An Anniversary...and Many More

This week two years ago, we were packing boxes, selling my car, selling and giving away furniture. It was a very busy week. In fact, the previous 8 to 10 weeks had been very busy as we prepared to empty our house and go on the road full time. On January 29, 2009, we watched the moving company load up all of the furniture and boxes of stuff that we weren’t ready to give up and take them to storage. Then we left an empty house with a “For Rent” sign in the window and drove off with our 5^th-wheel trailer. We were now full-timers. And we have never looked back once, except to say, “Why did we put so much in storage?”

Last summer, as I blogged then, we de-stuffed a lot of furniture, most of it to our son and his family. We emptied two of the five storage crates. Now we’re trying to figure out where we can find a place to have those three crates delivered, then sort through them and get rid of almost all of it. We obviously can’t do it at the state park we usually stay in while we are in the Denver area.

We really are as happy as clams, living in a 335-sq-ft house. We have everything we need—comfortable recliners, a nice kitchen, a comfortable bed, a desk/dining table, TV, internet access, two computers. John says there is nothing he misses about living in a stick house. Everything he wants or needs in life is no more than 6 to 10 steps away. I do miss a few things—the dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and letting the water run the whole time I take a shower. But that is all.

Living in our RV, the neighborhood keeps changing. We have been in the Arizona desert, deep in south Texas near the Gulf Coast, among the cypress and live oak in Louisiana and overlooking Mobile Bay. Later it was a lake in Georgia and the Atlantic coast. Upstate New York and Massachusetts came next. Did I mention the Great Lakes—Erie, Michigan and Superior? And of course the plains of North Dakota and the mountains of Colorado. All of that was just last year!

Our house may be small, but our living room really includes all of outdoors, wherever we are parked. We can travel when we want, rest and just live life when we want, and volunteer when we want.

We do miss family and being part of the regular events of their lives—especially seeing our grandchildren in sports and school activities. But we saw our Colorado family five different times last year and our Massachusetts family once, as well as John’s two sisters.

All of this explains why we are happy to be celebrating two years of living on the road full time. And we plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future.