Today’s guest post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.
On a recent trip to the southeast and beyond, Michael and I had great fun visiting relatives and seeing sights. There was a carefully laid–out itinerary, with appointments to be had and expectations to be met all along the way.
But our fondest memories are of an unscheduled day and a half between destinations.
We were commitment free – the only task was to travel at a leisurely pace from Peachtree City, Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina. Since Savannah was in our path we made our way there, and spent a delightful afternoon walking among some old buildings and Colonial Park Cemetery.
Among our casual discoveries –
A riverfront dinner at One Eyed Lizzy’s and a relatively luxurious night at “Inn @ Mulberry Grove.”
The next day we only had to make a 2 ½ hour freeway trip. Rather than hurry along, we snagged a map at a visitor center and decided on a detour to Hilton Head Island. We had no reservations for any of the pricey resorts, but did manage to find a lovely public beach with amenities for retirees like a boardwalk and real rest rooms.
On the road to and from the beach, we drove for several miles past strip malls – but not your cement-and-asphalt-on-the-prairie ugliness to which much of North America is accustomed. These rows of shops are nestled in among long tall pines and live oaks draped with Spanish moss. They look like someone just threw out some strip-mall seeds, and the shops sprouted there amongst the trees. They beckoned. We stopped.
Not everything was small and charming. We found a Barnes & Noble, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay full price ($16.95 for the paperback!) for THE Savannah book everyone had been recommending, Midnight in the Gardens of Good and Evil. So we wished for a thrift shop, and a St. Vincent’s showed itself around the next bend – bought the hardcover Midnight… for two bucks. An inexpensive meal at a modest Dunkin’ Donuts capped a satisfying ramble.
It felt a bit like magic by then, and it was. There is nothing like free time. Even if you are retired, as we are, you fill up your days with commitments of one kind or another. Sometimes it takes getting out of Dodge to find that unplanned, open, loose time. Next trip I’m going to insert into the itinerary: one day to go “off road”, a day committed to no one, to do whatever presents itself.
When have you had a satisfying span of loose time?
Trail Baboon 
Good morning. Thanks for the well done blog about the side trip and “loose” time, Barbara. I will need to do some thinking about the question. We are not big on setting up plans for our vacations. Most of our trips are a little loose. On our way to see Glacier National Park we took a side trip to see the Enchanted Highway in N. Dakota and stopped at each of the unusual very large sculptures found along the highway that are made from big pieces of scrap metal. That was fun. We have been to New York City a couple of times and with some help from guide books we wandered around and saw many different things. That is a great city to explore without making too many plans in advance. New Orleans is another great place to explore without extensive advanced planning. We made one trip to that city and we want to see it again. That’s all I have for now. I think I can come up with a better answer with more time to think about this.
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I think you are right about New York, and I would love to do New Orleans that way.
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I went to Atlanta in1996 to see the Olympics. I had a friend invite me and when I got there he said
that he hoped I had a good time and that this would be a once in a lifetime experience. I was expecting to be going with him but found out he had no idea about this. It was a great example of bad communication so I instead went to the area where the olympics were being held and i started checking out the scene. I wanted to see some of the events but the tickets were really expensive so I figured if I bought 3 or 4 tickets and sold 2 pr 3 it would be more affordable. I ended up having a great time buying tickets cheap and selling them before the event occurred and going to lots of different venues I would never have otherwise gotten to see. I had to rent a car to go see the gold metal soccer event in athens georgia and hour or so away. I got to seethe woman’s gold metal basketball game and a whole bunch of events I knew nothing about. I heard bob Dylan was playing at some little joint so I went and it was great. I enjoyed the heck out of being on my own with no one else to consider for a little more than a week. I was fortunate to have it come up the way it did. I don’t think I would have gone had I known the deal but it turned out to be wonderful. I used to go on summer vacations for long stretches with no ideamofmwheremi was going and omalways enjoyed that.mimfeltmlikemimneed to get itmoutmof the way while I was young and had no commitments before I needed to work and take family into consideration and boy was I right. It gets trickier as you go along and have to factor in stuff to the equation. I go overseas on business and the trips are always full of unknowns but the list of knowns so strongly flavors the rest of the trip that it doesn’t feel very impromptu. I think a trip would be better off if a certain percentage of time were set aside for discovery time.
