One More Year Under Our Belt

This was a post that I wrote but never published last year (10/2014), so I finally finished the post “late” but like they say better late than never..

One More Year Under Our Belt

We spent our second winter (2013/2014) in sunny Florida. We stayed in the TT (Thousand Trails) Orlando campground for at least half of the 4 total months we were in Florida. We love this campground, 867 total sites, 2 pools a nice hot tub and a lot of activity going on all of the time. Water volleyball every day at 1:00, bingo 2 nights a week, pickle ball every morning or lay by the pool and soak in the sun all day. While we were at Orlando TT’s this winter all of the kids came down for spring break. While they were visiting us we drove to “Daytona Bike Week”, Daytona beach and Fort Lauderdale beach. We also went to a baseball spring training game and spent a lot of time at the pool.

Of course the weather was perfect. Daytona Bike Week was a blast, it’s motorcycles from one end of the town to the other.

Another place we stayed while in Florida was TT Peace River, it’s in Wauchula about an hour east of Sarasota. It is a nice park that is more like being in the country, we like the country feel so it feels very comfortable to us. It’s a smaller park than Orlando only 460 total sites with one pool and a hot tub and the town of Wauchula is only a couple of miles away.

Now We're Getting Back Into The Swing Of It

Life is an Adventure

It has been 9 months since we have updated our blog; alot has happened so let’s get everyone up to date.

Going back to February 1^st and our trip to Jamaica with the kids…The trip was amazing!  The kids flew out of Minnesota and we flew from Orlando. The only regret was Brandon (middle son 21 now) not being able to join us because of a commitment he had back in Minnesota that he couldn’t break. We stayed at Legends on the Beach in Negril. Legends on the Beach is an all-inclusive hotel that has a sister hotel “Samsara” on the cliffs. The weather was perfect every day; we went cliff jumping at the cliffs, swam and laid at the beach a bunch. The highlight of our trip was on our last day while snorkeling we saw a 6’ reef shark next to us, very scary but very cool.

 

 

Finishing up February we attended the Daytona 500. We have never been to a NASCAR race and would highly recommend going to a race. The amount of people at the race is mind boggling…185,000 people attended the race. We were able to get into the Daytona Beach KOA for the 2 days of the race so we didn’t have to drive very much that weekend during the race.

The months of December and January have been the best so far

 



The months of December and January have been the best so far. We have some exciting news, we have sold the 2 scooters and bought a car. When we were in Key West we put our scooters on Craigslist to see if there was anybody interested in buying them, we had a few calls but nothing was for sure. When we left Key West we took the ad off Craigslist. A week after we got back to Orlando we received a call from a guy in Key West willing to come up to Orlando and pay us twice what our scooters were worth, seemed like a scam but

It has actually begun



Des Moines

We left Minot, North Dakota on Thursday October 26th and spent 4 days with family in Minneapolis…it sure was great seeing everyone but was hard to say goodbye. Thanks Ed & Missy...
We stayed at a couple of places on the way to Texas; our 1st stop being Des Moines, Iowa. We stayed at a Passport America campground (Cutty’s Campground)…. it was a nice place! The bathrooms were all closed because of the cold weather, low 30’s at night and 50’s during the day. It also had an indoor pool that we didn’t get a chance to use

Our next stop was supposed to be a PA (Passport America) in Grantville, Kansas. The campground was about 10 miles off I-35 with a dirt road that was 1-1/4 miles long. If we have learned anything it’s “don’t drive on dirt roads”! Everything in the basement storage compartments were covered with a layer of dust. We pulled in and the camp host was followed by a dozen or so cats, she pointed out the last full hook up site that was available. We drove around to look at the sites (cats followed us) and realized

Mega Yard Sale

I wanted to share some photos of our Mega Yard Sale.

The sale was a huge success. The sale was planned for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

We sold over 90% of everything on Friday and the other 10% on Saturday; we didn’t even need to have the sale on Sunday.

Our neighbors are the best…
For two weeks we filled both sides of our garage completely full with everything you could imagine.

We bought a Coach

Wow, we have looked at a lot of junky RVs in the last couple of months!!
 

We were looking primarily for a diesel rig but we decided to keep all of our options on the table when all the diesel coaches we looked at in our price range were either too small or too old.  It feels weird calling it a coach when our entire life we’ve always called them motorhomes or RVs. We have learned a lot about RVs in the last couple of months. It's obvious some people have much different ideas of "clean and in great shape" then we do. This RV (I guess I should start calling it a coach) was the cleanest of all we looked at. Check it out.  It's BEAUTIFUL !!

We have sold our Motor Home

We’ve done all of our research and have educated ourselves about the advantages and disadvantages of each type of Motorhome.

These are motor homes types that were rejected 

Fifth Wheels - Two reasons; the expense of buying a heavy duty pickup truck and a fifth wheel would be far too expensive. Reason #2, Laurie would never pull a trailer.  She has pulled the jet ski behind our pickup truck and complained she didn’t like it at all, not to mention I don’t care for it myself.

Travel Trailers - Same 2 reasons as listed with the Fifth wheels.

Class C - Our first RV was a class C and we liked it very much except the limited storage space, not to mention these are way too small to live in full time.

Class B - These were not even a consideration as they are way too small to live in full time.

We’ve decided to stick with the class A style Motorhome.

Emotions in planning

Emotions in planning Full Time RVing

Sadness, fear, and uncertainty are some of the emotions we have felt in planning our full time RVing adventure. The emotions are not so much sadness, but fear and uncertainty. What are we doing? Are we crazy? Second thoughts creep in every couple of days, what if this is a mistake?

Why Full Time RVing

Why Do People choose the Full Time RVing lifestyle?

Rising Fuel costs:

The challenges we face seem to be a little different than the challenges of the people that have done this before us. The economy we live in today is filled with so much more doubt and fear of the future than in the past. Even as fuel prices keep going up every day, today’s economy will not keep us from following our dreams.