Lands, roamed Edinburgh, drank in the pubs in Ireland, wandered through the palaces and mosques in Istanbul, got just close enough to polar bears to take pictures, and marveled the penguins (whose poop is the color of whatever they ate at the time). We rode horses in Palo Duro Canyon and stood under the biggest Sequoia in the world. We've been to Vicksburg and Gettysburg as well as family reunions. We looked at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (surprised at how small it was) and watched the sun set in O'ahu. We looked up at the Rockies from Colorado Springs and understood why the song was written. We held the first newborn child of the first child in California. We are grateful for this amazing world.

Our preference now is to just stay at the ranch. As our grandson says "home is more better".
Click to expand...
Sounds like you covered it all!
 
lsbcal said:
We agreed that international travel is not all it's cracked up to be. Lots of myths. When we meet relatively well off friends the talk might turn to "what's new in your life?" So often this demands a mention of an "exotic" trip. It's a lifestyle and ego thing I guess. She's told friends we went to the canyonlands in Utah last spring and nobody's interested to hear any more. They're unimpressed. That means we must be on to something -- those geologic formations were fabulous and people come from all over the world to see them.:D
Click to expand...

I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. I don't think it's necessarily a lifestyle or ego thing to go somewhere that maybe considered more exotic. I actually think it comes down to the fact that people only really want to talk about themselves, they don't want to listen to other people. I fear the art of conversation is quickly dying as we all become more self-absorbed.

I left small town Australia 25 years ago and have travelled the world far and wide. In all my numerous trips back home no-one has so much as expressed an interest in seeing a photo or hearing what I have done. People are so much more into their own lives they don't care if I canoed down the Amazon River or hiked the Grand Canyon. They are more interested in what they watched on television last night.

Our attitude to our travel is it is for ourselves, it's not to impress anyone with what class of travel we went or how much we spent. For us it is the experience, knowing that when we are lying in our bed in the nursing home, we will have memories of sights we saw and things we did.
 
For the most part I'm a homebody. My work involved very little travel and I didn't travel a whole lot for vacations either. As a result, I've seen very little of the US and am considering the RV life (either part-time or full-time) at some point in the next few years. If I do start RV'ing full-time, I think I may well only do it for a few years before the urge to have a permanent homestead kicks in again.

Nothing wrong with staying home if that's what you love.
 
If I could be teletransported......:cool: I would see all those places of your country I constantly read about in your novels. And meet some of you guys. Don´t worry, I´ve got enough means, I won´t crash in your homes:LOL:
 
Travel's an interesting thing. In Paris a few years ago, I imagined that the groups of young people I saw on the streets standing round conversing and smoking were involved in heady philosophical and literary discussions. Truth is they were probably moaning about school, parents, and talking about which mall they were going to hang out in.

Sometimes when I travel it seems that I go to great expense to just sleep and eat somewhere else when I could just as happily be doing the same thing at home with a greater degree of comfort and far less expense. At other times, I bump into interesting people and see things that I wouldn't have seen had I stayed at home.

I think it's possible to be a very creative and successful traveler in your own city and your own neighborhood. If and when I travel, I hope to discover new things and new people. If I'm just going to sleep, eat and go on the computer, I might as well do that at home.
 
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