Done! Another one off the list.

When we put our house on the market it was expected to take a year or more for it to sell.  All of our activities in regards to disposing of personal property, all the things that accumulate in the lifetime of home ownership and raising a family, were paced for a slow and orderly transition.  But that is not how it went.  Our house was showing every day, sometimes twice a day and in just a little less than a month we had our first contract.  Uh-oh what do we do now?  We have to be out of this place in just a few weeks now.

The quickest, and easiest answer was to rent a store room.  We had already disposed of huge quantities of "easy" stuff.  The things that were obvious that we would not want in a nomadic lifestyle and had no real attachment to anyway.  Then there was the stuff that the kids had already put dibs on, although not near as much as we had envisioned/hoped.  That left us with an odd collection of furniture, tools, baby keepsakes, family photographs, stacks of genealogy research, and, as it turns out, things the kids had us keeping for them.  A store room was not a permanent solution, but it was the right thing to do at the moment.

We had been whittling away at the store room contents since getting into it late last summer.  With the taking of a large dining room suit to my cousin in South Carolina a couple of weeks ago we had actually gotten to a place where we could see light at the end of the tunnel in terms of getting the store room emptied out.  That emptying out day came yesterday.

AND that was preceded by the buyer of my old 5th wheel making good on our deal and coming to pick up the Kountry Star (with check in hand) the day before that.

At Christmas time our son-in-law had graciously offered up precious basement space to take the remainder of what was in the store room.  I tried to explain what he was letting himself in for, but he insisted.  So, three months later here we are, stuffing a 5' X 12' U-Haul trailer full of these last bits of our traditional life that will not fit in our new abode of 400 sq ft. and transferring it to their basement.

This story may not be finished.  Our daughter and son-in-law are away this weekend, visiting Justin's family in Ohio.  Our son is house-sitting for his sister.  We did not plan it this way, but we are making the move from store room to basement without Shauna and Justin knowing it.  Chad is very apprehensive about the whole thing.  He thinks his sister and brother-in-law are going to flip out when they see their basement full of stuff.  We'll see.

But, in just the last two days we have made a huge shift.  Physical ties, costs, taxes, all eliminated.  The only connections we have with Georgia now are our kids and family history that dates back to the 1700's.

T -55 days to departure from Georgia.

Sold It.

It has been eight months since moving out of our Kountry Star 5th wheel and into our New Horizons 5th wheel. Eight months of listing with every on line system I could get into for free and a couple that I paid for and essentially,,,nothing.  No phone calls, no email, nothing for months. Every couple of months I would drop the price until just this month I had dropped to just below half my original asking price. That must have been the magic price point because I got one inquiry.  But it was a good one.

The Kountry Star is sold!  A really nice family came to look at it and wrote me a deposit check on the spot.  They are in the process of ordering a slider hitch (he has a short bed truck) and getting it installed.  If everything goes as planned he will be back with the pay-off check and pick up the rig this coming weekend.

But that is not the whole story.  Today a fellow that is a neighbor in our current campground knocked on the door and offered me 50% more than I just made the deal with the family for.  Man that hurts!  I had already shook hands on the deal with the family, I just could not take the new offer and go back on the family.  But looking at it on the bright side, if something happens that causes the family deal to fall through, I have a backup.  At least for a little while.  I don't know how fast this neighbor will move on to something else.

This will be one more thing checked off our list of 'must-do's' before leaving Georgia.  Selling our Kountry Star will eliminate storage costs, insurance costs, maintenance costs, tags, and ad valorem taxes. It's all good.

T -60 days until departing Georgia

We have a lot of country to cross between the end of May and the beginning of our volunteer post at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon August 1st. At least 15 stops by my count. My weekends and evenings have been pretty full of mapping and campground research. I have a path figured out but still need to put some time to how long we stay at each campground. As I mentioned in a previous post, we are choosing not to drive more than about 4 hours on a travel day. So there in lies the reason for so many stops. And it might have a little to do with there are a lot of places we want to camp.


View Driving directions to North Rim, AZ in a larger map

It looks as though we may have some time on our hands between the factory in Kansas and the North Rim. Maybe we'll check with the North Rim and see if they could use us early.

T -61 days to departure from Georgia.

More progress on divesting of the remainder of our possessions.  We still have some furniture in storage that we had envisioned that one of our kids would eventually take.  But we have realized that it is not to be.  The dining room furniture is going to have to find a new home.

We did not have a real attachment to most of our stuff, but this furniture was bought with it being an heirloom and passing down in mind.  We just were not able to put it in consignment or drop it off at Goodwill.  Thanks to a very dear cousin in South Carolina we don't have to now.  The dining room is staying with family and going to a beautiful new home.

We rented a U-Haul, loaded it up and made the half-day drive to my cousin's.  It is not really that far but we stopped frequently to stretch and recharge our refreshments.  Kind of practicing the way we think we want to travel as full timers.  We look to travel about 4 hours on any given travel day.  You don't make a lot of distance that way, but being that we are not vacationing there is no reason to push it.  We won't have to be pulling out of one campground at the crack of dawn just to make it to the next at 0'-dark thirty.  We should be able to pack up at a leisurely pace and still get to our next spot with time to get set up and be settled in in time for supper.

It was really great spending the weekend with my cousin and her family.  The kids are at the age where there is no moment that is not filled with an activity.  It has been awhile since our household was that way.  It was refreshing being around that again.

