This year has given us our first full year of retirement and we have taken the maximum advantage of that state of existence to get pleasure from many “Spontaneous Acts of Freedom.” We are still enjoying relatively good health and have continued to travel while we are able. We will sit back later in life (when we are no longer able) and enjoy long evenings of looking back at the thousands of pictures of the good times we have had.
For the first time since 1998, we did not take a January trip to Hilton Head. Instead, we accepted an offer from our best-travel-buddies, George Robert and Janice Dempsey, to visit them for a couple of weeks at their “Winter-Texan” retreat in Port Aransas, Texas. We enjoyed doing a little fishing, some walks on the beach, and going to great places to eat, all accomplished while in the company of great friends.
We still have season tickets and enjoyed the Memphis Tiger’s basketball season with our new coach this year. In April we took our big trip and flew to Fort Lauderdale and boarded the Royal Caribbean cruise ship “Independence of the Seas” for a two-week trans-Atlantic cruise. The weather was chilly but we enjoyed stops in the Azores, Portugal, and Spain before we landed at Southampton, England. We spent three nights in London doing all the tourist things like the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace and visiting places like the British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey. We could not go inside the House of Parliament because the national elections were in progress; however, we enjoyed watching the politicians on TV. We rode the double-decker buses, the Tube, and the famous London cabs, but mostly walked around sightseeing. We got caught in the London Marathon the first day there, so we spent that day roaming the National Gallery (which was Sue’s favorite attraction) and seeing all the great paintings we had previously only seen in art books by folks like Cézanne, Monet, van Dyck, van Gogh, and Rembrandt. We ate plenty of fish and chips and Cornish pasties and had afternoon tea.
Our next stop was RAF Mildenhall, where I lived for four years back in the Eighties, where we enjoyed visiting the local attractions. Side trips were made to Framlingham Castle, Cambridge, Ely, Bury St. Edmund, and Newmarket. We actually stayed several days longer than we planned, because a volcano erupted in Iceland and the volcanic ash shut down many British flights for several days. We ended up flying out in an Air Force KC-135 tanker that took us to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where we rented a car and enjoyed a scenic drive back home.
In June we made a short visit to see Beckye and the girls in Iowa with plans to take a side trip to California on the way home, but a change in schedules made us cancel that trip. Hey! We’re flexible. In July we made a great trip to Huntsville and spent almost the entire week in the library where I researched information for a new book and Sue dug into genealogy. The book turned out to be a bigger project than expected (402 pages), but The Baby Boomer’s Guide to Growing Up in “The Rocket City” was finished in time to have it available at my Lee High School reunion in August. We both enjoyed visiting with all my friends and classmates. We went one day early and sold a lot of books at a Sidewalk Arts Sale on the Madison County Courthouse Square.
Later, in September we drove down to New Orleans in hopes of catching a military hop to California and Hawaii, but the two flights we were trying for were cancelled so we just enjoyed eating our favorite foods from the French Quarter and then spending the rest of the weekend on the Gulf Coast. Later that month we drove to Shreveport, Louisiana to participant in a B-52 Association reunion and once again enjoyed ourselves.
We entertained company in October when our friend Duane visited from California and Beckye and the girls came down for her high school reunion. On our third attempt this year to get to California, we finally made it – though we took the long way getting there by heading east instead of west. We were the only passengers on a C-5 from Memphis to Norfolk, Virginia, and from there we hopped on a C-17 and flew to New Jersey. The next day we boarded a KC-10 and flew to Riverside, California, where Tiffany drove up and took us back to her house. We had almost a week with her and Greg before our wander lust started back and we decided to go to Hawaii. We were unable to get on two flights out of San Diego so we rented a car and drove to Travis AFB in Northern California after finding out there were several military flights scheduled from there. We were low on priority and missed two flights the first day and another flight on the second day. We needed to get home for some other activities so we jumped on a KC-10 to Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, and rented a car there to drive back to Memphis. We’ve already put Hawaii on the list of next year’s travel plans.
In November we returned to Alabama so I could participate in the Veterans Day Parade in Huntsville and Sue could visit a distant relative in Lentzville and do some more work on her family history. So far she’s found 915 people to add to her genealogy program. She finally broke down and bought her own laptop computer to keep up with all the research. She now has two scanners, dual monitors, and her own computer desk and chair. I’m still using my three year old computer. She’s on her computer a lot these days researching, and I’m on mine converting all my books to Kindle format to sell on Amazon. Sales are going much better than I ever expected.
We had a quiet and easy Thanksgiving at home, going to the Millington Officer’s Club for their turkey dinner. We let them cook and clean up and we came home and watched ballgames the rest of the day.
Oh, and by the way, we didn’t leave Jamie and Brian and their girls out on our trips - we’ve been up to visit them several times this year as well.
Since we’re already starting to get cards from others, we better finish this up so we can get them in the mail. We hope all of you have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and please pray for the safety of our troops overseas.
This year has given us our first full year of retirement and we have taken the maximum advantage of that state of existence to get pleasure from many “Spontaneous Acts of Freedom.” We are still enjoying relatively good health and have continued to travel while we are able. We will sit back later in life (when we are no longer able) and enjoy long evenings of looking back at the thousands of pictures of the good times we have had.