They say when you retire that you shouldn’t make big life decisions. You know, ride it out a while and see where things settle. Yeah, that wasn’t what I did.

In January 2025, I announced at work that I would retire at the end of July. It was not a secret that I was planning to go soon and my boss asked for lots of time so there’d be a good period of overlap with my successor (that’s another story!). So that started the countdown clock.

In May, I got engaged to the handsome ginger-haired man I’d been seeing. His proposal was quite something, with people in Canada, Korea, Wales and England knowing all about it before I did! But that’s a story for another day.

In September, I sold my house. The market was slow so I expected it would take a while. So we went to walk the last 100 km of the Camino. Wouldn’t you know it, we were dealing with, and finalizing the offer from Spain! It was a quick close too, so as soon as I got home, it was full battle stations to purge what I could, box up what I couldn’t, and figure out what was going to my Ginger’s Toronto condo and what was going to our Kawartha Lakes cottage before the October close.

Now that cottage wasn’t ready yet, so we started into design and architectural considerations. We quickly realized that our dreams were bigger than our pocket books so we put those plans on ice until we could sort our what we really needed. Besides, I was busy. As the Ginger tells me, he can live in a shoebox. He was discovering though, that while I can live in a shoebox, it needs to be a pretty one. So I focused on settling into the condo, creating storage, bringing character through paint, and greening it up with a few plants.

Oh, and that was when I wasn’t planning a wedding and a honeymoon! Between us, we had four living parents, and my Dad wasn’t well, so just after Christmas, we got married in front of about 150 of our friends and had a fabulous cocktails and canapés reception. In lieu of gifts (remember, downsizing!), we asked for donations to a Pilgrimage Bursary we’ve established. It’s with extreme gratitude to those folks that we raised close to $50,000 to help others experience the personal growth that comes with this kind of travel.

January brought with it clarity for cottage renovations so that work actually began while we were on our honeymoon, and we’re just about finished phase one and can be ready for guests. I can’t wait to share this place with friends and family!

With this, I feel like I’m finally coming out of a whirlwind of a year. I joked with the Ginger recently that until recently, it was enough that I knew that our things were “in” the cupboards – but now I’m ready to ensure they’re in the “right” cupboards.  Lots of change, and we’ve come out the other end of it in good shape.

Now if only I could get back to writing!