So how did this dream of living on the road begin? About 12 years ago I saw a picture of an Airstream travel trailer, the iconic bullet-shaped silver sided trailer that has been around for years. People were using it as a spare guest house in their back yard. I mused to Bob, wouldn't it be nice to have a travel trailer and be able to vacation with our pets rather than rely on family to watch them? So, on a whim we visited an RV dealership to see if they had any Airstreams. Nope. No Airstreams, but we did come home with a small travel trailer (TT) with no slideouts. Got a good deal on it, too. Within a year we had traded it in for one with a slideout, big enough to fit the whole family. Five years later that one was traded for a smaller, lighter model that could be towed by a Ford Explorer, our new truck.
We have been a lot of places in these TTs, north as far as Niagara Falls, west to Indiana and south to Virginia. It got harder and harder to turn the truck back in the direction of New Jersey to go home at the end of these trips. "Wouldn't it be nice," we would say to each other, "if we could just keep driving and see the country?"
It was an exciting yet scary thought. Could we do it? It would be so hard to leave the kids and grandkids, yet there are no guarantees in this life that our family will stay put where they are. At different times our children have lived in California, Chicago, and Florida. How sad to plan a retirement around the hope that family will be close by, and have them move away. We only get a relatively few short years to travel before we may not be able to do it any more. There will be time enough to be housebound later when the rigors of the road become too much for us. We sat down with a financial planner four years ago to see if this all was just a pipe dream or if it was possibility. To our amazement, after careful review the FP told us that it was do-able.
Stay tuned for next time: we buy our motorhome and get rid of almost all our possessions.
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