CAPTAIN SINBAD
Contributor
"I always wonder why birds stay in one place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question."
Because they lack IQ
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"I always wonder why birds stay in one place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question."
You are right when you say that it will be painful when I have to hang-up my fins. But that is my decision. My wife does not have to relent because she never asked me to quit diving in 2016 - in fact, when I told her that I was going to, her surprised reaction was "why?". But she understood when I explained. I think that it is only fair that I am prepared to give in 2016 when she was willing back in 2006.
Secondly, we may not be able to afford to continue taking exotic holidays - diving or otherwise - for more than a few years after we retire from work. Therefore, I have to plan in such a way so as to allow us to take those land based holidays before we start thinking about tightening our belts a little.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those land based holidays that we want to do together are of personal interest to me as well as my wife. It is not as though I'll be tagging along behind her and so in a sense, by sticking to my plans, I'll be getting almost the best of both worlds. The places we have in mind include Peru (Machu Picchu & The Inca Trail), Madagascar, Patagonia, the central Asian Silk Route, Hawaii etc. I know some of them have their own diving but once I quit diving, I'll stay quit. I have always planned my life that way - never looking back and wondering "what if........"
I may have missed it if anyone brought this up, but what percent of your vacations are diving vacations? I love diving but I love visiting new places and cultures, too - and, although most of the earth is water, not all the great places to visit are on the water. I've been taking 1-2 non diving vacations to each diving vacation the past few years. I definitely want to increase my diving but it's tough to ignore all the other amazing places around the world.
(we were supposed to go skiing out in Colorado, but after the winter we've had this year, we need sun and sand and warm water!).
We are a bit of both so that makes us a type 1.5 (not sure how you other people came up with a type 3).
When we first started diving we went on 1 trip per year to a different place each time. After my dive buddy hurt her knee skiing we then went on2 dive trips a year and started to return to a few spots. After a while we stopped going to new spots as the diving was limited in some way compared to our favs.
As another poster indicated, I can can (and do) dive the same site multiple times and not get bored. We look for macro stuff and I have never covered more than 10% of a site in a single dive.
We now rotate between our top 3 destinations and every few years may do something different. These are all Caribbean. We have done a few exotic trips (png, Hawaii) but they require compressing 2 trips into 1 due to time limitations.