I started writing about my retirement plans almost two years ago. I worked my way through some health stuff, end-of-life stuff, finances, etc. And then I did my big reveal for travel. A huge plan to travel all over North America in stages over several years.

The first stage would be 25,000 km, starting in Ottawa, heading for Alberta and then the North, over to Alaska and down to Vancouver, touring around as I went, finally ending up in San Diego before heading for New Orleans and then back to Ottawa. Lots of criss-crossing as I went. I skipped the Grand Canyon area for a future trip with the family — this would be, relatively-speaking, a solo journey with Jacob likely in university and Andrea still working. I’d cover Western Canada, Alaska, two territories and most of the US west of the Mississippi.

Stage 2 would be Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, PEI, New Brunswick, a bit of Maine, and back home. Stage 3 would be New England all the way down to Florida, over towards the Mississippi again, and back home. A fourth stage would head back to the US midwest and back up into Canada for Glacier National Park (both sides of the border) and then back home.

I figured the most likely scenario would be to get an SUV large enough to pull a small trailer…more than a teardrop, but still within the weight limits for an SUV. It would give me SOME options for extra sleeping space for Jacob and Andrea, but more importantly, gave me the best option for a bathroom. This boy don’t poop in a bucket in his kitchen.

It was a really good plan.

Life entered the chat

Within weeks of my writing those posts, with plans for more, our life changed. Or more pointedly, Jacob’s life changed, and ours adjusted to his big change. Over the last two years, what started as a suspected concusssion ended up being something else, messing with his day-to-day experiences a lot. The thought of planning for ANYTHING kind of went out the window.

For much of the last 2 years, we have been in some form of survival mode. Not thriving, not growing, just figuring out how to get through each day. What can he do, what can we do, how can we help, etc. And, to the extent that we thought much at all about future plans, it was more about “what are the long-term impacts of this, what does it mean for him and us?”. We could probably write a blog every day about what it was like, but that would be too much of Jacob’s story, as opposed to my portion of the experience.

A year ago, May 2024, after 7 months of adjustments, I was stressed out of my gourd. During that period, I was not thinking about plans for retirement, I wasn’t watching the countdown clock, I wasn’t focusing on the things I need to do physically to get ready for some of my long-term plans, I basically was chauffeur for Jacob to get to school and appointments and I worked. Outside of that, most of my hobbies went to the back burner. Binging TV shows occasionally, no astronomy, no photography, limited writing outside of some book reviews and the HR stuff. Every once in a while, I would get a burst of normalcy but it wouldn’t last.

So, I took a couple of weeks off to decompress just to get Jacob to the end of the school year. And then something weird happened. I realized that I wasn’t stressed about Jacob or his future or the challenges, I was stressed with our schedule. Every week, Andrea and I would work with Jacob on Sunday night to plan out the week. Jacob would plan to go to school for Monday morning, Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning, etc. Andrea would go to the office Monday and Wednesday, I’d go Tuesday and Thursday, etc. We’d add in the appointments and who was going, etc. And then Monday morning would arrive, Jacob would have a flare-up, and our schedule was out the window. So we’d adjust. Then Tuesday, something else would happen, and we’d adjust again. I started describing it as “game day decisions”. We literally had no idea when stuff would happen. So, with us working in Gatineau, the schedule was a mess. I got permission to work from home and/or the satellite office until the end of the next school year, and we made it work. There was still lots going on, but with me working from home, game day decisions didn’t matter — I was there, I could take him to school or appointments, etc., without having to figure out a commute home to get him, etc. And Andrea’s life became more predictable, too. But that’s her story to tell, if she chooses to do so.

Until about May of this year, I began to wonder if my plans to retire in two years would work out financially and logistically. With Jacob’s life disrupted, I began to worry about needing to be able to be around Ottawa to help if he was still in the same chaos in a few years, what would it mean for high school, perhaps longer university time, the potential for jobs to earn money to pay for school on top of what we have saved, etc. I started to question my likely retirement date. I was still nominally planning for it, but the excitement went way down as every day was game day. I don’t NEED to retire in two years and staying on for another couple of years would put a lot more income in our bank account. I want to retire, but maybe I should go a bit longer, right? At least, that’s where my thinking was going.

