Holy Monastery Roussanou from a neighboring peak. Photo by D R Pico, and may be freely used with appropriate acknowledgement. Click to enlarge.
My darling bride — of 46 years, 4 months, and 12 days — and I recently returned from our two week vacation in Greece, and we saw many amazing and beautiful places. The photo to the right is from the Holy Monastery Roussanou, one of five, including the one made famous in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, around Meteora, Greece.
Other than Athens, the most famous city in Greece and the home to the ancient Grecian works, but which was a filthy city defiled with ubiquitous graffiti, we loved Greece. There is a seaside home in Kefalonia, and it is actually on the (rocky) beach, that I considered buying, for only 315,000€, though Mrs Pico would have vetoed it. Litochoro, on the other hand, had my wife asking about real estate prices; Litochoro is a short car ride from both Mt Olympus and Aegean Sea beaches. Being a poor country, prices in Greece are surprisingly low. Two nice dinners in Greece cost less than one in the United States.
However, despite this article title, we are not rich. Buying a 315,000€ home would have required selling the small farm we currently have; it’s not like we have six figures to the left of the decimal point in the bank. We’re both retired — though my wife, a registered nurse, picks up an occasional shift at the hospital, primarily to fatten the vacation fund — but we own our home without a mortgage, have a relatively small retirement annuity, and our Social Security. We aren’t really worried about money, but, on the other hand, we don’t spend much anyway.
We were sitting in a couple of cheap chaise lounge chairs on Monday afternoon, on one of our lawns. Yes, we have more than one! It was sunny and in the low 80s, with a slight breeze, but we’d arranged the chairs in the shade of a pin oak tree. The only road, which is not very busy, was a couple hundred yards away. There’s only one neighbor’s house visible from our property, and it was just barely visible. There were three dogs lazing around in the yard. We have food in the refrigerator and the pantry, we have heat and air conditioning when we need them, running water, electricity, the internet, all of the utilities of modern life. We have our (small) family nearby, and enough friends that we don’t need more.
In rural Kentucky, we don’t have fancy restaurants, we don’t have Starbucks, and we don’t have the glittering lights of the big cities. Then again, we can actually see the stars at night, and hear crickets rather than cars. We sometimes hear Jeremiah croaking in the evening.
So, how are we not wealthy? Two working-class Americans, fortunately in decent if not perfect health, who suffered a few reverses during life but still did things the right way, now retired and living the life that we want to live. The places in Tuscany, in France, in Greece, and in Scotland that we’ve seen and liked and said, “We could live here,” were all nice, but is there really anyplace better than the United States of America?
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