Making the Decision
June 2024 – Kim and I have always been campers. Shortly after our second child was born we began camping and continued even while they were infants. I remember camping when our second child was only a few months old. We tent camped with some friends in NE Nebraska. It was a stormy night and he cried all night long. Luckily, we had set up camp in a field well away from other campers but still I am certain they were happy to see us pack up and head out early that Sunday morning! I was reassigned to Florida in the Air Force and we tent camped for many years there with a coworker whose kids were the same age as ours. It always ended the same – pouring rain and flooded tents! One time we decided to go to Helen, Georgia, and camp for a week. Instead of tenting, we had some friends reserve a popup trailer at Moody AFB and picked it up on the way. It was so hot in Georgia that I only bothered to learn how the A/C worked which would haunt us when the temperatures in the mountains fell and we had to deal with frost some nights! Luckily some Rodeo Clowns (yes, Rodeo Clowns, face paint and all) were in the same park with us and came to my rescue by teaching me how the heater worked. After that trip, my wife put her foot down and we never went back out as a family in a tent again. My son and I tented with the Boy Scouts but not as a family. We bought a popup trailer of our own and became RVers!
After that we moved to Texas and upgraded to a 25 ft Travel Trailer and then to a 32 ft Motor Home about 4 years later. We camped all over the place in the motor home but mostly at a nearby lake for several months each summer where we would escape San Antonio with our friends on the weekends. Twelve years later we started having some problems with the motor home not really working well for our growing family so we traded in for a 5th Wheel camper and haven’t looked back.
I was on active duty with the USAF when my wife and I met and a new assignment dropped for me about 7 months into our dating. It was to the island of Crete in the Mediterranean and I wanted her to come with me so we quickly got married, did all the paperwork to change her name and get her a passport. We then packed up all our stuff, putting most of it in storage and went overseas to travel as much as we could around the island and in Europe. Here we are 30 years later and again we have decided to pack most of our stuff up into storage and head out traveling again!
How did we get to this decision? Kim’s family has a long history of being full-timers. Her grandparents and some Aunts and Uncles were full-timers. My family has no such history but a life in the Military moving around and my particular job that sent me to several locations overseas gave me the travel bug also. Kim’s job wasn’t really what you’d call a career and I had continued to serve the DoD first as a contractor then as a Civilian after my military retirement but things were changing and it was very frustrating for both of us. One day a few months back, during the worst two weeks of my 15 years at my current job, we saw a picture from our friends, Patti and Shane Gill (Gillsonwheels.com) of Patti staring off over a lake wrapped in a blanket surrounded by snowcapped mountains saying “I can’t believe this is my life”. We had known them for years from the lake and watched them go from owning a house to full-time RVing. It was at that point that I looked at myself in the mirror and said “what am I working for?” I had always wanted to travel more but work was always in the way. There was always a limited number of vacation days either for me or for Kim. Also, I had always figured we’d have a home to come back to and go on long trips with time back at home in between trips to visit kids and grandkids. All of a sudden, I realized that I only needed to work to pay the mortgage and for the first time, I considered getting rid of the mortgage by selling the house. I asked Kim if she was serious about selling and going full time for a while and she jumped at the opportunity. That was Tuesday, June 4, 2024.
I went into work with a shit-eating-grin on my face and my co-workers asked what was up and I said “we’re doing it” having spoken to them of the possibility of quitting one day earlier.
When we told my Mom, she was a bit skeptical about the prospect. “You’re selling your house and living in your RV?” (read that with a very skeptical tone!) to which we replied “yes, and no drugs or alcohol were involved in the decision!” She asked why and I told her we could finally come visit for more than a couple of days and she said with a slight break in her voice, “I haven’t spent more than a couple of days with my oldest son in 40 years.” Damn. That hit home. 20 years in the military moving around as ordered, followed by another 15 or more settling down where the jobs were, kept me away for a long time and limited the time I could spend visiting my Mom and Brothers. But before we could jump into a momentous decision like this, the matter of money had to be addressed!
