June seems so far away
Back in November 2016 our daughter told us about her June 2017 trip to Salt Lake City. She and her husband were going to a company convention and were worried about what to do with the 2 kids. “No problem, we’ll meet you along the way and take them in the RV!”
Seems reasonable. We were still living in the RV outside of Portland. We knew we had a few weeks of work on the storage lockers before we went on the road full-time.
Everyone asked what our plans were. The answer became a story. “We are going to Loveland Colorado to pick up the grandkids on June 12th. Not sure how long we’ll have them but we’ll meet up with their parents sometime. That is the extent of our plans.” …
Three into it
Today is our third week anniversary of actually hitting the road. It seems like forever. What is it about looking out the house windows at new territory every few days that makes this lifestyle so attractive?
We went east from Portland. We’ve done this path several times in the past. Leslie, Alison, and I drove to Texas when Alison went to Texas State University in San Marcos. We did that 2200 mile (3500 km) trip in less than a week. I call them death marches, but that’s rude to the people that really did death marches. Leslie, Zach, and I drove to Florida when Zach went to work at Disney World. …
We are having a lot of these recently. I’m pretty sure today is one we’ll remember for a while. Today was the day we put Portland in our rear view mirror for the first time on our road trip. We’ve been working toward this day for almost a whole year. And, today was it.
At one point I glanced over at Leslie and said “Hey, We Are On The Road!”
She responded that she had just had a similar thought.
I know the crew at Por Que No is surprised we didn’t show up today as normal for a Sunday afternoon. I’ll miss those margaritas especially since the jars in the freezer from last week are almost empty. …
Where is the RV
On my most recent trip to Taiwan everyone had questions. What Leslie and I are doing is so out of the norm for my colleagues and friends in Taiwan. It’s even strange sounding to people in the US. I thought I’d try to formulate some answers.
Why aren’t you in the RV?
This was back in December while we were staying in Austin, Texas. It was hard to say that we had put the RV in storage. It’s not that we were giving up. We decided to make the Austin holiday trip a little easier.
If we had driven the truck & RV, I’m sure it would have taken a week or two extra both ways. Since one of the reasons for the trip was to be in Austin for both grandkids’ birthdays, that would have meant leaving Portland by November 1st and not leaving Austin until after middle of January. Even then we’d have to return over the various mountain ranges during winter. …
Are we still New to RV’ing?
It’s been over 3 months. The wife said she wanted “Happy Trails, Y’all”. Even though we couldn’t agree on how to punctuate it, I agreed to move on. So this is my last post here.
The kids visit
It’s been an exciting week. The grandkids showed up with mom (our daughter Alison). It’s been 4 months and surprise, surprise, they’ve grown.
We took the RV for the first warranty repair. It went well but their are several issues they didn’t get around to. So we’ll be back eventually. Luckily nothing on the list can’t be lived with.
The Pacific NW is having the tail end of support typhoon Songda. Something like 16 trillion gallons of rain is falling this weekend. That’s more than the US gets in big hurricanes. …
or We hang out with the homeless at Walmart
It’s the end of September. We appear to have a buyer for the house although he is going way out of his way to find things wrong with the house. But I believe we are within weeks of closing. So we will officially be homeless.
We did get the house on the market only a week later than our original plan. Not bad guessing about how long it would take to get things done. A couple of good offers were made. We took the one that was slightly higher and had firmer financing. We still have a list of about 4 things we will do, including paint behind some of the staging furniture. We never got around to putting the kick plate on the front door. …
I bet my wife will want to change that name
The last update was quite a while ago. It’s been extremely busy since mid-June when Jasper and Leslie left on their Summer Southern Tour. I don’t know much of what they’ve been doing. The highlights include visiting Austin, Destin, Jackson MS, and Austin again.
For me the ordeal associated with “refreshing” the house we have over-lived in for almost 20 years has been stressful. I think I would suggest moving into a tent in the yard or an RV on the street before starting. It seems like I spent more time moving things around than doing anything else. I moved the den into the living room so the contractor could work in there, moved the big stuff to the storage locker, started moving more stuff into the living room, moved stuff away from the walls so we could paint, moved everything off the floors so the flooring could be replaced, moved a bunch of stuff out of the garage so we could move the baseboards in, moved the baseboards again in the garage, started painting the baseboards, moved the painted baseboards into the house, finally moved the rest of the stuff out of the house, Leslie finally came back as we finished up the insides of the house. Finally we started moving stuff out of the garage, then we moved the shed stuff into the garage. …
After months and even years, we are making progress
We have been living our life doing things for ourselves but it has been in service to someone else. We started out 45 years ago trying to meet the education goals of our parents.
My folks agreed to pay for a trade school in photography if I also agreed to finish a college. So off to the Atlanta Art Institute I went and later to Ole Miss. I like to say I squeezed 4 years of college into 8 years. Never did anything with the photography training but I a lot with the computer science degree. …
A truck, an RV, and a house
The last few weeks I’ve wanted to write about this but the time never happened. We broke through on a few issues but we still have a long way to go.
The Truck!
First, we ordered the truck. We looked at everything available. We settled on the RAM 3500. We worried and fretted about the color. Finally we decided a two-tone pearl white with a silver lower would look good with the chocolate RVs that we had been seeing in the dealer lots. So that’s what we ordered. Did we do a perfect job? Not sure. We are already talking about lambs wool covers for the seats even though we ended up with heated leather seats. …
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