This week sees us on our very last school holiday as we retire at the end of July and we will be no longer limited to just holidays for our adventures. We will also experience our last Sunday night holiday feel and the associated angst of the return to school- after July there will be no return to school feelings!!!
Time with family and friends.
We took the opportunity this week to catch up with family and friends in various locations around the country. We had a lovely couple of days with Luke and Charlotte at the Hay on Wye book festival and lazing around the campfire. We then shot off to Snowdonia to meet up with friends from the gym to do some climbing together. It was great to see Eddie and Michelle after far too long. They immediately got us out of our comfort zones and scheduled an early start and also in decidedly sketchy weather- don’t they know that we don’t walk in the rain? It was just so nice to meet up and share in an activity that we both love. Getting out into the great outdoors and spending time with good people is thoroughly recommended.
Rainy days & things to do.
It is always the case that in the UK the weather will play a significant role in any holiday and this one was no different. We have had some great windows of weather, but also some times of severe precipitation- it pissed it down! So what to do during these more challenging times? We have found joy in simply hunkering down and waiting out the storm. Taking pleasure from pots of tea, good books and the opportunity to slow down that we don’t normally have in normal life.
The weather is not going to change just because we are frustrated with it, we just need to change our perspective of the situation. We have both loved getting stuck into some well overdue reading and simply just slowing down, our bodies are thanking us for the time to recover.
Half term adventures…how much does it cost?
We often get asked how we manage to get away so often on our travels and how we afford it when we are trying to keep to a tight budget in preparation for early retirement. There are too many details to go into here, but we will publish a separate blog on how we managed to get away for a week of camping on campsites in Wales for £136 plus a tank of fuel. Trust us, it is doable!
You may want to have a look at our previous blog that we wrote on our budget friendly visit to Scotland in February here, although we did do a lot of wild camping on that trip to keep costs down.
Sealed bids for the house.
No surprises here in that our friendly estate agent in Yorkshire has managed to engineer his long held wish to go for sealed bids for our potential house purchase. By dragging the process out, he has somehow generated enough interest in the bomb of a house to justify calling for sealed bids…so here we go!
We think that we have a sound strategy in place, we have a price in mind that we are happy with and a story for the vendor that we hope will resonate with them. If that doesn’t work, we need to be happy that it wasn’t to be and be safe in the knowledge that other dream houses will come up in the future that are even more perfect for us. (The estate agent however still pisses me off!)
So another week gone and now only 6.5 weeks until we officially finish work! The feelings are starting to get pretty real. We go back to work fully rested from an amazing week away, minds full of future plans for adventures when this is our reality of early retirement. Hopefully we should know a bit more about the house in Yorkshire this time next week, so we are keeping everything crossed.
Have a brilliant week,
Richard and Jackie
Comments