Softball, cruising, and the rest of 2000-2004…

The new millennium brought new adventures into our lives. With our son now out of high school and off on his own our focus went to our daughter. I was traveling more with my work and even was able to sneak in a white water excursion while attending a meeting in California. At this time our daughter was well entrenched into fast pitch softball and was playing at the highest level of gold softball which meant we were going to be traveling quite a bit more - darn :)

So with softball tournaments in Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado, Florida and California  we were not only getting to see a lot of the USA… we were also getting to know a lot about people and places all over our country. Youth softball culminated with our daughter signing a national letter of intent to play softball at an east coast school (good more travel in our future).

But that wasn’t our only travels as we had gotten bit by the cruise bug…. Our first cruise was in the mid eighties but softball kept our travel dollars in check.  However, as we advanced in our jobs we were able to travel more and that allowed us to go on a cruise about once every other year or so. With cruises deep into the southern Caribbean and gulf coast we were able to visit nearly all of the Caribbean islands and were able to enjoy the cultures of all these areas as well…

We were both approaching our fifties at the end of this time and the discussions of retirement started to enter our thoughts.  What we were going to do and where we were going to go became more frequent topics of discussion.  It is was about this time I realized that we were on the last few miles of our road to retirement…