Reality also decided to check in regarding my travel plans

Now, I mentioned a bit of this when I wrote about it, but my excitement gave me a false sense of confidence. Here’s the thing. I am NOT a handy guy by any stretch of the imagination. I can handle some basic electrical stuff, at least I’m confident enough to try some of it, but I am not a mechanic, nor a plumber, nor a general fix-it guy. Can I **really** drive an SUV and trailer all over North America without getting myself into a giant funk somewhere when something goes wrong and I have no way to fix it myself?

Even if I ignore the need for basic maintenance and repairs, such as plumbing and toilets, there’s an additional component: some tasks are really hard to do by yourself, even if they are straightforward. Take backing up the SUV and connecting the trailer. Most people are doing this with two people, one driving and one standing by the hitch saying, “A little more, yep, keep coming, keep coming, whoa, stop, go forward an inch, okay, let’s try it there”. Or if they are doing it themself, they are using backup cameras, extra sensors, or really cool mini-pulling machines that will let you move your trailer TO the hitch rather than the hitch to the trailer. However, for other things, even having someone hold a flashlight and angle it up, or to say, “Hey, did you tighten the left one too or just the right one?” Extra brainstorming or mental capacity.

I started second-guessing my confidence. I was still buoyed by the trip, but was it really DOABLE by myself?

As I thought about that, I started imagining breaking down somewhere in Northern Alberta on a highway and having to deal with the headaches all on my own. Even finding a place to stay while finding a mechanic while finding food solutions, etc. When we travel as a family, I do all the driving, but Andrea and Jacob share the overall load by doing most of the destination planning, route choice, and accommodations booking. In a trailer, I would probably have most of my accommodations set in 3-day increments, but it would still be nice to have someone share the mental load.

Plus, to be honest, I am not always the most fun-loving guy when I spend too much time by myself. I am afraid that 2 weeks in, I’d be speeding through destinations just to get there, not taking my time, just bored and/or lonely. A family member suggested that one option would be to basically post my travel schedule to a bunch of people that I would be willing to travel with and say, “Hey, here’s where I’m going and what I’m doing, if you want to join me for a segment, let me know!”. My friend Stephan even suggested that if I wait a couple of years, he’d be interested in major parts of the plan.

Except then my squirrel brain started thinking, “Wait…travelling with the SAME PERSON for FOUR MONTHS? Am I nuts?”. 🙂 Yeah, it makes no sense to anyone but me.

But I started to wonder if maybe this travel plan is not the best solution. Maybe, instead, I could do what we just did…the three of us flew to BC, rented a car, and drove around the lower mainland. Awesome experience (and a bit terrifying, I’ll come back to that).

I had done Vancouver Island before, and Whistler, Abbotsford a bit, Vancouver. I thought I had an idea of what to expect. I absolutely did not. And it rekindled my desire for the giant trip.

Just before I left for the trip, I was reading an article that had been flagged for me due to alerts I had set, and it was about all-in-one van campers. Not the ones with widow’s peaks, etc., just the huge panel fans. There are three general models, one that sells about 120K units a year, another that does about 65K units a year, and a third that does about 55K units a year. Online fora are rabid about the differences in the models, and while I was interested enough to set an alert, I had relatively screened them out of my planning. Essentially, I wanted more space for a toilet…the vans were a bit too cozy for my needs.

Yet the article that I read was by a guy who had actually owned all three brands, and multiple models of each in fact, and he had come to a decision based on his experience. I assumed it would be about his preference for x or y, which might or might not be relevant to me, but it sounded cool. I like curation articles by knowledgeable people.

Except this was about something totally different. He was talking about repairs and reliability, and in part, the ability to run one by yourself. Hey! That sounds familiar! And here was his take. All three were good. You could come up with reasons to take any of the three, hence the rabid fans online arguing which is better. But for him, it came down to a question of whether or not you could get something fixed relatively easily or were you just “stuck”.