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That does sound like a great unplanned trip to see the Olympics, tim.
OT Thanks, tim, for putting up that video on seed saving yesterday. It does a very good job of capturing an approach to seed saving that is very similar to mine. I think I would have started a seed company myself if I could have found a way to do it. I like the way that the political and preservationist sides of seed saving side are given less coverage than the joy of actually doing seed saving. I do understand the need to preserve old seeds and I also understand how big seed companies are doing things they shouldn’t do in order to try to increase their profits. However, I think seed saving is a fundamental part of gardening and one of the best activities available to gardeners. It seems to me that anyone who likes to garden would enjoy seed saving if they would give it a try.
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Start it now. Small at first
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Right now I am concentrating my extra efforts in seed saving on doing volunteer educational work to promote seed saving such as organizing seed swaps. I’m more or less done with working for money. I might do a few things to bring in money, but I don’t want to start a new business.
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Leaves more time for what you do want to do
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Interesting use of “m” in stead of the space key? 🙂
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Snort!
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i am fighting the ipad. i hate typing on it and m instead of space cuses me to have to retype 1/2 the words. you can imagine if just let it go. i give ipad about a 5 on my list of wonderfulness. the touch screen drives me nuts
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I think this was my favorite:
“…that.mimfeltmlikemimneed…” I looked at that for a long time tim.
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Obviously someone needs to and it’s not me
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I have a trip with a friend to somewhere tentatively planned for June. She gets done teaching college and cat leave til then.wh have it narrowed down to either Kathmandu Ireland Italy or nova scotia I a, suggesting we throw Montana into the mix too
Woul d be real loose if it happens. Her husband is a freelance guy who can roll wit whatever. Closest thing I have done like this in a while
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I just realized that there is something terribly wrong with me, as I can’t remember having any loose time for many years. I haven’t had time to mosey, mull, or meander. It’s just meet this deadline, get here, get there, and get back to work. Perhaps when daughter is out of the house, things will change.
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i had someone who is a calander filler like you to schedule time for yourself. then if someone calls to get you to fill in the slot you can say you have an appointment. it i will be true it is with yourself. plug in mosey mull and meander from 5-7 every tuesday and thursday night
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I have scheduled off every Monday afternoon, as it is the day we go to Biusmarck for violin lessons, and it is very hard to resist scheduling things at work when we have no lesson and I can stay in town. I will have to evaluate my schedule next year when daughter is gone to college and I no longer have to drive her to Bismarck. I have to keep reminding myself that I am only paid for 40 hours of work a week, and any extra time is just my gift to the State of ND.
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Did you miss the weekend post that declared independence from the constraints of time?…I believe it included a clause about the pursuit of laziness 😛
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We had time to mosey and meander some this weekend – I ignored projects around the house and mostly just lazed about, filling my time with things like puzzles and watching DVDs with Daughter. The hardest part is giving yourself permission to do this when you’re at home. Easier when you are on a trip and not in your own home – like when Daughter and I visited a friend a few years back and spent a long weekend in her big old house up in the Hudson Valley of New York. The weekend consisted of stuff like eating, reading, playing with the dog – we wandered into “town” once for ice cream and a stop at the elementary school play yard (where there was a slide, monkey bars, and other things to run, jump and climb upon that wasn’t furniture…or the dog…). It was lovely. Daughter continues to ask when we can go back and visit Andrea’s house and Lloyd the Licky Dog.
