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!