My Year of Meaningful (2011)

Right so back to this whole "I know what I want to do with my life" thing.

First, some background. Let's start with the vital stats of moi, just to make it all a bit more understandable.

Since 1994 (13 yrs ago) there have been 10 moves. And that doesn't include "moving back to the parents' house for summer breaks from college". That's just regular old pack-up-your-life-and-start-it-over-again-somewhere-new type of moving. It included 4 continents, 5 countries, 6 time zones, appx 11 houses, and I think that's a good enough buildup to establishing an obvious pattern. Effectively, I like change, and I have a short attention span. Or of course one could say I use fleeing as a means of dealing, depends on how you look at it. Whatever!

Since hitting 30 I've been struggling with the inevitable question: when/where will we "stop"? Man if I had a Pula or a Rand or a whatever for every time we have to field that question, then my retirement plan would be coming together ever so neatly. More on that to come. At any rate, I just don't know. I *kinda* see myself as a bit of a clairvoyant and normally I can conjure up, in my mind's eye, visions of exactly where or what kind of thing or place I'll be in, for a few years into the future. But more than 5 years, no way! It's like there's a big brick wall at the 3/4/5 year mark and no matter how much I try to revert into my instinct and gut feelings and all that malarkey (which I totally believe in BTW), it's like I just don't have access to it. So many of my friends and family do, they know, they really know where they're going to be living and dying and all the rest and exactly how many benefactors will be on their estate or will. I just have a 3-to-5-year-brick-wall to look at! That bastard! But honestly, I think I put that brick wall there myself. As a kind of madey-uppy barrier that keeps me from being able to know. I'm pretty sure it's there because deep down, I don't want to know.

I mean, there's lots of things I'd like to do between now and death, but if I had to pick one thing and say "I want to do _this_ and remain _there_ until I die", then I would probably get some sort of nut-allergy reaction where my throat closes up and I can't breathe and my eyes bug out of my head and panic ensues.

So to re-cap, the gist of this crap is that:
1) I think I'm just a wee bit transient
2) I just really can't see my future (well except for stating the obvious which is that it's "somewhere with the Mr.")
3) The thought of growing old in one place and spending "the rest of my life there" could well and truly necessitate a trip to the Accident & Emergency Room.

Then along came Dave. Our subcontractor/colleague who's (similar to me) an American masquerading as a Namibian, with gypsy blood and about 99 countries on his list of both living and working. Dave has a plan. Well, he better, he's like 52 or something.

Basically, without trying to keep up the well-formulated-paragraph-thing up, I'll just lay it out there:

• There are these cruise ships that exist. Some are American, some are Norwegian. I'm sure there's a lot more than that too, I just don't know yet. At any rate, they are massive mother f*ckers.
• You can buy a "retirement home" on these ships. You can buy a 1-bedroom jobby, a 3-bedroom apartment, or a huge f-off penthouse.
• Dave is going to buy one on the Magellan. It has 200 properties on board, on-call housekeeping staff, a world-class spa and marketplace, a 24-hour concierge staff, indoor and outdoor pools, six restaurants, a 450-seat theatre featuring Broadway-quality entertainment, a casino worthy of Monte Carlo and a 8,000 square foot greenhouse with onsite horticulturists, even a frickin on-board observatory with onsite astronomer!!
• One would buy a property on said ship (Dave's going for a big fat 3-bedroom one with veranda and balcony), and (for lack of a better descriptive term) live there!! It would be your condo/apartment/home on the great blue sea!
• The boat circumnavigates the globe once a year. They plan out the routes 2 years in advance. As an example, the 2007-2008 route goes all the way around the coast of North America, through the Panama canal, all the way around the coastline of Europe and the Mediterranean, and down the east coast of South America. Then the 2008-2009 season, on the other hand, does the far east (Asia), Australia, New Zealand, then 'round the back to the east coast of South America, back up the west coast of North America, and around Alaska, Siberia, etc, etc.
• Any way you shake it, you'd be touching base with massive long Ports of Call in the good old U.S. of A. at least once a year, for all those friends and family (of mine) who'd be likely to use the "but wouldn't you miss HOME?" line, not to mention all the other places we love such as Aus, Africa, Europe, and not to mention all the amazing other new places that we otherwise would probably consider ourselves too "old" to up roots and run off to...
• Yes indeedy, you'd have a guest room available for visitors!
• You'd own the property, meaning it could be either re-sold for a profit, or you could leave it to your beneficiaries in your will thereby keeping it in the family or what have you.
• Of course it's set up with all the elderly-centric medical facilities that a big pack of globetrotting old bags would ever need.
• You're not "on the water" the whole time- only when moving from port of call to port of call. the rest of the time you're just doing the normal land-lubber holiday thing... or not, if you don't want to! You'd be totally flexible! it's just that your "house" would be in a port or harbour.
• All of the travel, none of the moving!

OK now for the minor glitches:

• Cost (upwards of 1million US dollars for basic apartments). Adela, I need help on how I'm going to grow up that dosh over the next 25-30 years. We have about €200,000 capital sitting in the Ireland house right now... is that enough to start with???
• If you buy into the american ship, you've got a butt load of those perplexing american property taxes (that I simply can't wrap my head around because they're so confusing) to deal with, not to mention annual maintenence fees. So as the Mr. puts it "you're gonna have to have one hell of a pension!" So I guess, yeah, that's also part of "Cost".
• It's expensive.

I just found out that according to the website you can also buy a 1-month or 2-week annual timeshare in the "Magellan" too. So you wouldn't necessarily have to live there 365, but if you got 12 of your best mates together (who could kick up the $300,000 for the 1 month timeshare price!) a joint-ownership thing could even be possible. But the Magellan is super duper expensive. I'm thinking there's gotta be cheaper out there - and who knows, maybe in 20 years they'll be so run-of-the-mill that we really CAN afford it? I just don't know. But for once in my life, I'm already conceptually SOLD!

:-D

Have I totally lost it?