Tag adventure

Top Ten Retirement Adventures: No. 3

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

In spring 2022, we summited two of the Northeast’s most famous mountains, one by foot and one on wheels. Sue sits atop Acadia National Park’s Cadillac Mountain, the USA’s tallest peak along the East Coast. We are proud that we hiked to Cadillac’s apex.

Wheels lifted us to the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the tallest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 feet. There was a cold breeze when we posed with the sign, but nothing near the record 231 miles per hour recorded there in 1934.

The mountains offered challenges, but to qualify as my number three retirement adventure, there has to be more to the trip. Right?

Yep. Two reasons. First, aboard Lead Foot, our Ford F-150 named after its color, we pulled Minnie 2 on a 13,000-mile journey to more states than I can list here, but a few of the most memorable: Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Our hiking shoes found miles and miles of trails and our bikes carried us on rail trails in several states.

Now for reason number two. Minnie 2, a 25-foot Winnebago travel trailer on its second cross-country voyage, did not return home with us. Why not? It’s not that she quit, nor did she get in an accident. We left her in Virginia—on purpose. We rushed home in Lead Foot in five days because our realtor had put our Ashland, Oregon home up for sale.

Why?

Sue and I had fallen for Williamsburg, Virginia during a week there and, on the spot, we decided to move there. And it almost worked. After months of enduring sky-rocketing interest rates that scared away potential buyers, we finally had our Ashland townhome sold, but on the last day of due diligence, the buyer backed out. Maybe our move was not meant to be.

But Lead Foot missed Minnie 2, so in January 2023, he took us to Virginia to bring her home. We took the slow way back, cruising through the southern states in two months, piling up even more memorable day hikes and drives.

Oxford says adventure is “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous experience or activity.” It says nothing about happy endings. We didn’t get to move to Virginia, but adventure stories number two and number one are coming soon!

Any guesses?

Top Ten Retirement Adventures: No. 5

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

Record-setting Appalachian Trail runner Jennifer Pharr Davis said it was her favorite trek in the world. “You can do it,” she told us about the Tour du Mont Blanc during her visit to Ashland, Oregon. We weren’t as certain, but after months of nervous debate, we jetted to France, played tourists in Paris and Strasbourg, then rode two trains to Chamonix, one of the world’s most popular winter sports cities.

It was July 2016. The Tour du Mont Blanc was our greatest challenge to date. The trail guided us from Chamonix around western Europe’s tallest mountain (15,766 feet) and its massif, counterclockwise, through France, Italy, and Switzerland. Although the TMB never climbed above 9,000 feet, it offered steep tests, sections of snow, and a blizzard that we barely avoided.

The Alps treated us to a grand show as we climbed nearly 30,000 feet and walked 110 miles over 10 days. We stayed several nights in rustic mountain huts, sharing drinks and meals with adventurers from all over Europe and even a few from America. At Rifugio Elisabetta, the tiny window in our bunk room revealed a glacier.

When we quit the working world in 2012, we longed for adventure, expecting to travel by planes, trains, and automobiles. Maybe a day hike here and there. We never, I mean never, would have dreamed (or had nightmares?) about such a foolhardy enterprise as the Tour du Mont Blanc.

Never assume.