People tend to look up to people that
have more things - that's never been a
priority for either of us, to have people
impressed with our lifestyle. We
just did what we did and we really
didn't care what what people thought
about it. If we drove a car that was three different colors because it was coming from the wrecking yard
that was fine with us. We didn't do the stuff
that a lot of people do, with the going
out to dinners... if we were gonna spend
the money to do something like that it
would be an adventure somewhere that you
you've got your memories, you know, I mean
and that's what you can keep that
forever the food goes through you. It's
just so much more important to
experience things than to buy things.
Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, China, Turkey, and Morocco,
oh yeah Africa, Tanzania, Kenya,
France, and Holland, and Italy. My life
when I saw people when I was working, as
they get over enough to retire, 99% of
them didn't live two years past their retirement,
if they lived that long. To me, if I'm
gonna work on I wanted to enjoy life,
especially since I met Page.
You just don't know how much time you've
got, and so to keep postponing enjoying
life it's just so sad, you know, well
we're gonna wait and do it later on, next
week, and two months from now...
we're always putting stuff off and you
can't do that, you've got to just go out
and enjoy your life and not wait
because you don't know if you're gonna
be 40, 50, 90, you have no idea what
what's gonna come along and so you
can't just keep postponing enjoying
yourself.
My mom would start developing
Alzheimer's while she was working, just
couldn't quite get her job done, so I
retired a little bit before Larry so
that I could watch her because I didn't
want to put her in a home, but I just, she
could stay in her house but by
11 o'clock she'd be taking off, and so I'd just
make sure I was there and then I'd just
follow her around and go do stuff with
her so she wouldn't lose her freedom.
That made me want to just get out and go
you know. And my dad had some form of
dementia, I'm not sure which type, but he
had a dementia problem, too, and his just
came on real fast and my mom's was real
slow and it took like 15, 20 years.
It seemed like 1992 was when she was
diagnosed and she died in 2009, so it was
a long, slow, slow, slow process, whereas my
dad's came on real rapidly, and he
didn't get a lot of chance to think
about what he was, you know, that he was
losing it. She was very aware that she was losing it and
was very frightened through the whole
thing, so to me, it was like, "Oh I gotta go out and live before then."
I mean that's what we're all here for
us to go out and enjoy, not meant here to
work and die. I mean I think that just
really pushed me into saying, "Okay,
we don't need that much money to go, we
can just go now and think about it
later."
If you get any, anything, the enjoyment of going anywhere, I don't care if it's a
vacation or what it is, you need to learn to just do it, get away, to have fun in
life, because life's too short,
you've got to enjoy it.
So it's a different outlook, that you get
over. You miss so much when you're younger
because you're just trying to work, for
many hours, overtime, and I missed a lot of it.
I did as much as I could, but there was a
lot that I missed, so I try not to miss
anything with her grandkids.
I think growing up, I never
thought of myself as going into doing
these things, I mean just, it's
like you've got so much in your little
brain that you can just feed off of all
the time. You can just think
back about climbing Kilimanjaro, you can
think back at running across
the Serengeti, or in the Amazon, and
all those things are, they're like things
in your life that you did. I had
never thought that my life would end up
doing all these exciting things, that's
just nowhere in the cards. It was: you
just get married, get a job, have kids, and
that's it. But no, that to me, it's like
you just can't wait to see what's coming
kid, you know.
