June 2021

So the day has finally come to cross the line and move to the farside of my working life to the land of retirement where everyday is a Friday. I’m excited, delighted and sad at the same time. The French intellectual Anatole France said: ‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.’

After working in the same place (although it has changed names – Ardkeen Hospital, Waterford Regional Hospital, University Hospital Waterford) for most of my working life, it’s a wrench to go and leave friends and colleagues behind. I started working almost forty years ago in the Biochemistry Laboratory of Ardkeen Hospital and although I have come and gone with numerous leaves for travel, education, more travel and child-rearing, I have always come back. I’m sixty years old and one of the questions that I ask myself is ‘How can I possibly be this age?’ but I am, and consider myself so lucky to have got this far. That big number was looming on the horizon like a black cloud all year but now that I’m here, its all sunshine and rainbows and even a little pot of gold!

Travel is a huge passion – I love the thrill of going to new places and meeting new people. I don’t like to plan too much or have a detailed itinerary – that feels like being sewn into a straitjacket. And luckily I have a husband who feels the same way. I traveled a lot in South East Asia in my twenties and we took a year off in 2007/2008 and traveled around South America, Australia, Vietnam, China and Russia with our three children who were eight, ten and eleven at the time – a journey that evolved as we went along, having started with one-way tickets from Dublin to Buenos Aires, Argentina because this was the cheapest flight we could find to South or Central America. Now my husband, Caoimhin, is going to take another year out from work (he’s four years younger than me) – he’s calling it his gap-year. So with precious time and some money(I don’t have a huge pension because of all the leave I had), we can hit the road. But this is 2021, the second year of the Covid pandemic and there are restrictions and quarantining associated with travel. So we decided to travel in Europe to begin with. We investigated buying a campervan but they are expensive and in high demand at the moment. Ideally we would love to buy and convert a small electric van. We already have an electric car – a 2015 Nissan Leaf – which we love but the range of 125 kilometres on a full change is a bit limiting for long haul travel. So for now we are going to go in our other car (nine year old Kia Ceed which we call the guzzler) with a tent. Keep it simple is our motto. We have booked a ferry from Rosslare to Bilbao (one way) in Northern Spain departing on August 10. We have vague notions of walking part of the Portuguese Camino and maybe driving to Greece and I feel myself drawn o the Balkans but we’ll see what happens. Time will tell

But first we will do some camping in Ireland