Our Story
Why we're RV'ing full time
Why did we choose to spend our retirement RVing full-time? We actually considered it at a much younger age. We were both working at our awful full-time jobs and dreaming about what retired life would be like. At the time we very seriously considered selling our house, buying an Airstream and traveling the country. Then we talked about how much I loved to garden and how much Jim loved to work in his shop on various projects. Maybe we would find a minimalist life as nomads too restrictive and we filed RVing in the back of our minds.
We did retire to a small house in a great little town in East Texas: Winnsboro. (By the way a friendly place with all kinds of music, art, restaurants, etc., about 100 miles due east of Dallas.) I gardened and gardened and gardened. I worried that I would have to open the “Smith Arboretum” and charge admission to pay for all the plants I bought. Jim did projects around our 100 year old house. He built three outbuildings to store all of our stuff. He was busy all the time.
Then life started to happen...
I had both knees replaced because of arthritis and could no longer get down on my knees to garden. I started to think about RVing again, but never mentioned it to Jim.
In the meantime, Jim was getting tired of always working on projects. He was spending more time in his recliner watching TV because he was bored. He started riding his bicycle and that was a big help but not quite enough. Unknown to me, he was also thinking about RVing full-time.
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One night on the evening news they interviewed a couple who were camp hosts at a state park. Jim commented to me, “We could do that”, and I agreed. Our journey had started.
Within 6 weeks we had purchased a 5th wheel, a new truck to tow it, sold our house and everything in it and were on the road. Whew! Our friends thought we were a little crazy but every one of them encouraged us to follow our dream. It was comforting to know that we had friends that would always remain our friends even if we were nomads.
So here we are, following our dream, traveling the country with our two dogs, Daisy and Rose, and Lucy, our cat. We’re doing it on a Social Security and a small 401k. We believe you don’t have to be rich to travel in retirement. We’re learning as we go and hope you will come along on our journey. We’ll share our mistakes, successes and insights and, hopefully, you’ll learn alongside us.