The storage room is now thinned out enough that we are beginning to see the possibility of getting it completely empty and releasing it.  Outside of our kids, that will be the last physical tie we have to where our roots have been set for the past 29 years.

T minus 62 days until departure from Georgia.

Where do I begin? It has been two weeks since announcing my retirement and putting a date on when we will no longer be affixed to a single address.  Although I had been discussing, in general, my full-timing plans for years, and a good number of people knew that we had already disposed of our home, my announcement was still met with some surprise by a few.  Then there were the others that asked what took me so long.

Things started out a little slow but have been picking up.  The first thing that happened, quite by surprise, was a call about a volunteer job.  Getting into one of the more sought after positions usually requires the building of a resume by doing some of the less desirable volunteer jobs first.  We started putting applications in with the Corps of Engineers, Texas Parks and Wildlife and National Park System last year in anticipation of it taking awhile to get picked up by one of them.  On the Thursday before making my formal announcement we got a call from the National Park System.  They had a position open starting in August and asked if we were available.  "As a matter of fact, we are"; I said.  "What do you have in mind?".

The volunteer coordinator explained that it was a three month assignment as a campground host on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Wow, are you kidding me?  That is a job that Cyndee and I had researched more than a year ago and decided it was one of our top five 'dream jobs'.  And this is the very first offer we get!!  I am taking this as nothing but good karma.

We will have a four day on, three day off schedule and our coordinator told us to pick the four days we wanted.  Well alrighty.  Our daily routine will consist of assisting campers occupying one of the 95 sites in the campground.  The campground stays full and has a turn-over of about 20 sites a day.  We'll check the sites to be sure they are ready for the next campers and do rounds a couple of times a day.  The park service is supplying us with a brand new Polaris side-by-side ATV as our transportation while on duty.  We will also be eyes and ears at night while the rangers are gone.  They will give us radios that we can use if the need arises.  One of our "assignments" is to turn the radios in to the rangers at 8:00 am each day we are on duty.  Oh the stress of it all, I don't know how we will manage.

But there is one little detail that probably makes this job not for everybody.  The nearest place that would pass for a grocery store is 85 miles away in Utah.  If you want a full shopping experience such as a Super Walmart then you have to go another 65 miles.  So, a 300 mile round trip for grub; its do-able.  Another 'perk' that the campground offers is that they have a large refrigerator that we will share with the other host couple.  We'll see if we can keep our shopping trips to one a month.

While it may be a haul to buy groceries, the payoff is living in a stunning environment.  Just take a look what will be our front yard.

The lid is off!  Up until now I have been reserved in what I wrote.  Disclosing publicly my retirement date is something I have avoided, I just did not want to become a lame duck in my job until I got to the point in time that it would not matter any more.  That time is now.  Tomorrow, Monday the 11th of March 2013 I will formally submit my notice of retirement.  90 days later I will have my last day on the payroll and enter, with a gazillion of my fellow baby boomers, retirement.

But if you have read the introduction to this blog or any of the previous posts, you know that retirement for us (Cyndee actually gave notice at her job in January) does not mean a rocking chair on the front porch.  Far from it, we're going to have ourselves an adventure in lifestyle.  Nomadic, exploring geography, geology, flora and fauna.  We are changing from collecting things to collecting memories.  Gone is 3,000 sq ft of living space crammed full of, as George Carlin called it; "stuff".  Now it is 400 sq ft and very little of that space can be used for stuff.  The elimination of all that stuff has been liberating.  In the past eight months of living in our RV we have found we want for very little.  In fact, Cyndee has even done a re-visit of all the things we initially brought to the camper with us and put together a couple of good loads for Goodwill.

Although my last day on the payroll is in the first week of June, my last day to go to work will be May 3 because of the vacation time I have.  Cyndee's last day at work is May 23 and we will depart for Livingston, TX on May 25th.  Once in Livingston we will spend the next month becoming Texans again.  We are going home, we have been away for 29 years and we are looking forward to returning.  We are estimating it will take a month to get all the changes made that will satisfy the Federal Gvt and the states of GA and TX that we are no longer beholden to GA and their tax system.  This means, of course, getting our driver licenses and truck & trailer tags but we have to do a lot more.  There is the changing of all our legal documents from Georgia "paper" to Texas "paper".  Our wills, family trusts, medical directives, power of attorney's, banks, phone service, doctors, everything is to be done all at once in June.  These things normally get changed over a much longer period of time when one is doing a conventional move.  But since we will be taking off on our traveling adventure, we will be leaving Livingston as soon as we are finished with no idea of when we will be back, it all has to be done at once.

The last of June and beginning of July will see us winding our way north from Livingston to Quitaque (kit-a-kway) for a stay in Caprock Canyons State Park.  This northward drift will also have us seeing family and friends around the state.  In that pursuit we will also spend some time in Palo Duro Canyon, near Amarillo.  Both of these state parks are familiar to us, though it has been almost thirty years since being in them, and we hope to be volunteer camp hosts in both in the not too distant future.

Our applications for volunteer camp hosting are in at several agencies - Corp of Engineers, Texas Parks & Wildlife and the National Park System.  There are some really interesting prospects out there.  But for now we have to concentrate on becoming Texans again and getting to the factory in July for some upgrades and warranty work on the RV.