Days of Wine and Roses?

I've been thinking a lot lately about a post I read a couple of weeks ago, by Dave over at The Flip Flop Vector. He's been on the road now for six months out of a planned 12 month trip around the country. Its been interesting to read his perspective on the RV lifestyle and how they are adjusting to it. Its still amazing to me the number of folks who set out to do this who have never RV'd before! He's finding it a bit different from the way they've imagined it, and the jury appears to be still out as to whether they will continue the journey up to and after the 12 months.

What was so thought provoking, though, was that he felt reading all the blogs of other folks, like us, that are living the lifestyle, makes it sound as if we are all leading an idyllic life of leisure as we progress through the country. And I've been trying to decide if my blog is guilty of this as well?  I certainly don't mean to :-)! Are we enjoying our life? Much more than we used to, yes! Our life in New York was great as well, and we will never complain about the business we had, it provided us a very nice life and gained us the savings we needed to get to this point. It became "not enough", though, and we wanted to slow our pace down at this stage, and enjoy our traveling while still young and healthy enough to do so.

Would we like to "lounge back in our leather recliners sharing a glass of fine French wine with our two AKC award winning Pomeranians fast asleep in our laps as we discussed how to invest our lottery winnings while viewing the seagulls outside of our Prevost coach scooping up their meal as the sunset disappeared along the Oregon coast".? (Thanks Dave, that's a beautiful visual!) Well, sure, it would be nice...but truly, how boring would that get day after day after awhile. More dollars would help, don't get me wrong on that count, but we all do whatever it takes to make our lifestyle work. There are many full-timers out here who don't work and don't have to, but I think for us, even if it wasn't necessary for us to work, we still would. So far, the experiences we have had have been good, and the friendships formed treasured. (well, except for the beets, didn't particularly care for that experience!)

Do we have problems? Sure do! Maybe I try to paint them as lighter than they are, I don't know. We've definitely had our share of issues with the trailer. When we first picked it up, we discovered a propane leak in the furnace. Not good! Especially as I have a phobia about propane (all electric in the sticks n'bricks, and oil furnace) and I had to learn to get comfortable sleeping over two propane tanks. Last fall while here at Campbellsville we had the black water holding tank crack, and it took six weeks before it was repaired. All I'm going to say about that is after working 10 hour shifts, towards the end it was getting harder and harder to rise up off the port-a-john! This fall we have two new issues that we have discovered in the past few days.  As we were leaving Hillsboro, and Al was cleaning the leaves and snow off the roof and slides, he noticed a crack in the fiberglass side going from the top of the living room slide towards the roof. That will have to get checked out as soon as we get to Florida and hopefully isn't anything extremely serious. And on today's agenda is a repair to a crack we found yesterday in the galley gray water tank. This repair he's doing himself. It is good to have a handy person around :-).

I did find the emotional toll of leaving worse than I had expected. We didn't have children or grandchildren as so many others have, but we've always been very close to our families and for the most part have lived close to them all the time. So that was difficult. We had attended the RV-Dreams Rally in Tennessee about 3 weeks after we had left New York...I actually had Linda tell me I needed to stop crying! :-). Well, I did, and as I see everyone is doing just fine without us, I've adjusted just fine :-). We both really look forward to visiting family and friends, whether we go to them or they come to us.

I wish I had a bigger refrigerator. I do miss my washer and dryer. There are definitely times I miss the fenced in yard where we could let the dogs out by themselves. Long hot showers are to be treasured. But as I sit here looking out my window at the beautiful lake (no sunset, its morning) I think its not such a bad trade-off. I really enjoy that our days off of work are really days off, not days to be filled with lawn mowing, leaf raking, chores and errands.

Anyway, that's just some ramblings I have as I wait to start here at Amazon. I start next Monday, and hopefully Al does as well. He is waiting on a background check, and then will be cleared to start. Let's all raise those wine glasses and have a toast to the good life, whatever it may mean to each and every one of us.