When I first retired, one of the comments I often got was: “enjoy your new adventure.” This first year of retirement has been an adventure of trying to sort out what the heck retirement is about - let alone what it means to know that I am now a senior citizen - a young senior, but still!!
Sometime earlier this Spring, Art read an article that Riga, in Latvia, was a fun place to spend a few days. The idea intrigued him, so he did a little more reading and a little more research and then began to talk to me about it. So here we are, a full year into our retirement and now we are ready to set off a real adventure!
When Art first spoke about Riga, I had no idea where it even was. We got out the Reader’s Digest World Atlas that Art’s parents gave us in 2000 as a gift for our family. When’s the last time you looked at an Atlas instead of just at Google Maps?? It was fun to use the map to trace out a route to take us through central and eastern Europe. Between the Atlas, Lonely Planet books, and Google searches of various places, we came up with the itinerary of 11 cities, in 7 countries over the course of 6 weeks. A travel consultant at CAA helped us book flights to Europe and home again. We booked the hotels ourselves - somehow it eased some of the anxiety to know where we would be laying our heads each night. We are staying 3 - 5 nights in each of the cities, traveling by train between cities as much as we are able. Yup - it will be an adventure!
One of the reasons we decided to do this trip now rather than later, is that we certainly don’t take our health for granted. At this point, our knees can handle fairly long walks, our backs can handle pulling along our suitcases, and our brains can handle the stress of navigating in countries where English is not the first language. Neither of us did the “back-packing in Europe” adventure in our 20’s, so now that we are in our late 60’s, it feels like the right time!
While our idea of going to Europe began with the article about Riga, I think there is more to it than just seeing another part of the world. We both recently read a book entitled Two Roads Home, by Daniel Finkelstein. It is the story of his family and their journey through the hellish years of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes prior to and during World War 2. His mother’s family were German Jews, his father’s family were Polish Jews. It is a remarkable tale of courage, of love, of resilience - touched my heart deeply. While it won’t always be easy, it feels important to know more about the lived realities of people in that part of the world - both the despicable cruelty of wartime experiences, and the resilience of those who survived such experiences. I would imagine it will also help put into perspective some of the insanity of today’s political realities - cruelty and violence still abound, but so do courage and beauty and kindness. Plus, there is a whole lot of history that comes before the Second World War - makes Canada feel very young when we are looking at castle’s from the 1300’s - including Dracula’s castle in Transylvania!
All of our hotels are booked in the Old Parts of the cities. I am so looking forward to wandering on cobble-stone streets, discovering new foods - and new beer! We will have lots to see and learn, and will be writing about it as often as we can - hopefully with more pictures than words!
Part of the prep has been downloading some new apps on our phone to help us with the adventure. Here they are…you will have to google them to see what they actually are! We now know how to say Whisky in Polish - you’d be surprised! Next post in 3 weeks - from Riga!!
