Greg and I married late in life in 2009, the kids were grown
and raising their own families in various parts of the country and we were in
the pre-retirement discussion stage. I
asked him one day, “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted after
you retire”? He said, “I’d buy an RV and
travel”.
His answer kind of worked right into my “wish list”, a list
of 20 things I wanted to do that I had been working on for over a year before
we met. One of the things on my list was
to “visit someplace special in all 50 states”.
However, I was planning on hotels and room service to be a part of the
plan when I traveled as a single woman.
Greg had camped and traveled in an RV earlier in life. I had camped in a tent once-it was a disaster. Since he had convinced me that getting on the
back of a motorcycle for long road trips was a good idea, he was sure he could
convince me that traveling in an RV would be a good thing.
We spent over a year going to every RV show we could get to,
researching RV layouts on line and reading websites and blogs of people who
were traveling fulltime in RVs – I started to get very interested. We decided to go to a rally for people who
are interested in the fulltime lifestyle put on by Howard and Linda of RV Dreams.
Life got in the way and we had to put off going to the seminar but we
continued to talk about the “what ifs”.
In 2011 things fell in place almost too quickly. We put our house on the market in July thinking
it would take a couple of years to sell.
In August we found the RV we wanted and went to Texas to pick it
up. In November we accepted an offer on
the house and agreed to give possession December 1. Now we were homeless. We decided to move into our RV since that was
the future plan anyway. On Thanksgiving
Day we moved into Hidden Paradise
Campground. On December 1 we had a
household auction. We sat through the
whole auction and honestly didn’t have one regret, we were now ready to move on
to the next chapter in our life together.
In 2012 we were finally able to attend that seminar to find
out about fulltiming and we found out we had made a lot of the right decisions.