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Yes, it just seems impossible to do “loose time” at home, Anna. Sometimes I’ll have a “fun” task to do and can’t get to it, because the shoulds around the house trap me – I end up taking it to a coffee shop! It seems these to time pieces (:) ) are related.
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( 🙂 )
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I think the first canoe trip we took to the boundary waters was, in some ways, a “loose” time trip. We had planned our route and the food that we took, but we didn’t know exactly where we would stop each night and much of what we would do beyond making it around the route chosen in a certain amount of time. The route across each lake, trips over portages, and stops for the night were all things that we did without too much planning. Of course, there were very few people out there and we were far from everything that is not found in a wilderness. Thus, I think it was a trip where we had a lot of the freedom from day to day life that you might associate with something done in “loose” time. We had never before been on a trip like that together, so that also made it more “free form”.
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OT – Just reminder, today is the big sale on Neal & Leandra’s CDs:
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=c691dec44e0637cc5be01f6b0&id=895a3ede88
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Thanks, PJ. I needed that reminder.
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Well, I think there are at least two of us baboons who have this concept of loose time down to a fine art. I’m one of them! I know it’ll make the rest of you crazy that, with the exception of the four or five months when I had medical and therapy appointments up the wazoo, I have had a satisfying run of five years with a minimum of scheduled activities. Most people when they hear that I’m retired ask me what I spend my time doing, and I answer “whatever I feel like.” I treasure that I can shop when the stores aren’t busy, spend a whole day reading if I feel like it, and squeeze in lunch and/or a museum visit with a friend. I can take a walk when I want, or go to the YMCA to work out if I’m feeling ambitious. I find it ironic that most people seem surprised at this answer, that they somehow seem to expect that I should be doing something more worthwhile with my time. I tell them that my whole life I’ve been very duty bound, compelled to do whatever was expected of me and more. I have earned my loose leisure time, and I fully intend to keep enjoying it free of guilt.
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OK, now you’re my role model, PJ.
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I’m glad that kind of retirement works for you, PJ. I don’t look at retirement that way myself. I think it is a time to do more of the things I was trying to do before I retired, but couldn’t get done. So what I am doing now is not “loose time”. It is things that I want to do which are keeping me busy and I only have a little more “loose time” than I had before retirement. I have always had trouble figuring out what I should do and took time to do plenty of things that weren’t productive. Now I am trying to organize my time to do a better job of getting things done that I really want to do. I still manage to take some time off partly because I still have trouble moving forward in a well organized way.
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That’s terrific if that’s what works for you, Jim. I do lots of stuff that I want to do and that I couldn’t do while I was working, but I feel absolutely no need to schedule myself to deliver Meals on Wheels four hours twice a month or whatever. I’ve done lots of volunteering over the years, and I still do the occasional project, but I don’t want to fill my schedule with obligations that will once again interfere with the spontaneity that I can currently indulge in. Call me selfish, so be it; exempting myself of other people’s expectations of how I should be spending my time has been my retirement gift to myself.
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Your retirement sounds wonderful to me, PJ.
Sounds like both you and Jim are doing with your retirement what you want to do – each is different from the other, but as long as you’re happy with it, that’s all that counts.
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I’d like to go a slightly different direction with this concept. I have been appalled by the way time is scheduled for young people these days (although I’ve heard hints that this might be moderated). It seems common now for kids to have so many schedule activities (like soccer) that they have no free time at all. They spend all their play time playing under the supervision of coaches or parents.
My teen years could not have been more different. We had free time, not just a little of it but vast amounts. We were quite content to amuse ourselves, but much of the time we played with other kids, usually kids from our immediate neighborhood. And no adults were involved. Ever.
I’ve heard earnest discussions about how desirable it is to have kids living such a controlled, supervised play life. There is little that is playful about it, some argue. I know the Japanese in particular worry that the absence of free time for kids means that kids grow up to be dull, obedient “salarymen” who are afraid to express individuality or creativity.
