A New Lifestyle

Today is my birthday, and I am celebrating it by starting a new blog.  On May 9, 2014, Tim and I sold our house in Estes Park, Colorado, and began a new chapter in our lives as full-time RVers.  We have been camping at Ridgway State Park in southwestern Colorado for the past week or so, and I will write more about our stay here in a later post.  It has taken me a while to get this blog up and running, so I have some catching-up to do.  Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll backtrack a bit and talk about how we came to this momentous decision to full-time in our RV, as well as what we did to make it happen.  In the meantime, here’s a little background that led up to our May 9 departure date.

Traveling in an RV, let alone full-timing in one, is not something that either Tim or I ever envisioned doing.  That all began to change in 2010, however, when I proposed the idea of taking a year off and traveling throughout the United States.  Tim agreed to help make this travel dream of mine a reality, and he was able to take a nine-month leave of absence so we could travel from September 2011 to June 2012 in an RV.

We called the trip our “Road Trip Ramble,” and viewed it as a trip-of-a-lifetime.  I kept a blog about our trip, and you can check it out here.  Little did we know when we returned to Estes Park that we would sell our house and hit the road on a full-time basis in less than two years.

Our Road Trip Ramble Journey

But didn’t I mention that we traveled in an RV?  Sarah (and Tim, for that matter) in an RV?  Surely, that can’t be true.  Two people who swore they would never even set foot in an RV traveled in one for nine months.  And not just any RV, but one that is about the size of a large walk-in closet.

This Is Our RV

You might ask why we selected this mode of transportation.  It’s simple, really.  It’s all because of the cat!  You see, Tim had a cat when I met him in 2008, and I quickly grew to love her.  When I broached the idea to Tim of taking an extended road trip, I had thought we would travel in a car.  But what about Kitty?  If we left her with someone for nine months, she would no longer be our cat when we returned.  Traveling with her in the car, however, did not seem to be feasible.  So the idea of an RV slowly emerged as the only way to go.  You can read more about Kitty here.  The cat made us do it! 

The Kitty and the RV

At the end of our amazing trip, Tim returned to work, and we considered selling the RV.  Tim had no plans to retire for at least four to five years, and we never really considered ourselves weekend campers.  We changed our minds, however, when we realized that we might need the RV after Tim did retire.  There was still the cat to think about.  The RV continued to be the only way we could travel with her.

On October 22, 2013, something amazing happened.  Tim decided to retire early, and he set a date of March 21, 2014.  We had no plans for our future at that point, and full-time RVing was not high on the list of possibilities.  Although I had continued to follow the blogs of full-timers and could easily envision myself as a full-timer, Tim was not so sure.  As we continued to talk about our future, however, he came to the conclusion that this type of lifestyle might be the way to go.  I don’t remember when we made the decision, but once the decision was made, we began to work toward that goal.  We would sell the house, store a few things and hit the road.