CuRVWander

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...

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 offere...

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 do...

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 g...

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 Geor...