My time was my own, and most of the time my parents didn’t know where in hell I was. We did all kinds of things, including things that would have terrified my mother had she known about them, but it all worked out in the end.
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Daughter complained this weekend that she was “bored” and wanted a friend to play with…I told her it was good to be bored and left to her own devices without a scheduled activity because it forced her to get creative and think up stuff to do. Not sure she bought it, but she didn’t mention “bored” again (at least that day).
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I have to agree, Steve – that was why I tried not to overschedule Joel when he was little – I loved the adventureof unscheduled time. Still do.
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Well said, Steve.
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Our schedule seems very full these days, not because we necessarily want it to be, but because of an over-abundance of “shoulds” (and a very random and uncertain work schedule, which also means that there is a feeling that hay must ALWAYS be made while the sun shines, because you just never know….)
That said, we are great lovers of loose time.
We consider it a good day if the car never moves. We take bonus points for days in which the clock is never looked at. We don’t necessarily experience leisure in these times, but we do revel in being able to work at something for as long as we like, without any imposition of an external schedule/demand.
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Those shoulds can really get to you if you aren’t careful. Financial pressures and uncertain work schedules can wreak havoc on your peace of mind, not to mention loose time. I agree completely that loose time doesn’t necessarily translate to leisure time.
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Frankly, I have nothing BUT loose time! I’m trying to plan a 3-generation 5-day cruise for me, my daughter, and my 19-year old granddaughter for the end of January. I so enjoyed my solo 7-day cruise last year that I impulsively said that I’d pay for the three of us to experience a cruise together this winter. The problem is that I’m very logistics-phobic and have such scant experience in master-minding the myriad of details, reservations, scheduling, etc. for such a trip. Further complicating this trip is that my granddaughter plans to move to Miami shortly after Christmas. Our arrival flight in Miami barely gives us enough time to get to the Port of Miami, go through customs, and board the ship before it sails, so Bree will have to pick us up and know how to find the parking garage near the right gate for going through customs. My anxiety is high about all of this coming together and manifests as “What if we miss the ship’s sailing time??!!!”. Or, what if the plane is late or we get a flat tire on the way to the airport?? Or, what if Bree doesn’t move to FL and there’s no flight at the last minute to get her to Miami?? Or, what if one of us might get sick just prior to departure?? At this early point, I’ve already paid for the whole thing and there’s no refund if the plans fall apart.
And there it is: the reason I very rarely leave the cottage!
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As I recall, Cb, you expressed some of those very same worries before last year’s cruise. I can see why that would take a lot of the pleasure out of going anywhere.
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Good memory, PJ! The difference is that last year, the woman who organized “Cruising for Credits” spent hours coaching me through the obstacle course and was literally on the receiving end when I arrived to sail. This time is all on me. Perhaps the only thing which would ally my fears is a half dozen successful experiences? My daughter is also anxious because she’s never left her ranch for five days, works 80-hour weeks caring for 93 horses, and isn’t sure that she can secure enough trained help to cover for her. The only one who isn’t anxious, of course, is the oblivious granddaughter. All she has to do is pack her own bag and show up!
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Trust me on this, Cb, the world will not come to a screeching halt if you miss the boat. But why schedule a flight into Miami with so little wiggle room? Last time I flew to Denmark, I missed my connecting flight in Chicago despite almost two hours between my projected arrival time and the departure of the flight to Copenhagen. We sat on the runway in Minneapolis over an hour waiting for clearance to fly, held up by Joe Biden’s plane (he was in town for a fundraiser). Had to spend the night in Chicago and get a message to my sister that I wouldn’t be arriving till 24 hours later. These things do happen. My advise: buy insurance, and if you have the choice between arriving 2 and 5 hours before the ship’s sailing time, choose 5. You can always find something interesting to do to pass the time. I think this is especially important when this is all new to you and every little details causes you distress. I really hope the three of you can manage to pull this off in a joyful and relaxed way. tim could probably give you some pointers on copping the right attitude to sail through unscathed.
