SilverGate: You're welcome again!
My wife and I are also both retired and about a year and a half ago, we bought a Camry (mainly because I thought my wife was going to drive it, which she never did). We (and especially me!) had occasional problems getting in and out because of bad knees and back. Had I known my wife wasn't going to drive the Camry, I would have bought a RAV4 then! Hindsight is always 20/20! And while I liked the Camry just fine, when some friends of our showed up in our driveway with a new 2016 RAV4 and gave me the opportunity to sit in and test drive it, I knew I had to make the change and we haven't regretted it one bit.
Both neggy and rdgrimes make good and valid points, although I do have to disagree a bit as to buying a hybrid or not based on the type of driving you do. If the vast majority of your driving is flying down the highway, you'll not see much, if any, difference between the hybrid and the standard gas engine. Both are rated by the EPA at 31 mpg highway. However if nearly all of your driving is in the city (or stop-and-go on an overcrowded freeway!), the RAV4 Hybrid is rated at 34 mpg city and the gas engine RAV4 is rated at 24 city. Obviously a substantial difference. Also, I don't know what gas costs in California, but I'm sure it's higher than here in Central Texas ($1.70 per gallon today and that's up from $1.30 or less a few months ago!), so a lot of city driving, hybrid vs gas, would be a pretty big difference in your annual gas bill.
In my case, I considered the hybrid, but decided on gas simply because I do very little city/stop-go driving. We live out in the country, our "town" has one whole stoplight (and we just got that a year or two ago! It used to be just a blinking light.) and I simply couldn't justify the additional cost of the hybrid as I'd never make up the difference, as neggy said. Also, I didn't drive the hybrid, but as rdgrimes says, it has more horsepower, faster 0-60 time, all that, but my gas XLE seems to have plenty of pep in her step, I haven't felt like I was in any danger of getting run over out on the highway, and it gets us everywhere we need to go in an expeditious and comfortable manner!
Personally, I don't think you'd be disappointed with either! So good luck and let us know what you decide!
C Ya!
Ron