With a truck or SUV and trailer, you can always leave the trailer behind if you need to go get parts. There were a considerable number of trailers along the side of the road during our BC trip where they had a problem, maybe a flat, maybe something more serious, and they parked the trailer and off they went to get help or parts or whatever. I wanted the separated “drive” vehicle and “sleep” vehicle as it can be painful to pack everything up just to run to the store to get bread. I don’t have a lot of travel experience of that type of combined vehicle, but the little I do have made that clear fast. Plus I’m likely to want to go kayaking a lot during my travels, so a separate drive vehicle would work great.

But here was what he noted for repairs and parts, including with a test. He created a common scenario where each of the vehicles broke down with the same issue, and would require a certified tech/mechanic to install the parts. Something up on a hoist that you couldn’t do yourself, basically. He then called a few areas that he might regularly travel to that were a bit farther away from a big city, and thus not something you just run to the local store to deal with or get parts. For the 55K units per year model, one of the areas he called basically said they could get the parts in about TWO WEEKS, but they didn’t have a certified tech to install them. He’d have to have the vehicle towed quite a way to get to a proper dealership. Someone MIGHT be able to fix it local, but the garage owner wasn’t optimistic. For the 65K per unit model, it’s a bit more common in the US, so installation was more likely but parts would take several days at least to order in.

Then he tried the model that sells about 130K per year. The very first garage he called said they had the parts in stock, any of their mechanics could install it, and if they drove by that afternoon, they could do it before they closed.

Why the difference? Not the volume of units sold. It’s because the last model is the Ford Transit van. Which uses almost all the same parts from Ford’s F-150 and 350 series. So of course they had them in stock and of course the mechanics are all certified to install them. Ford sells more than a million of these units per year or something like that.

And suddenly, I was wondering if maybe the trip WAS manageable. Sure, I’d have to deal with electrical and plumbing and space. But it’s a smaller footprint aka easier to drive with no trailer, not much different from driving a large SUV or station wagon (according to some people, although I have some doubts that’s entirely accurate), and only one “unit” to go wrong. I’m not sure how kayaks would work for the height, and there are a LOT of options from DIY design to custom builds to existing commercial versions. Getting the passenger options up to 2+1 would be a challenge and there is NO extra room for sitting around, you pretty much have to be outside most of the time. But for one person, it’s easily doable.

I would be back to compromising on the toilet stuff, but well, if it means I can DO it afterall, maybe that’s the price.

Except the trip to BC threw an opposite curveball. I did the Coquihalla Highway in BC early on in the trip. And I discovered something I didn’t know about myself.

I confess up front that I already knew that I am not a big fan of heights…I can go up in hot air balloons, I can fly in planes or helicopters, I can be in tall buildings, etc., but I don’t like being on walkways or standing at the edge of platforms. If I look down, my legs start to go jelly-like. I could never do bungee jumping or parachuting (Andrea jumped twice, she’s fine, but not me, and likely not Jacob either).

What I didn’t know is that when I’m driving on a highway that has a giant cliff next to me, I’m not that happy about it. I’m better if I’m on the inside of the road aka I’m not next to the cliff, there’s a whole other lane and then the shoulder, and then the cliff. But when it’s next to the passenger side of the vehicle I’m driving, I don’t like it. There are parts of the trip where I was on switchbacks for 10-15 minutes, not very fun, but manageable. And then there was one section where I was doing it for about 30 minutes and I found it a bit much. I knew that the “trick” is to relatively focus on the road ahead, do not look out at the gap, do not look down, basically ignore the cliff. Not perfect, but workable.

And then we went to Lilloett. The last hour to there was really quite painful. I spent about 30 minutes dealing with some switchbacks and some other bits that were a bit annoying, but not terrible. I had to focus, lots of speed changes, and some places where I didn’t like having a large truck bearing down on me even if the turn ahead was rated to 60-70 kph instead of 40 in some places. Just enough to ramp me up a bit for stress. Hands at 10 and 2, gripping a bit tighter than I would like, strong concentration. Particularly as I was driving a rental, a Chevy Blazer with some power that met the requirements for big hills and steep grades, but which I wasn’t completely comfortable with nor that experienced handling. But the last 30 minutes? It was hell.