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I bet you’ll remember next year
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I blame the screens and portable gadgets for the loss of some of our “loose time”. Even with the little bit I have, what would be my unscheduled time gets eaten up by emails and, yes, this blog… At least the blog is a little adventure unto itself.
One thing I might try is: setting a time to meet a friend (or my mom), but having no set intention. Usually there is a planned activity, but might be fun to get together and just see what happens.
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I guess it depends on how you look at it BiR. The time I spend on the blog, emails, Facebook, reading, cooking, and god help me, even cleaning, falls in the category of “loose” time simply because I can do it (or not) when I feel like it. Don’t forget, dust keeps! And so does most of the stuff that we get so caught up in. Now, if you have an elderly mother/aunt/friend in a nursing home expecting you to show up every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM, then you begin to lose the flexibility. Today I had lunch with my 91 year old friend, Eleanor. I try to spend time with her once a week doing something we both enjoy, but I’m not committed to Monday 11:30 AM lunches. We’re both free to participate in whatever interesting opportunity shows up, we negotiate a time that suits us both. Don’t get me wrong, I know that’s not always possible or realistic, and I certainly understand that those who have a full-time job and children face extraordinary challenges. I just think that we all too often give up control of our time to please, placate or not disappoint someone else, it’s as if we abdicate responsibility for our hectic lives. In the long run I think that’s a mistake.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKyG1mMgb8&feature=fvwrel
… they are lipsynching and it is hilarious. I always loved this song.
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Wow, Joe Mauer has nothing on John Sebastion’s sideburns.
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make that Sebastian.
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Wow! Had forgotten this one, Holly… perfect!
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Well, i did have some extra time today. Today was to be a Bismarck violin trip day, but daughter informed me that her throat was sore, and strep was confirmed at the walk in clinic, so we are home tonight instead of on the road. I confess I went back to work finish just one evaluation, but then I came home. I am neither cleaning nor cooking nor working on my worshop presentation. I suppose I should start putting away the mountain of clean laundry. We’ll see.
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OT We haven’t heard from Clyde today. Yesterday he indicated that his wife, Sandy, was not doing well. I hope Sandy is not having more medical problems.
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Been to Savannah, as Barbara knows, as I gave her some tips about the town, which Sandy and I love. Speaking of Sandy, neither of us have had much loose time the last couple days, but she is all right. Her body is trying to stabilize. Getting there.
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Glad to her it
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If it weren’t for Clyde we probably wouldn’t have known to stop in the Historic District…
I consider waiting rooms a sort of “loose time”. though not always welcome – which you have a lot of, Clyde. Good that you bring a book.
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I was at two today for about 90 minutes total. I have learned how to carry a sort of office/art room in a bag.
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OT – I find it interesting that of the seven individuals who have “liked” this blog, five are bloggers that we don’t know and who haven’t joined our discussion and who me may never see again. Does anyone have any idea of how they come to know of the blog? I suspect it’s a WordPress thing, but have no idea how it works. Just wondering.
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I was just wondering about that, too. Great minds think alike!
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🙂
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Sometimes odd google searches can lead various people here (or to other blogs). Didn’t Dale once post some examples of google searches that brought people to the Trail?
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I think the posts may be promoted somewhere by category. I notice that a lot of posts that are categorized under Travel get considerable “Like” activity. But that’s just my unscientific observation.
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Like!
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I was invited on a boat trip with a friend many years ago, a couple of weeks meandering down the Mississippi. We went as far as Prairie du Chien or so, as I recall. Got to see a lot of river towns, and the donut shops and diners therein. Lots of time for reading and playing games and watching the wildlife. I haven’t had much opportunity for vacationing in my life – most of the traveling I’ve done has been for business purposes – so it was lovely to just go there to go there.
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