The reality matches the dream pretty closely. I mostly wanted more unscheduled free time to do more what I wanted all day every day instead of having someone else lay claim to my day from 7 am to 6-7 pm (getting ready for work, commuting, eating lunch at work, commuting home, etc).
We planned to travel much more in early retirement. In the last 12 months we spent 5 weeks on vacation. It wore us out (thanks 2 year old son!). 2015 will have less traveling, and we'll hopefully ramp it back up in 2016 with a 1-2 month summer trip somewhere abroad (Oaxaca MX, Andalusia Spain, and Berlin, Germany are current front runners). The limitation now is due to very young children and not work, although we never could have pulled off 5 weeks in 2014 with my 14 days of vacation per year while working. So ditching the work habit certainly helped us accomplish something we wanted to do.
The only major project accomplished since retiring was starting a blog. I always wanted to do something internet-ish for the last decade and this was it. I started on September 9 after retiring August 26, 2013. So I didn't waste any time really. I didn't necessarily plan on starting a blog while working, but I wanted to dabble in something online and blogging caught my eye one weekend. I started the blog on a whim after a couple days of thinking about it and researching "how to blog". It's proven a very fun and fulfilling hobby so far!
