Indiana, St. Paul - Leaving Sunday, June 9, 2013

Today is the official start of our new adventures.  We’ve spent the last two years preparing for this fulltime RV lifestyle.  We’ve finally both retired.  We sold our home and acreage in 2011 and had an auction to sell what belongings we couldn’t take with us.  We’ve gone over all the details of how we will get our mail, how we will pay our bills, how we will get our prescriptions refilled.  I do have to admit that today’s technology makes that easier than it would have been several years ago.  We’ve said goodbye for a while to our family and friends, making sure they all have information on how to access us.  And lastly, we lived through two Indiana winters in the RV waiting for this day to arrive and we still like each other.

Everything has been secured or packed for travel.  Loading of the bike is the last thing on the list. 

Today is a beautiful day for traveling.  We are headed to Syracuse, NY for the Good Sam RV rally which starts on Thursday.  We evidently did a good job of getting everything ready for travel because it is all staying put and the bike is riding along nicely.

When we get to Syracuse we will have electric hook ups.  But until then we are functioning as a self-contained unit.  We’ll be stopping at places that have overnight parking available.  Tonight it looks like the Love’s Truck Stop in Lodi, OH.  Actually it isn’t too bad tucked in between a couple of big rigs for the evening.  Since both of our career backgrounds are in the trucking or trucking related industry we kind of feel right at home. 

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.