6 (More) Questions for Dave Hughes of RetireFabulously.com

By Mark McNease

I’ve been a fan of Dave Hughes and his RetireFabulously.com website for the past five years. I’ve been raving about his columns and had the privilege of helping edit his two books . We both recently enjoyed cruises with our husbands, and I thought it was a good time to ask him some more questions about living in retirement, some of the realities of traveling as a retiree, and a general update. (Note: I’ll be turning 60 this month and hope to retire myself at 62.)

Dave, thanks for taking the time to answer more questions. You’ve been retired a while now and more active than ever. We both just finished cruises, and have fabulous, but different, experiences with this form of vacation. Let’s start there …

MM: I know people who love cruising and people who would rather walk on burning coals than be on a ship. What would you tell someone who’s never cruised to sell them on doing it?

DH: Cruises aren’t for everybody. I won’t pretend that they are. But some people harbor misconceptions about what cruises are really like. There are plenty of lesbian and gay people who harbor misconceptions about what lesbian or gay cruises are like.

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Slideshow from Dave and Jeff’s Cruise

The main reason I go on cruises is to see the destinations. On a cruise, your hotel room goes with you. You don’t have to check in and check out everywhere you go. I probably wouldn’t take a cruise solely to experience the ship, but that’s nice icing on the cake. Cruises are a bit indulgent, very social (unless you choose not to be), and a lot of fun.

In 1995, I experienced my first cruise on a very small ship (130 passengers) with my parents. Compared to large cruise ships, it was simple and basic. It had only a dining room and a lounge/bar, but no pool or any other recreational amenities. I enjoyed it for the itinerary (Curacao, Bonaire, Tobago, Venezuela, and Trinidad), for the decidedly non-glitzy and unpretentious atmosphere, and for the quality time with my parents. But I still swore off the large cruise ships which I derisively referred to as “Atlantic City on the water.”

That changed in 2003, when I tried my first all-gay cruise with Atlantis. I was single at the time and I had an 8-week sabbatical from work, and at age 46 I had never been to Europe. It was a 7-day cruise on a Royal Caribbean ship with about 2,000 gay men (and a handful of lesbians and straight people). It started and ended in Barcelona, with stops in Nice, Rome, Naples, Mallorca, and Ibiza. I loved the destinations, the dance parties, the festive atmosphere, the entertainment, the gayness – everything. Everyone was friendly and fun. It was a fantastic experience in every way. I booked another Med cruise for the following summer, and now I have been on a total of nine Atlantis cruises all over the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific, all but the first two with my husband Jeff. We are booked on a cruise from Hong Kong to Japan next April.

Gay cruises are significantly different from straight cruises. Almost every element of the cruise experience is adapted in one way or another, with the possible exception of the shore excursions. For example, the dress code is casual at all times. There’s no dressing up for dinner and no formal nights, which are a feature of most straight cruises and which are a major turn-off for me. Atlantis, RSVP, and Olivia bring all of their own entertainers, such as singers, comedians, DJs, and even the piano bar pianists/singers, so the entertainment is curated for a lesbian or gay audience. The costume dance parties are fabulous! Our people can be so creative.

Every gay or lesbian person I know who has traveled on straight cruises reports that they are accepted or at least well tolerated by the other passengers and they don’t have any problems. Nevertheless, living in an all-gay society for a week or ten days is very refreshing.

I would encourage someone who has never cruised to try it at least once. The same goes for a lesbian or gay person who has never been on a lesbian or gay cruise but thinks they would hate it. There’s a stereotype that gay cruises are a floating bathhouse of constant orgies, but that’s just not true. If you want to find someone to hook up with you can, but it’s not overt sex being shoved at you all the time. We’re a monogamous couple, and we always have a great time.

So try it once. You may discover that you truly enjoy it or you may not, but you will be making your decision based on actual experience, not myths and misperceptions.

MM: Can you talk some about your recent cruise – the pros and, if there were any, the cons?

