“Life is an adventure, not a guided tour.”

That was the last thing Warren County Commissioner John Eggleston said before leaving his retirement party at the Warren County court house Wednesday afternoon.

The 12-year veteran of the commissioner’s office chose not to run for re-election for another four years, leaving him with plenty of time to persue his hobbies and other interests.

“I’ve been working since I was a young kid. I’ve got four grandkids under the age of five, it’s time. It really is,” said Eggleston. “I have some other things I want to do. I’ve always done a thing until I didn’t want to do it anymore, whether it was teaching school or working in the mental health field or working in my business. With my business, I got to the point phyiscally where it was just too tough. I still do it as a hobby with fixing up my own home, but I couldn’t do it as a living anymore.”

Eggleston said he’d planned on running for a second term. When it came time for his third, he said he knew it would be his last.

“It wasn’t an out of the blue decision,” he said. “It wasn’t like something made me mad and I decided to quit. It was always the plan. It’s time to do something else.”

In addition to working on his home-which son and commissioner-elect Jeff Eggleston joked he’d never finish-John is also planning on working on cars, something he enjoys doing.

“Cars are straight-forward,” he said. “There’s no lip, no politics. You figure out the problem, you solve the problem.”

Eggleston said he’s always enjoyed solving problems and fixing things. “I take pride in being abel to fix almost anything,” he said. “I take pleasure in it. When something breaks, my kids always say, ‘Why don’t you just buy a new one?’ I said, ‘Why? I can fix this one.'”

It was that kind of problem solving, Eggleston said, that he enjoyed in government.

“It’s the same thing in government,” he said. “You figure out the problem and you find a way to fix it. Just like a car, it takes maintenance. A well-made thing that works right is a beautiful thing.”

He said he finds that kind of beauty in Warren County, even in things like corn fields.

“You drive past a field of corn. Some people just see food for animals or people, but there’s order to it and planning. It’s admirable and it’s beautiful,” said Eggleston.

Part of that might come from the garden his grandfather kept up on the west side of Warren.

“There were paths through the flowers for the kids to run around in,” he said. “It was absolutely phenominal. To look at it, you’d never think it belonged to factory workers.”

In addition to his other hobbies, another Eggleston is looking forward to is continuing to study Albert Einstein.

He told a story about Einstein and Edwin Hubble on top of the Mount Palomar Observatory while Einstein’s wife was on the ground with the man running the observatory. She asked him what he intended to do with the telescope.

“He said, ‘We’re going to unravel the secrets of the universe.’ She looked up at him and said, well hell, my husband does that with a pencil and an envelope,'” Eggleston said. “I love that whole idea. He did this all in his head. I’d love to have dinner with him sometime … Your mind is there in the stars, you’re trying to figure out the very essence of life and some of these guys are saying, ‘Did you see the game yesterday? Boy, that quarterback really threw the ball a mile, didn’t he?’ For us, the routine, the normal, they’re not interested in that.”

While he’s excited about moving on with other projects, Eggleston said there’s something big he’ll miss about the office.

“The big thing I will miss is the people that I’ve worked with and the people I’ve met around the county,” Eggleston said. “I really appreciate and admire the people giving their time, often as volunteers, to make Warren County a great place to live. I’ve always been a gregarious kind of person. I like people and it’s been a pleasure working to help move Warren County forward a little bit.”