Retirement and Spontaneous Travel

I have been to all but three states in the U.S. I still need to get to the two Dakotas and to Alaska. Alaska, obviously, will need to be a specially planned trip. However, my husband and I recently considered taking a quick trip to the Dakotas. But at the pace we drive, it is a two-day journey from Kansas City to Rapid City (we’re not so rapid). We only had a week of free time, which meant if we drove we couldn’t see everything we wanted to see.

I looked into flying to Rapid City—over $1000/person for round trip tickets!

“We could go lots of places for a thousand dollars,” I said.

I typed “cheap flights” in the Google search engine, and up popped many possibilities, including several places in the Caribbean with beaches. I love beaches. We’d been to the Caribbean twice before—to St. Thomas and to Aruba—and enjoyed both trips.

Why not travel there again? I thought. We’re retired. We can go wherever we want.

We settled on the Bahamas—technically in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean, but close enough. We could fly round-trip to Nassau and get a great hotel room for six nights for not much more than flying to Rapid City. We might spend more on food and activities in the Bahamas than in Rapid City, but not that much more. And we’d experience another culture while staying in a hotel right on the beach. Did I mention I love beaches?

“All right, “ I said after I booked our reservation and clicked “submit” to charge our credit card. “Let’s go find our passports.”

My husband gave me a wild-eyed stare. “Mine might have expired.”

Now, mind you, he is an immigration attorney. He’s retired, but he still knows it is imperative to have a current passport to travel outside the U.S. Nevertheless, when he got out his passport, it had expired on May 6, just days before we booked our travel.

We turned to Google again. “Fast passport renewal,” he typed in. Google gave us several options, including “RushMyPassport.com.” Suffice it to say, the folks at RushMyPassport.com came through, for “only” $300. We had his new passport in hand by June 6 for a trip that began on June 15.

Whew! Disaster and embarrassment avoided. For a price.

After a two-hour weather delay in Atlanta, we arrived in Nassau late on the evening of June 15. We stayed at the British Colonial Hilton, which offered us a beautiful lobby, a small but lovely private beach, a room that looked out over the harbor (showcasing both beach and cruise ships), wonderful food, and a friendly staff.

As is our typical practice on vacation, we toured local military fortifications—in this case, Fort Charlotte and Fort Fincastle, and we viewed Fort Montagu on a harbor tour. The harbor tour also took us to the Sea Gardens (a protected underwater site). We went to the Bahamian Historical Society Museum, the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, and the Pirates of Nassau Museum. At all these places, we learned about Bahamian history, from the Lucayan peoples to Christopher Columbus, to the Eleutherians (English Puritans), to the era of pirates such as Blackbeard, to the slave trade, to the abolition of slavery in 1834, through the independence movement that began after World War II.

And we took a day excursion with Island World Adventures. They boated us over choppy seas to an uninhabited island in the Exuma chain to snorkel, fed us a fantastic lunch, then took us on to another uninhabited island to feed iguanas before our return.