DH: Our recent cruise consisted of ten nights aboard the Celebrity Reflection. It was an all-gay cruise chartered by Atlantis Events. It started and ended in Rome, or more accurately, the port of Civitavecchia, which is over an hour’s drive away from Rome. The itinerary included Naples, a day at sea, Crete, Mykonos, Santorini, a day at sea, Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia. We spent stop at Naples on the nearby island of Capri, so every stop was an island. We had waited 14 years for an itinerary like this one to come along at a time we could go, so this was a bucket list vacation for us.

We thoroughly enjoyed almost every stop. Our favorites were Crete, Santorini, and Malta. Only Sicily left us underwhelmed. Valletta, Malta; Heraklion, Crete, and to a lesser extent, Cagliari, Sardinia all impressed us as places that might make nice places to live and retire. That’s a lens through which I often view new places I visit since I’ve started writing Retire Fabulously.

The ship itself was very nice. Celebrity ships are nicely appointed and have a lot of options for things to do. The Reflection holds about 3,000 passengers, so it’s fairly large. Most of the entertainment Atlantis brought was top-notch. We participated in the traditional Dog Tag T-Dance and Classic Disco T-Dance, which are held in the late afternoon, but we opted out of the late-night dance parties. We have sampled them on many previous cruises. Some people go to great lengths to create fantastic costumes, and it’s often worth going just to enjoy that spectacle. But we’re getting older – we need our sleep! I sometimes nodded off during the evening performances, even though they were very good. By midnight, we were ready for bed.

There were a few cons. The food was good, but not as remarkable as we recall from previous Celebrity cruises and cruises on other lines. The service could have been a little more prompt. Celebrity, like many lines, offers some smaller specialty restaurants which carry a hefty additional price tag. Word quickly spread around the ship that they weren’t worth the extra money. We tried two of them, and we agreed.

It also felt as though we were being marketed to constantly. There are many ways to spend money on a cruise ship – specialty restaurants, drinks, clothing and jewelry shops, art auctions, spa treatments, the casino, laundry service, and more. These were promoted constantly. This happens to some extent on all cruises, but it was more pervasive on this cruise than ever before. It became really tiresome.

MM: Your newest article deals with the realities of traveling as a retiree or just as an older person – financial considerations, health insurance onboard and while traveling. Can you give us a few tips from your experience that are most important?

DH: The most notable part of our recent cruise experience was the realization that we tired much more quickly than on previous cruises. Part of it is simply that we’re older (Jeff is 59 and I am 61). All of our previous cruises took place between 2003 and 2014. We could use more exercise, but overall we are healthy and relatively youthful for our age. Still, we just didn’t have the stamina we had on previous cruises – hence our decision to eschew the late-night dances.

This is perhaps one of the biggest differences between an Atlantis cruise and a straight cruise. With all the additional entertainment, there is much more activity taking place throughout the evening and well into the night. There’s so much that you can’t possibly do it all. I can’t speak first-hand for RSVP or Olivia, but I am led to believe they are similar.

The travel from Phoenix to Rome took a lot out of us, particularly on the way there. Our schedules were such that we couldn’t arrive in Rome a couple days early, and that would have helped to catch up on sleep and get acclimated to the new time zone. As it was, we flew a red-eye from the States and landed in Rome at 7:00 AM for a cruise that wouldn’t begin boarding until 2:00 PM. Add in the fact that the shore excursion to Capri on the first day lasted over ten hours (whereas the others were more like four hours), and it wasn’t until our day at sea that we felt adequately rested.

On the issue of travel insurance, we had a wake-up call on our day in Heraklion, Crete. We were walking on an uneven sidewalk when Jeff tripped and fell face-first onto the pavement. Both of his hands started bleeding, he lightly scraped a knee, and one of his arms and his jaw were sore for the remainder of the trip. Fortunately, the tour guide had a first aid kit available to bandage the cuts on his hands, so he didn’t need to seek medical attention. But it could easily have been much worse.

Such an injury could happen to a traveler at any age. But as we get older, we have a little less strength, stamina, and coordination and that could make us more easily susceptible to injury and a little less resilient. So with that in mind, be careful not to attempt too much strenuous activity in a single day. Many excursions, especially in Europe, involve a lot of walking and climbing steps.

Always buy travel insurance! You will be able to pay for minor medical care out of pocket since it’s very inexpensive in most places, but your health insurance will not cover medical care outside of your home country. On one of our previous cruises, our luggage was lost. Travel insurance includes an allowance for purchasing clothes and for replacement of the luggage if it is never found.

