Kathleen's Window: Why We Ran Away From Home and How We Did It!

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Ah, May Day! The day for maypole dances, military marches in the old Soviet Republic, and taking over US Route 1 at the University of Maryland to protest the Vietnam War! Wow, I guess there are places that still have maypole dances... Here at Lake Kerr, VA, it is chilly, drizzly and not fit weather for any of the above!

When I started this blog in January I made a promise to myself and my readers, that I would go back and recount our travels since we ran away from home on November 12, 2012. So I am going to take a few posts to get the blog up to speed. Pardon me a moment while I brew a mug of tea (not beer!), and then I will begin with why the heck we did this!

Okay, I'm back. My Yogi Mayan Cocoa Spice tea bag tag is telling me to, “Unite with your own higher self and create a friendship”.... we'll see how that goes... So, the first order of business is, what motivated us to make this huge change in our lives and how did we make it happen?

Life can take strange twists and turns. Most people who choose this life dream and plan for it for many years. Greg and I spent a lot of years dreaming and planning for a small farm and a transition to a rural lifestyle. We spent quite a few years discussing it, looking at various parts of the country and properties. Nothing ever clicked, and Greg felt that as long as he was supporting a family and then putting a daughter through college, it was never the right time.

One day we woke up and realized that our daughter had been out of college for five years, Greg was burned out by his job, and I was searching for a focus for my time and energies. When you get into your 50's you begin to hear of old friends having heart attacks, getting cancer, dying, getting divorced, and the list goes on and on. In other words, you begin to feel that you are on the downside of this life in terms of the numbers, and it becomes time to embrace the sweetness and live for the moment. We decided we wanted to travel and since we aren't of retirement age yet, as long as Greg was working, we had the money and the vacation time, but he couldn't unplug for decent periods of time from his job. We realized that financially we couldn't buy the property we wanted, devote ourselves to growing things, and find time to travel, so travel it would be while we are still physically able to really enjoy hiking and biking and being active.

I woke up one morning with the conviction that we needed to make a clean break. I ran the numbers; how much we had in savings, how much we could get if we sold the house and the cars, how much we might get for our stuff, how much unused vacation time Greg could get paid for, what it would cost us for a small RV or trailer, and then an estimated list of all the fixed and variable expenses. We could do this for a few years!

Next, I had to convince Greg. Now I have always been the accelerator in our relationship and he is the brake. It works out well. He slows me down from running off in the wrong direction and I push him to move out of his comfort zone. Between the two of us, we usually make good decisions. This time I expected Greg's usual first answer of , “We can't do this because...”. This time he said, “Yes!”. Seriously? This was too easy!

Greg started to research in his own way. He created Excel tables to help put a sense of concreteness to my chicken scratch. I started searching the Web and found a whole community of people “fulltiming”. Yay! We didn't have to re-invent the wheel. Our next decision was timing. Greg suggested a year from then. It was late April 2012. I was having trouble getting motivated to get the house emptied out with that long a time frame. We decided at that point to move up the time schedule. It was too late to catch the Spring selling season, but we could aim for the Fall. We called in our realtor Jim, who gave us a list of the work that we needed to do, and we were off and running. We decided to have it listed by the beginning of September.

We had 15 good years here

We spent the summer working on the house inside and out. We repaired, painted, redecorated, cleaned and cleared out our 1950's rancher. We worked on the yard and the curb appeal. We had four yard sales, sold stuff, gave away things to family and friends and Goodwill. We used Craigslist, Freecycle and we recycled. We kept as much out of the landfill as we could. We decided not to pay for a storage unit because there was little we wanted to keep. Our daughter and son-in-law offered a corner of their basement for the few things we wanted or needed to store. Frankly, it felt freeing to no longer be tethered to so much stuff!

In the midst of the work, we needed to find and buy something to travel in. We spent hours on the internet researching. Did we want a truck camper, a truck with a trailer, what kind of trailer, how big? Did we want an RV? What size, what kind, what kind of fuel? We changed our mind a half dozen times. We wanted to buy a used one, since RV's depreciate worse than cars when they leave the lot. We looked at some at the dealers and kept an open mind. We finally decided that smaller was better and more fuel efficient. We discussed our travel lifestyle in great detail. Where did we want to go? How long did we want to stay in one place? How long could we afford to travel and how could we keep our travel costs down? How small a space could we reasonably live in, and what did we really need? We have always had small houses, so we are used to thinking small and being creative with our living space.

In July we found and purchased a 24' 2008 Winnebago View. We found it used at a local RV dealer. We had been working with a salesman who called us when the trade-in came in that matched our criteria. He had been helpful in getting us to ask the right questions. We test drove it and bought it that day. By that time our research had paid off and we knew it would be right for us. The RV sat in our driveway until the day we closed on the house. We were so busy preparing to sell the house and move out that we had no time to try it out!

We had a lot of other decisions to make in a short amount of time. The house sold in two days and we had eight weeks until closing on November 12, 2012. Greg gave his final notice at work. He worked up until two days before closing. We scrambled to get rid of the rest of our furniture. We had staged the house to sell it and now EVERYTHING had to go. We also had to make choices about banking, bill paying, residency, connectivity on the road, cellphones, health insurance, RV insurance, and canceling utilities. We had one car to sell and one to give away. We had to make sure everything was set up for my parents in Assisted Living.

Loading up furniture for Brian

Greg selling his hipster Scion to Carmax

Somehow we got there. We knew once we were on the road we could relax, so we pushed on until we were done. There were last minute house inspections and repairs. Hurricane Sandy blew through a few weeks before we closed. Thankfully all the damage we had was a twisted chimney cap. We had goodbye dinners, and last minute doctor's appointments. The night before closing we got three hours of sleep! Between throwing things into the camper and cleaning the house, we gave up at 3 am and went to bed. I was up at 6 am cleaning the fridge. The buyers came for a final walk through at 9 am. We were out by 8:30 am and sipping strong caffeine over breakfast at the local Inn. Closing was at 10 am. We said goodbye to our realtor and friend Jim, and off we went to begin the adventure of our lives!