Every single inch was along the side of a mountain with a huge valley gap beside us. And we were going around a mountain so that my view was almost 240 degrees of drop. If I looked ahead, I could see the drop after the road turned; if I looked to the side, there was a drop; if I looked in the rear-view mirror, there was a drop. And I don’t mean a hundred feet. It was more like 1000 feet down. The views at the rest stops were great, but driving, hell no.

I made it, there were no safety infractions, nobody was on verge of death, but I hated the drive. I followed the speed limits PRECISELY. If it said slow to 50 for a curve, you bet I did 50. If I came to a pull-off area, and there was anybody behind me or I had gone 10+ minutes without stopping, I pulled over and let my arms relax. I was gripping so tight. It was fine, but it wasn’t fun.

And if I was driving one of these vans? I’d likely be sitting about 14 inches higher than I was in the Blazer. Meaning that I would see over the edge even easier. It would be harder to ignore. I have never seen roads like this. I’ve been driving in Newfoundland, Quebec, New England, and never once felt uneasy. But the Coquihalla really freaked me out the first time, and the road into Lilloett was the least fun part of the trip for me. I felt some residual angst on the highway from Whistler to Vancouver, one section kind of hangs off the edge of the mountain, but it was relatively minor in comparison as it was a big wide road.

Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the roads with the huge drops had NO GUARD RAILS???? Frak me.

Sooo…95% of my various trips would be fine, nothing like what I did. But there’s a stretch from Alaska to Washington I’m not as sure about now. And I would want to make sure that whatever route I went through BC even for the mainland was much simpler. And definitely not in rain or winter. Never in winter. Not even a glimmer of a possibility of doing it in winter.

So, where is my headspace now?

The “trip” stuff is probably a distraction…maybe I do it, maybe I don’t. I don’t need to decide for two years. I really like the idea of having a contingency plan where I go to a bunch of the destinations, even if I have to rent a car and stay in a hotel.

In the same sense that I don’t have anything that tells me retiring in 2 years is financially “sounder”, I also don’t have anything that says it is bad either. Jacob is doing way better, or at least was at the end of his school year. He has things going on, such as school, mobility, and driving, but he’s handling it. Some of it is just basic teen stuff, with an overlay of some extra stuff. So maybe nothing to worry about now. Or nothing more than normal, anyway.

Which is also partly true on the retirement plan side. There’s nothing I have to tell work yet officially. I’ll definitely wait to see if there are buyout packages that look lucrative or manageable for me; I will still focus on writing when I retire; and, I’m hoping to do some special projects for work before I exit. All of that stays relatively the same for now.

I feel like I’m still on track for two years. As of today, August 27, my father would have been 98. Fast forward two years, and I suspect even you can do the math to realize August 27, 2027 would have been his 100th birthday. It’s still my target. Things may slip, I’m not hardcore planning right now, but I will return to some of the ideas in the coming months. I suspect I’ll make my real decision on January 1, 2027, or at least the decision if I’m going that year. If I choose no, I’ll decide again on January 1, 2028, or 2029, etc. I know I won’t go past 2030, that is my max for pension. I’d be 62 by then.

Two years. Start your engines!

Next up on my plans? A writing conference next week in New Orleans. Fingers crossed it goes well, it’s a bit more expensive than I would like but I have wanted to go for a very long time. And I get to try travelling by myself for the first time in a very long time. I’m not exactly Dora the Explorer, nor her cousin Diego. Well, for that matter, I’m not even her knapsack.

In month 1 of my preparations for retirement in three years, I covered financial, legal, and end-of-life issues, and then I covered all my travel plans last month. I had intended to do health stuff, a natural progression from the EOL stuff in month 1, but I was slowly getting drawn into all the info on campers and RVs. And I went with the passion.

As I mentioned in previous posts, pre-planning for retirement is about seeing if I’m making the right “investments” in the various “areas” of my life, just as you would for financial planning. The biggest one that most people talk about, even if they don’t use those words, is health: “Are you making the proper investments in your health to smooth your transition into a healthy, active retirement?”.