MM: You’ve been doing Retire Fabulously for a number of years now. Still fabulous? What are some of the realities you’ve discovered doing the site and project?

DH: I’ve been writing articles for RetireFabulously.com for over five years. I admit that some days I don’t have as much enthusiasm for it as I used to. Other days, I’m still excited about it. Part of it is just that the novelty has worn off. Like a lot of us, I like to have new challenges. Also, it’s harder to find new topics to write about. I’ve covered a lot of the important topics already.

On the other hand, I have learned so much! I’ve learned a lot about retirement lifestyles through research and reading a lot of information on this topic. I have learned a lot about running a website, contributing content to other websites, and self-publishing books. I would like to think I have become a better writer. All of this will be useful knowledge to apply to whatever I might decide to do in the future.

I have also learned that the topic of retirement is not nearly as profitable as some other topics. There’s plenty of audience, but it’s not an audience that is particularly inclined to buy books or courses. I also hoped that there would be more demand for my live workshops and speaking engagements. I’m not in this solely to make money – I enjoy doing it and I enjoy knowing that I am helping people – but it would be nice to have a little more to show for the thousands of hours I have put into this.

MM: You’ve got a new and third book in the works. Topics? Finish date? Why this book?

DH: Yes, I am working on a third book. The working title is, The Quest for Retirement Utopia: How to Find the Retirement Spot That’s Just Right for You. My goal with this book is to take a deeper dive into how to evaluate potential places you might move to after you retire, and to help you gain clarity on what factors are the most important for you. I hope the book will suggest possibilities you may not have thought of. I plan to release it in early 2019.

Lists of great places to retire are popular and fun to read, but they are too shallow to give you any significant information upon which to base such an important decision. They’re just brain candy.

This will be the meatiest and most researched book I have written yet. I am looking for people who have moved to a different country or a different region of the same country who would be willing to share their stories and offer first-hand advice. If that’s you or someone you know, please contact me at dave (at) retirefabulously (dot) com.

MM: Top three things about being retired. Top three unexpected things about being retired (could be delightful, could be dreadful).

DH: Top three things:

The freedom. This is the greatest thing about being retired, and if it was the only benefit, it would all be worth it. I love having much more control over my life, both on a day-to-day basis and in curating what will be part of my life and what won’t.
Not waking up to an alarm clock (most days). I can sleep in later and stay up later, which fits my style. I’ve never been a morning person.
Less stress. There are no more work deadlines, being on call, crises, performance reviews, and office politics. Almost all deadlines are self-imposed and there are rarely any consequences if I miss one or push it out. I’m much happier.

Top three unexpected things:

I am still so busy. But it’s busy-ness of my choosing. In addition to writing and doing all the background support for RetireFabulously.com and several other websites, I am a wedding officiant and, until recently, I was president of the board for a non-profit arts organization. I am usually playing trombone in 2-4 bands. I have done an extensive yard improvement project and I have a lengthy to-do list for things around the house. Some of the things that consume my time are a result of me retiring early. When I did that, I accepted that I would need to bring in some additional income for the first few years.
Apparently, I seem to like it this way. I envisioned that there would be a lot more leisure in my retirement. But I have realized that if I have too much leisure, I get bored. I realize that I need to be engaged. I still have a driving desire to be productive and contribute something. I still want to learn and try new things. But I also wish I had more time to just read or write or listen to music. I’m still trying to find the right balance.
Retirement is not a permanent vacation. I was naïve and idealistic to think that it would be, but I kind of did. The rest of life beyond work continues much as it did. There are good days, bad days, and average days, just like before. And that’s okay.

About Dave Hughes

Dave Hughes created RetireFabulously.com to help you envision, plan for and ultimately enjoy the best retirement possible. Most articles focus on the non-financial, “lifestyle” aspects of retirement, such as successfully transitioning from work to leisure, choosing where to live, identifying the things that will make retirement happy and fulfilling, and more. Dave is available for speaking engagements and workshops, and also officiates weddings. Dave lives in Chandler, AZ with his husband, Jeff, and their furry family members, Missy and Maynard.