How did we get here?

Here specifically?

At a campground in Winston Maine, where they spell Kampground with a K to be cute?

Where we are all watching my wife vacuum mosquitoes and other bugs up with the portable vacuum and cheering her on to at least an Olympic level Silver in this event?

We got here by deciding we didn’t want to drive any further than this on this day; the same way we got to the state park in Gorham New Hampshire yesterday… It was on the way to our next destination, and it had space. And it turned out to be awesome!

But that’s not what folks have been asking about.

Here… generally?

In an RV…

An RV with no big couch, no garbage disposal, no 50” flat screen, or porch furniture, no salt water pool out the back door and no back door.

Well, it was the collision of a bunch of things. I will miss some I am sure, as this is a couple meandering years in the making.

Overlook of hike near Woodstock NY

“Hey I can see where we started!”

It started with the idea that we needed some mountains in our life. It was that simple.

My wife and I grew up in areas with mountains, and the ability to change your vantage point and feel that change in a relatively short period of time; as in, I am here now, but I can be up THERE looking down at HERE in a few minutes or hours (depending on your mountains, hers- the Sandias, mine the Appalachians). It is a simple pleasure, but one that registered with both of us. After a few visits out west to Vancouver Island, New Mexico, Montana and multiple visits to Asheville, North Carolina, the idea continued to come up… that life was short and we should get somewhere with some varying vantage points. These elevation changes felt good. They made you feel alive. I have a pipe dream of mountain biking a fair bit before my body won’t let me anymore and hiking with our kids to Appalachian vistas as they grow up. That pipe dream wasn’t going to get realized in our current location.

We liked where we lived and really valued the friendships we had cultivated on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but alas life is short. We’ve already witnessed just how short through family and friends dying from natural and unnatural causes, ailments catching up and slowing down loved ones, etc. So a sense of urgency was there. We would put our house on the market and move to the mountains!

A Plan is Hatched

As we visited Asheville on one occasion, we discussed the idea of extensive travel, and the mythical two-week vacation. Neither of us had enjoyed a two-week vacation in the past, as running our business and other typical life restrictions had intervened. We were good Americans and never dipped our toes in an extended European style vacation, the kind where you actually at some point completely decompress and stay that way for a week or more at a time without thinking about work, and where the money comes from that feeds you (at least that’s how I pictured it).

As we discussed the idea of long term travel, it occurred to us that the time to pounce on that idea was now, and not after we had settled down elsewhere, gathered a mortgage, juggled kids’ sports schedules and business meetings. And certainly not after our retirement funds had grown to the a point where it made financial sense. We will need “walkers” by then. We were not going to wait until we could afford it before we took off on a great adventure! After a couple of beers we had more reasons we should embark NOW, than reasons it was a crazy idea.

So it was decided that if we could test out our plan to travel the country and make sure we could handle the close confines of RV living, before we dropped a large amount of money on an RV. We would put our house on the market and go visit mountains!

Pics from our pop-up test runs
Pics from our pop-up test runs
Pics from our pop-up test runs

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Test Runs

The initial plan to camp in a tent, as we did our test traveling, was shelved after our good friends offered up their used pop-up camper. Even this idea scared us a bit as we would have to tow it with our Honda mini van. It wasn’t exactly a preferred tow vehicle, but after $500 worth of upgrades it was ready to drag around the pop-up. That was our first peek into, “there are bills and costs coming at you that you will not have anticipated”. We set out for the month of July in 2015, fully anticipating a call that would bring us back to Easton because we had offers on our house. We had an enjoyable and reassuring trip from New Jersey, to the Catskills and Adirondacks of New York, to the Susquehanna in Central Pennsylvania, and ultimately back to our Moms’ driveways in Western PA and West Virginia. Other than a leaky roof, from time to time, the pop up camper worked great. We learned a lot about tight confines and tempers, but also felt the pure joy of snuggling kids in the cold of night and watching those kids run the through the woods on their own, or build fairy gardens under giant Maple trees with only their imagination to accompany them, or conquer an uphill climb to a scenic overlook. Sitting at a distance hearing two sisters separated by 3.5 years laugh and giggle was a daily reminder that slowing down, and taking time to appreciate each breath we are fortunate enough to enjoy, is not only nice but as necessary as exercise to a healthy existence in today’s world. The network news delivers a never ending stream of reminders of the state the world is in. Things are grim, so it would seem. The pace of life continues to increase with no easing in site. Coupled with the fact that computers never delivered on their promise of make life easier and allow us to get things done more quickly, they just allow us to get more and more done each day, and work from anywhere…wait I better quit complaining about computers. In a nutshell life was moving fast, and if we could slow it down for awhile to enjoy our kids we would, and we were.