Now that I’ve blasted through all that fun stuff, this month’s focus on health is likely to totally suck mentally and emotionally. Part of that is my historically dysfunctional emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical relationship with health, nutrition and fitness. Part of that is optimism tempered by a reality check that will hinder my efforts. Part of that is the fear that those big travel plans I mentioned in month 2 are only possible in their current form IF I can make changes before I retire; if I don’t make them, many of my retirement plans fall away. I will have failed to invest adequately to do what I want and need to do.

But the biggest challenge is that my health planning differs from almost all the other “areas” I’ll blog about within this first year. On most of them, the goal is “pre-preparation”…for example, on travel, I didn’t have to decide yet whether I would travel in an RV, campervan or towed trailer, I only had to decide what the big options would be for later. The detailed implementation planning can happen in the first year after I retire to “start” the trip about 11-12 months later. I don’t have to DO the planning work now, I just have to come up with a viable framework. If, however, I’d discovered in there that I needed to do some advanced driving course before I even get there, sure, I’d have more work to do in the coming months or years before retirement. Instead, for the most part, most of the planning stuff is to monitor developments in the industry and options for the future, handle a bit of savings to ensure I have the money if/when I need it in retirement, and then hit it hard after retirement.

By contrast? The health stuff starts now. I’m not just building a framework for the future, I’m building the framework and full-on implementation plan now. I’m jumping out of the airplane and sewing my parachute together on the way down. I don’t have time to wait, I need to start now. And if I’m totally honest with myself, I’ve tried some of this before, and failed miserably. I can’t afford to fail this time. In many ways, it feels like my last chance.

My starting point

So how’s my health? Well, generally, it sucks. If you compared it to financial planning, I would hit retirement with very little health assets to support me in my aging years. That’s a bit overdramatic, but well, not completely.

At the moment, my back is in rough shape. I did something to it about six months ago, and it has been terrorizing me ever since. I’ll bop along for a couple of weeks, seems to be going well, and then one morning I’ll wake up, roll out of bed, and it starts twinging like an SOB. When it “killed” me the first time, I had never experienced that kind of pain from the spasms. I literally was crying and occasionally screaming. Six months later, I know how to control the pain, keep it down to a dull roar, and I have a back brace to use when I need it. Massage helped, and I thought osteo was helping too for a while, but then it stopped helping at all.

Right now, I need to focus on three things:

• Taking my over-the-counter meds to reduce inflammation…I confess I really don’t like taking pain meds of any kind, they can make me kind of foggy or loopy at times, but I need to get over my reluctance and take them regularly to reduce the flare-ups;
• Actively do my back stretches and strengthening exercises, increasing into the more advanced ones; and,
• Continue my chiro treatments.

I’ll also consider some myofascial release (after Christmas) or increased regular therapeutic massage.

After that, there’s my weight. It’s stable, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I have plans, and most of those right now are around getting a solid workout routine going. Even if it doesn’t reduce the weight for now, it will give me more strength, energy and flexiblity for the future.

And then I need to get moving again. I’d love to start kayaking next summer, but my back needs to be “fixed” first.

What comes next?

I don’t know exactly all the “pieces” yet for my plans.

• I want to look at the roll-over elements from my End-of-Life work;
• I’ll be doing a full physical this fall, including A1C numbers, BP, colon, prostate;
• I want to get hearing aids or at least have my hearing fully checked and evaluated;
• I need to get some dental work done;
• My feet have the same issues most diabetics have, so I’ll get that looked at, see if there’s anything to worry about;
• I need to work through a full assessment regimen for regular evaluation of my fitness level;
• I’ll start looking at flexibility, strength, movement, etc; and,
• I’ll need to do a bunch of work on cognitive functions as well as mental health.

I confess that I’m not fully ready for the work I need to do this month. And, as I said, it’s not just the framework; it’s the full implementation plan or at least the pieces I need to do now to support my back rehab and be ready to move into the strength and energy levels work in about three to six months.

