A Case of Wanderlust

Even as I'm in the midst of a pretty bad case of jet lag (First up all night, then up till midnight, then awake since midnight . . . ) I am already getting itchy to take off again. Home is increasingly becoming the place we come home to to do the laundry and pay bills before heading out again. Or at least it is for me; Mike doesn't seem to have quite the severe case of wanderlust that I do just yet.

I knew going into our recent early retirement that we weren't on exactly the same page about how to organize our post working lives. A standing joke in our house is that Mike and I are exactly the same people we were when we were dating some 30+ years ago. One random weekend back then, he came over to my house and asked what I'd like to do, and I immediately suggested that we head over to the L.A. County Fair. Mike's immediate, panicked response to my enthusiastic suggestion was, "Now? But that's over 75 miles away!"

Not a whole lot has changed since then. I'm still constantly coming up with spur of the moment, and to be fair, sometimes slightly hair brained ideas, and Mike is still acting as the grounding Ying to my Yang.

Personally, I would love to be consistently on the road for two to three months at a time, home for a week or two, then off again. I enjoy coming home, but after a couple of days, the old familiar itch to take off starts to descend, and I become increasingly restless. Mike, conversely, appears to enjoy being at home just as much as he enjoys being on the road. 

So, my strategy in our early retirement has been to float my wanderlust ideas little by little, and hope hard that Mike comes on board and learns to love being on the road as much as I do. The agreement we've struck for now is that I will try to work around the 24 weeks of the year that our lifelong learning program is in session here at home, and Mike will give me free reign to plan on-the-road adventures for the remaining 28 weeks of the year.

The good news is that as Mike continues to de-stress from decades of working at a frantic pace in a high stress industry, I'm seeing a wonderful, playful spirit beginning to emerge that might just work in my favor. Mike is increasingly open to filling our days here at home with a variety of activities, and can often outlast me in the energy department. He's also beginning to float ideas of activities he'd like me to consider, and places he'd like us to go visit. After decades of me being the primary mover and shaker in these areas, I can't tell you how much fun it is for me to see this side of him develop.

In fact, just the other night he came home from the lifelong learning program we attend with the excited suggestion that we immediately head back over to catch a baseball game that was just beginning at university.

The irony? After two nights of virtually no sleep due to jet lag, my immediate, panicked response to his enthusiastic suggestion was, "Now???"

Hmm . . .