CuRVWander

As I discussed in the post "The Plan", we had to order our 'forever rig' back in May, before the house sold.  The whole process took place over the phone and with exchanges of option sheets and engineering orders by email.  But it is not like we had done this blind, far from it.  Cyndee and I had years invested in window shopping and tire kicking before we picked a manufacturer of our dream rig. We attended RV shows in Georgia and surrounding states with the RV Supershow in Tampa, FL being a favorite that we returned to a number of years.  We found Tampa to be the place where key people from the manufacturers were.  You could go one-on-one with them and really get a good feel for a company's approach to building a coach.  Tampa is where we met Phil Brokenicky, owner of New Horizons.  Phil is a former banker that turned manufacturer of RVs with a different business model than most in the industry.  His business was based on custom-built, mad...

The day after the 4th was a lot like the day before the fourth.  Lots of folks helping with whatever needed to be done.  The carcasses of all the spent fireworks had to be cleared from the dam and decorations from all around the property had to be taken down and stored until the next independence celebration. When the cleaning up was all done, it was a caravan of vans and trucks to the Pizza Hut where the buffet was stressed to keep up with the McFarlin clan. There was some last minute visiting and then it was time to start rigging the camper for travel. We had made the trip from Oklahoma to Georgia many times in the past 22 years.  This time it felt familiar and new at the same time.  Before, we have always been headed back to put the camper in storage, go to the house, unpack and start doing all the chores and maintenance that had been left undone in our abscence.  Most times it would take days to get caught up.  But this time there is no ...

With the tire problem corrected we could now focus our attention on the matters at hand; having fun. A big annual gathering of the McFarlins, and many extensions by marriage and their prodigies, on the 4th of July was underway.  This year was bittersweet, we were regaling in the summer celebration but grieving the loss of the man that had traditionally been the heart of the celebration.  We miss you Uncle Tommie. I am sure he was proud to see that his family had pulled together to make the annual gathering a big hit again this year.  Aunts/uncles, sisters/brothers, grandmas/grandpas and cousins of many generations came from far and near.  From South Carolina and Georgia in the east, the mountains of New Mexico and the Coastal Planes and oil fields of Texas in the west and many places in-between they all came. A virtual small army spent several days putting up decorations, mowing the acres of grass, acquiring the fireworks and shopping for, and ...

Our first day on the road to Oklahoma was uneventful.  We pulled into Tom Sawyer's RV Park on the Mississippi River in the late afternoon.  After nearly ten hours of driving in the hot sun the camper was more like a walk-in oven than it was some place to sleep. We got the electricity hooked up, turned on the air conditioner and promptly left.  It would be a few hours before the inside was habitable.  Our youngest was riding with us and he suggested we go back across the river and explore Memphis. We had been coming this way on trips home to Texas and Oklahoma for 22 years and for one reason or another we were never able to get over to Memphis and look around.  This time we were going to make it. Man it was hot walking around in Memphis, but interesting.  I had been there on business in the mid-80's and had a business dinner at a place called Charles Vergos Rendezvous.  It was a rib joint that was famous for its dry-rub bar-b-q ribs.  I had b...

Sure, we have camped and RV'd for years.  The confines of those spaces was not much to think about really.  But now we have to conduct our everyday life out of these confines.  Every drawer and every cabinet of the sticks and bricks that was chock-full of things that we had collected in our 34 years of marriage was going to have to be divided into "can't live without it" and "find somewhere to go with it besides us". We thought we were doing really well in thinning out to just the must-haves but there came a point when the loads of stuff from the house we brought to the camper each night would not fit any where.  There was a little mountain growing in the floor space between the chairs and TV. At first we just chalked it up to inefficient storing.  And sure enough, after organizing the storage space we were using and taking advantage of storage space we had never thought to use, we got it all put away.  Well, almost all. There were a few large items l...

So, we want to be full timers - but how?  Well, for us that means planning, planning and more planning.  Our youngest was about 12 at the time so we built a plan around a ten-year time frame, just about enough time that both kids should be finished with college and making their own way.  Of course we had to put some financial order in our house so that the funds would be there to support an early retirement.  Professional help was sought and we got ourselves a financial planner.  Definitely one of our better moves. We also graduated from the pop-up to a 5th wheel RV in 2003.  This is where we lost the kids, they said; "Dad, this isn't camping any more, it's a condo in the woods."  They got out the old tent and sleeping bags and went back to roughing it with their friends now that they were licensed drivers and could get themselves around. All the planning in the world back in 2000 could not foresee the economic crash of 2008.  Even the pros ...

Since the early days of our marriage in the late 1970's we were campers. At first it was pure backpacking; weekend and vacation trips into northern New Mexico with just backpacks a tent and two Siberian Husky pack dogs.   Then came children and we evolved to very close to home car-camping trips near where we lived in Oklahoma.  We were now bringing luxurious items with us to Corp of Engineers and State Park campgrounds like two-burner Coleman stoves, a variety of shoes and, of course, all the accouterments it takes to support toddlers. The kids grew but we still car camped.  Now it was bicycles and air mattresses, sports equipment, boom boxes, 9" TV's with built in VHS players, folding chairs, screened cabana for the picnic table and more.  And don't forget the two Huskies.  My 1979 Bronco would be packed to the gills. After a number of consecutive, very wet camping trips (we are talking float the air mattresses right out of the tent ...