On the last day of his service, before he retires, commercial pilot Kyle is a contented man. Eagerly anticipating the joys of retired life; doing nothing so to speak, enjoying his paid-off home, tending his garden, mowing his lawn and walking a dog he does not yet own. While his co-pilot is willing to bet that Kyle will soon be back in the cockpit behind the controls, Kyle is confident that nothing on earth can bring him to visit another airport for the rest of his life. When his cab drops him home after his last flight, he is shocked to discover his house, razed to the ground. Thanks to a mix-up, the plot where his house once stood is now a flat piece of land. Kyle buys the latest RV so that he can live in it on his ground till the work on his new house is complete. During his retirement bash, his childhood friends Shane and Maggie talk him into taking a road trip; one good adventure worth stowing away in memory for the rest of your life.
‘Retirement Road Trip’ is a feature script from writer Joe Leone. Leone captures the spirit of a retired professional who though preparing for a life not dictated by the clock, has to make a list down in his planner to execute them off the to-do list and strike them away one by one. The writer paints the thorough professional in Kyle right away in the first scene that leaves no doubt about the shock he faces when he finds that his whole house has just disappeared from the ground. All the main characters are well fleshed out and they drive the story forward on an eerily relatable route. Even though a large part of the story plays out inside the RV, the writer does not, for even a moment, keep us oblivious to the landscape and the terrain we are passing through on the outside.
‘Retirement Road Trip’ is a story about self-discovery as much as it is the goofy road trip among childhood friends after life has knocked them around hard. The writer leaves us with the poetic idea that it is ‘only a few good minutes of open talk amongst friends’ that is needed to end the frictions that have been stopping life from being what it could have been. But quite often, those few minutes come a few decades too late, a few thousand miles away from home and in the middle of a life-threatening incident.