But the hardest part will not be that part of the equation. The most challenging part will be figuring out how to harness all the rituals and enhancements I came up so that I’ll stick to the plan and make it work. As I said, it feels like a last chance to get this right before I retire.

If I succeed, I will have the health foundations to do what I want to do; if I fail, well, that is a much more sedentary and disappointing retirement than I want to contemplate yet.

Okay, I described bundling trips, a series of one-off trips, and some possible cruises that interest me. Then, I went a bit off the grid with walkabout options for Canada and the West Coast, including how I could handle possible trip logistics. If that all worked out, I would have options for the Atlantic Provinces, the East Coast of the US and inward to the Mississippi all the way back up to Southern Ontario, and the mid-West.

A lot of trips in some sort of trailer in that second half of the month.

But Andrea and I are considering another option. To be honest, I’m not sure how it relates to the others.

We like to move it, move it

I jokingly called it move it, move it (thank you to the Madagascar movie) as it would involve temporarily moving to various provinces and potentially territories for an extended period of time.

So, for example, let’s say I look at the Newfoundland trip. Instead of driving all over, what if we drove to Labrador and just parked the trailer there for a week? We could do a series of day trips, have a home base, maybe even stay two weeks. Then perhaps we head to Newfoundland and park somewhere near Gros Morne for a week or so. Or two weeks in Deer Lake or two weeks in St. John’s. We could even just consider a month in Newfoundland and Labrador, with only short hops in between rather than the rolling tour I outlined earlier.

But what if we didn’t have the trailer? What if we just rented an apartment in St. John’s for a month? What would that look like? Treating it like we “moved” to the province for 4-8 weeks.

My dream would be to move province to province, spending a month here, six weeks there. We could spend a month in each capital and then a few weeks getting to the next one. The goal would be a leisurely visit to the capitals and regions where perhaps we do something every other day, as opposed to a friend’s itinerary of 3 things before lunch every day. Less touristy, and more “move into the city” to get more of a feel for it.

As I said, it could be with or without the trailer. I could see combinations that would have us spend:

• 4-6w in Newfoundland and Labrador;
• 4-6w in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton;
• 2w in PEI;
• 3w in New Brunswick;
• 3-4w in Quebec (near QC, Saguenay, Gaspésie);
• 4-6w in Southern and Northern Ontario;
• 3w in Manitoba;
• 3w in Saskatchewan;
• 4w in Alberta
• 5w in BC;
• 3-4w in YK;
• 3-4w in NWT; and,
• 2w in Nunavut.

So, adding it all up, drumroll please…ba da ba da ba da…44-53 weeks of living in other parts of Canada. So, yeah, about a year.

I was initially wondering, if we were also thinking of moving out of our own house, would we sell and put a bunch of stuff in storage and then travel for a year? We could rent apartments and short-term housing for a month here or there and spend a year in a suitcase. But Andrea would rather go do, say, 1 of them and then come back to Ottawa; maybe do another in the year and come back to Ottawa.

This takes me back, again, to the question of what form it might take. Are we doing AirBNB in different parts of Nova Scotia, for example? Or would it make sense to take a trailer down to NS and park it in different spots as a home base? With shorter duration, one side of the argument is that short-term accommodations are more affordable; however, you could also live in a trailer for a month here or there. Assuming, of course, that we get a trailer that is not marriage-ending too small or frustratingly too long for pulling.

I confess too that if I have the trailer, I love the idea of saying, “Hey, how about a month in (x)” where x is some location within relative 5 or 6d driving where either we could travel down together or I could drive it down and Andrea would fly to join me. Like Florida. Or the Grand Canyon (notwithstanding my fear of scorpions and snakes getting into the trailer). And then have a month around the location, with an SUV to get around and the trailer to sleep / cook / poop in.

In the end, I don’t know what we’ll do; we’ll have to wait and see what our interests and health are like at the time. Maybe we have a good trailer option, and we flock to it, or maybe we try it and say, “Meh.”

Either way, we’ll see more of North America one way or another or another or another.

And I think that’s about it.

Did I miss anywhere that you want to go?