The Decision to Fulltime

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.