We returned home in August knowing we wouldn’t strangle each other, with a number of stories to tell, and some fun adventures already in the books. And we returned to a home that hadn’t even had an offer on it. What the hell!?

After a few more realtor calls that dictated we hurry up and get out of the house before some unsatisfiable strangers shuffled through it, we decided a second Southern RUN was necessary.

We were still hopeful the house would sell and went ahead with beginning the home school process in the Fall. Swimming at lunch was PE, and there weren’t a ton of complaints from any of us.

After a successful field hockey season and some successful and unsuccessful moments homeschooling the girls, we embarked on a fall journey South through the Carolinas, part of Georgia and ultimately to visit friends in Florida. No real issues, more fun, and less people in the campgrounds, made for more good times seeing mountains, oceans and checking states we’d never seen, off the list. We even met some real nice RV campground folks along the way that had advice and insight for us. We returned to an empty unloved house and decided to make the most of the winter in our home, amongst friends. We yanked the house off the market so our days wouldn’t be interrupted by tire kickers who needed a master bath or central AC.

It would allow us just that much more time to purge things we didn’t need, coordinate yard sales, haggle with online swap and sells, and research RVs. So the dark days of winter included time in the basement, sifting through endless boxes of memorabilia and keepsakes, slowly purging old magazines, some bad old drawings, frayed football jerseys, and varsity jackets, and then on to even more difficult decisions like which article of adorably tiny clothing that our kids wore do we keep, and which of their scribbles was a worthy article for the future art show, and which could be recycled or burned out back under the cover of darkness.

Spring Changes

In the spring we test drove RVs and mulled the pros and cons to Gas vs. Diesel powered options, along with a myriad of other decisions that needed made to questions we didn’t even know needed answers. (We can elaborate on this process in another post.) This would be our home on the road, and it would be the biggest decision we had made in a long time. We didn’t want to screw it up!

In March we dropped the price of our house an insignificant amount and immediately got a fair amount of interest. The right buyer came along and the process of moving out and selling was in full swing. Thank goodness, the lack of interest was rather depressing after all the work, and upgrades we had put into the place over the years.

Now we were left with approximately 60 days to move everything out that we wanted to keep, burn, sell, or store the rest and find a home on wheels to move into. We took it right down to the wire, even with the months of packing, and purging. Fifteen years is a long time to accumulate stuff and we had accumulated plenty. And 15 years in the house, we thought a lot of was, about to come to an end. This was the house we came home to married, we had epic parties in, had dogs put to sleep in, and the house we brought our precious children home to from the hospital. It meant something to us.

Through various sales and bonfires we got rid of 50% of our stuff, and probably still kept more than we should have. Luckily we would be able store our furniture and bunch of boxes in Grammies basement.

We spent every opportunity we had in the month of May checking out RVs in person. We were meeting with salesman and reviewing used inventory all around the mid-Atlantic area. The mythical three-year-old bunk bed RV was our goal. We never found it, but we learned what we thought we would need for this trip at least. We also learned that most RV salesman don’t know a lot about the RVs they are selling and it was up to us to learn everything we could about particular inventory, makes, and models that a dealership had before we stepped on the lot.

On June 7th we settled on a fairly humble 2014, 31-foot long Class A Winnebago motorhome. Our first night together as a family in the RV would be spent on a mountaintop in West Virginia.

The adventure had begun!
(Even if it was in Grammies driveway.)

Here specifically?

Here… generally?

“Hey I can see where we started!”

A Plan is Hatched

Pics from our pop-up test runs

Pics from our pop-up test runs

Pics from our pop-up test runs

Test Runs

Spring Changes

Interesting links

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