In this weeks blog we look at an exciting early retirement opportunity for us in the publishing world, Richard recovers from a tech' disaster with his beloved Headspace app and we reflect on our first two months of producing content for this blog.
Vw Bus Magazine
We were so excited to hear that we will once again be featured in VW Bus
Magazine. We were asked to write a 3 part article on our Four years and 400+ nights in Nelson, our VW campervan. We received the proof of the first article based on our European adventures that is due to be published on the 11 May, and it looks fab. The follow up articles are then focused on our UK travels and weekend adventures in the van. We cannot wait to get our hands on a physical copy of the magazine in the next couple of weeks to see our work in print.
It is so exciting to get back into the world of travel writing, after the obvious travel hiatus over the Covid years. As we move into early retirement, we intend to continue this venture with VW Bus Magazine and look to branch out to look at producing more content for other travel magazines. Exciting times ahead!
Headspace app disaster
You may well be aware that I (Richard) am an avid Headspace user. The meditation and mindfulness app has been a real focus in my life for over a year now. I started meditating during lockdown and over the last 12 months it has become a consistent part of my daily routine. My meditation has brought me real comfort during the difficult times when we lost Dad, and then my brother in close succession. It helped me through the grieving process and has remained an all round support for my mental health and wellbeing. I have developed my breath work, my meditation skills, my ability to be present, my ability to relax and my general ability to be content and calm with the world…up until this week!!!!!
Having spent the weekend in the Borrowdale Valley with no phone signal, the Headspace App did not add my daily meditations onto my run streak, and auto-reset my count back to zero. I was 338 consecutive days into a run streak. One of my long term targets was to get to a year of consecutive daily meditations. At the point of losing the 338 streak on the app, through no fault of my own- I absolutely lost my shit! Jackie calmly pointed out that this was a rather ironic and self defeating aspect of my whole Headspace journey if I was singularly obsessed with a run streak statistic…she is so wise!
To cut a long story short, I have come to terms with my mild, OCD like obsession with the data, and calmly set a reminder in my calendar for when I finally reach the 365 day milestone. It is a purely arbitrary date, as I meditate every day as a matter of course anyway and I fully intend to continue this throughout my life…but the number still brings me an odd reassurance and an overall sense of accomplishment.
On a more serious note, I throughly recommend Headspace to anyone who is wanting to develop any aspect of mindfulness in their lives. It is a great one stop shop for any resources on breathing, mindfulness and meditation techniques. The app allows you to track your progress, evaluate your stressors on a bi-weekly basis and has a suggested daily programme if you just want to follow along. I initially found daily meditation hard, struggling to even complete 5 minutes a day, but over time I built the habit and I now look forward to my 15 minutes of quality time every morning. It has become an integral part of my morning routine.
House move developments
Over the last week, as we have moved closer to our house being put on the market, we have shifted our thoughts towards what we would like our ideal purchase to be.
We know in terms of location that we are wanting to move to the northern Yorkshire Dales, but we have shifted our thinking about what type of property would suit our needs. Initially we were looking for our forever house to retire to. On reflection, we remain certain of our forever location, but feel that our next house will be a 10+ year project, leading to another house purchase thereafter.
We are planning to travel extensively for at least the next 10 years whilst our health is at its best, so we need a small, low maintenance house that we could potentially use as a holiday rental when we are on our travels. When we are much older and travelling less, we would want a very different style of house for our needs at that time. As a consequence of this thinking, we have produced a wish list for our house purchase, in priority order:
An old building
A central village location
2 double bedrooms
A log burning stove or potential to accommodate one
A shower
A gas hob in a usable kitchen (I struggle to cook on anything else)
A small, low maintenance outside space but not maintenance intensive
Storage space such as a loft, cellar or outbuilding
A parking space
We know that we are unlikely to fulfil all of these requirements in one property without compromise, but at least we have a starting point.
Website soft launch
If you look across our website, you will see that we have been creating blogs for a couple of months now, with very little impact on the world wide web. It is fair to say that we are not yet troubling the Google search algorithm! However, this project was never about fame and fortune, and we were never expecting a quick win. We know that for any website to get organic exposure takes over 8 months of regular content creation for Google to even recognise the site. We are happy to wait for the point that Google finally realises that we exist!
The reason we are blogging our experiences is to simply document this key point of change in our lives. We want to be able to look back and see what the process was like when we are comfortably at the other side of retirement.
A lovely development this week was when Jackie announced her retirement to her friends on Facebook and for the first time we actually signposted earlyretirementwanderlust.com to anyone. We saw a spike in interest in the content that we have produced and we have had some really positive feedback from the people that we value in our lives. We are loving the process of content creation- it gives us a real point of reflection for each week. For us, it is really cathartic to share our real time thoughts and feelings of what we are experiencing. If others care to share in this process, or are inspired by what we are doing, then that is an cheeky bonus to what blogging brings to us as a couple.
So that's it for another week. As we sign off this blog, we have just come through a really hectic weekend of house sale activities. We signed the contract with the estate agents on Saturday morning, by lunchtime the house was on RightMove.com and we had numerous viewings on the house later in the day. It seems that the housing market really is crazy, something that we are not looking forward to when seeking to buy our next house.
It's going to be an exciting week. Have a good one,
Richard & Jackie
Great insights into life beyond early retirement. Personally at 50 & 51 I'd be looking forward to another twenty years of traveling ( based on us and family members)!!