“You have maximized your retirement activities better than anyone I’ve ever met! It’s inspiring!”

I shared pictures from my latest adventure online last week and a former MegaCorp colleague posted the nice response above. I do try to make the most of my early retirement time and share out my latest escapades – if for no other reason than to evangelize the benefits of FIRE.

Last Wednesday my son and I jetted out to LA/Orange County and flew on the Goodyear Blimp N3A ‘Wingfoot Three’. It was my latest ‘Quirky Goal’ and one that I had worked for more than a year to accomplish.

Like many people, I’ve always thought blimps & airships were some of the coolest ways to fly. I remember seeing the Goodyear Blimp on TV broadcasting the Rose Bowl when I was a kid. A couple years ago, the blimp was in Minnesota for a PGA Golf event and when it left on Monday, it flew right over our house! Our little dog was barking like crazy!

That week, fresh on the heels of being named to the White Castle Slider Hall of Fame, I was looking for a new Quirky Goal and I set my sights on getting onto the Goodyear Blimp. I tried some MegaCorp Sports Marketing contacts, but that was a no go. A friend that works at the regional airport they use locally thought he could get me on the grounds when the blimp next arrived, but it was a no-show this year at the PGA event.

The Goodyear website says, “Due to the limited number of seats available, most riders are Goodyear customers through our dealer relationships, winners of local charity auctions, local dignitaries or members of the media.” From that, I started scouring local charities.

Unfortunately, there are no Goodyear Blimp Airbases locally. There are only 3 in the USA: Akron (Goodyear HQ), Miami, and Los Angeles. I started scouring Twitter to find any charities that were conducting live auctions online and found a few over the last 10 months. They are hard to find (search “Blimp Auction”) and even more difficult to win. They don’t usually donate the flight certificates to the same charities every year and the auctions happen fast.

Once you find one, you still have to win the auction. They place a value of $4-$6K for each certificate and they sometimes go for $10K or more. I have some ‘silly money’ to spend, but some auctions have bidders with far deeper pockets that mine. I was lucky to find a small charity in Los Angeles with an online auction in September. It was a 3 week auction and I ‘won’ the certificate in the final minute of the bidding for less than others I’ve seen.

We made arrangements with the Goodyear Blimp Airbase in Carson (CA) a couple weeks ago. They do the charity flights when they aren’t busy doing TV broadcasts. The blimp is kept in Carson year-round, unless it is off at events somewhere else on the West Coast. (Coincidentally, my MegaCorp used to have a manufacturing plant just a few miles away from the blimp airbase in Carson that I’d been to many times).

There is no way any of this would have happened if I was still working full-time in a busy job. It’s a choice to give up a perfectly good career for goofing off, but it does give you time to make some of your crazy dreams come true!

Having flown on the blimp, won a blue-ribbon in our state fair, and taken home a trophy in a sports car rally, this has been a banner year for quirky adventures. I’ll have to dream up some new ones for 2024!

What quirky adventures are you pursuing right now?

Image: (c) MrFireStation.com