I was in my 28th year at Boeing and that year (1998) had been absolutely awful because of all the travelling I had to do, almost all of it to the Islamic world or working other places on jobs related to Islamic customers. I was out of country for 28 weeks of that year and very few of those trips were longer than 10 days. I had over 400,000 frequent flier on 9 different airlines.
I asked my management for an assignment dealing with North American or European airlines and was denied. I gave in my notice two days later and left the company a week before my 57th birthday.
After about 8 months, getting progressively more bored, I spotted an ad in our local paper for transit drivers. I answered it and ended up driving fixed-route coaches as a substitute driver. It was a smallish agency with a fleet of 30 coaches, covering the five larger cities in the county. The routes ran 5 days a week. Start time was 06:40 for all but one route and most routes were two shifts, first one until 13:00 and the second ending at 21:00. It was an enjoyable job, particularly the substitute role as I was on different routes just for brief times, but very rarely did a week go by without an assignment.
Unfortunately, after I'd been there 2 years, the top guy decided on expanding, firstly to weekend service and then to much longer inter-city expresses. Start times for the inter-city routes were at 04:30 and some routes had their end times running to 22:00. I bailed after three months of that and have been fully retired since.
We got a Class A rig shortly after I started as a bus driver. Although we enjoyed the life initially, our utilisation dropped off until we'd only done one trip in the 4th year. We concluded that having a $20K plus rig taking up one driveway and not using it was a waste. We became ex-RVers after 4 years. We miss it some, but not enough to start over. I'm coming up on my 75th birthday this month. We're through!
To answer your title question, yes, we're happy with our decision to retire.
