010. Slow Travel: one suitcase and one backpack

010.Slow Travel: one suitcase and one backpack

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” 

When I read that Virginia Woolf quote back in high school, I had no idea that it would impact my life so much in 2016.

 Granted, she wrote that in 1938 as part of a protest against women being soldiers and going to war to defend their country. But in this day and age of globalization, information technology, and the digital revolution that quote changed my retirement landscape drastically. Vividly.

 For 16 years, I told everyone that I knew that I would retire to Barcelona Spain. Some people didn’t believe me, others were happy for me and couldn’t wait for me to get there, while others hoped it would never come to fruition. But from July 2001, after my European Whirlwind Tour, up until the day after I sold my house in February 2016, moving to Barcelona after retirement was the only absolute goal that I had.

 Let me pull back a little bit and give you some background… I was consulting in Scottsdale Arizona in 2015 and rather than fly back to Virginia every weekend, I normally resided in Scottsdale for 3 or 4 weeks at a time at an extended stay hotel. On Friday of that Memorial Day weekend in 2015, I arrived at my house near midnight. Parked in my garage, as usual, grabbed my luggage out of the trunk, and unlocked my basement door. My alarm began its 30-second countdown but when I flipped the light switch to punch in the code, no lights came on. I tried the light switch several times in rapid-fire then remembered that the garage light was still on and the illumination would allow me to punch in the code before the sirens went off and the police were notified. That done, my eyes had finally adjusted to the semi-darkness, and what I saw made me heartsick. In that moment, I realized that I was standing on a really soggy carpet, half the ceiling of the family room was on the floor, and in the distance, I could hear water running.

Needless to say, the damage was extensive. 

To get back to the point… My house was finished by the end of November 2015 and it was beautiful – a paint job and wood flooring throughout, stainless steel appliances, matching granite countertops in the kitchen and bathrooms, new vanities and cabinets, doors, etc. I would never live in that newly-renovated house. It was put on the market and snatched up within a month. I signed on the dotted line on February 2, 2016.

That night as I lay in my neighbor’s basement bedroom, I had an epiphany. That Virginia Woolf quote popped into my head and a weight was suddenly lifted off my shoulders...


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The Slow Traveling Soul Sister podcast is sponsored and hosted by SelfishMe Travel. 

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