It's been over nine years since we bought the piece of land that triggered our acceleration into retirement, when we bought the land in 2006, the magnetic numbers on the fridge said 23, so 23 months was the target.
On our 19th wedding anniversary in December 2006, during a meal at the Keg in Oshawa, I presented Karen with a ring box with two magnetic numbers in it. It was a one and a two and for a moment Karen was confused and then slowly realised that my projections had sliced five months off our target.
So by the following wedding anniversary, we would be retired.
We drank a lot of wine that night.
History shows that to be true, but what actually happened was the land purchase made our feet so itchy, that we retired in the September of 2007. Three months ahead of our revised target.
Today, after an adventure with a backhoe, the land was cleared again, eight years of weed trees and blackberries bulldozed down in four hours, and we sat on that log in the middle there and drank some more, it was a magical day.
And we found a building!
The guy who helped us with the heavy lifting used to own the property, and lived on it, he used his backhoe to clear a path along "our" creek to where the shack was, it was an amazing thing to see, and there it sits, like a ghost in the forest, with so much history and so much knowledge of what goes on in the black of night.
