The Journey Begins

We are on the road and living in our motorhome (Tim prefers “RV”)!  Pat and Tim differ on the actual start date of our full time RV travel. Pat’s position is that we are visiting family for the holidays until 1/1/2023 when we will start our adventures in Florida.  Tim’s position is that we have been in the RV full time since 11/18/2022 when we spent our first night in the Windsport as full-timers.

We plan to do reviews of campgrounds, national/state parks, historic sites (especially state capitols and presidential libraries) as we travel; and talk about the people we see and spend time with along the way.  We started this blog so that family and friends who wanted to could follow our adventures (without inundating Facebook daily for friends who just want the highlights).

 

Pre-RV

 

We had taken many tent camping vacations to national parks when our three sons were kids.  We really liked to drive.  We even had season tickets to LSU football games when we lived in Carrollton, Texas; a 14-hour, 900-mile roundtrip.  So, before we knew it, we were seriously considering full-time RVing in our retirement. This set Pat on one of his obsessive planning furies to create a path to see all 50 states in their optimal weather. We went to an RV show on September 14, 2018; and picked out all of our favorite features in an RV, which narrowed down the list of models we were interested in to about six.

 

Tim retired on February 28, 2021.  In early 2022, with Pat set to retire in November, we began to track our favorite models’ selling prices.  Others had advised us to buy a used model, about 3-5 years old with less that 20K miles, because people buy new models and then sell them within about three months because they realize that RVing is not for them.  Sadly, even for used models, prices skyrocketed during the pandemic; but as fall 2022 approached, prices were starting to look a little better.  Suddenly, in August 2022, there was a listing for a 2022 Thor Windsport at an RV Dealership in Sanford, Florida, which met nearly everything on our wish list.  We flew to Florida, liked what we saw, and had it inspected.  There were a few issues that needed to be fixed, so we left it at the dealership and returned to pick it up Labor Day weekend 2022.  We spent the weekend in the RV and then put it in storage in Wildwood, Florida, for six weeks.  We returned to pick it up the week before Halloween 2022, and drove it to Houston, Texas, stopping in Ponce de Leon, Florida, and Lafayette, Louisiana, along the way.  There the RV remained until after Pat’s retirement. 

 

The Move from Apartment Life to RV Life

 

Many people have asked us how we moved from living in a Brooklyn apartment to living in the RV.  The transition began with deciding what furniture and other belongings we wanted to keep and what we would do with everything else.  We rented a moving truck from Budget Truck Rental and filled it with the things we would keep; some of which was ultimately going to the RV and some of which was going into our storage unit in Baton Rouge.  Tim drove the moving truck from Brooklyn to Lafayette, Louisiana, on November 2-4, stopping along the way in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

 

Pat’s last day of work was November 16, 2022, and the next day we flew to Houston to begin our journey.

 

Sugar Land, Texas (November 18)

 

Our first full-time campground was the Sugar Land RV Park. But it is really hard to review them since it rained almost the entire time we were there.  We used none of their facilities, we didn’t even go to office to check-in.  We had to set up the RV in the rain (put down the jacks; plug into electricity, water, and sewer; and extend the slide).  We then worried the entire time that we would get stuck in the mud or that we would become unlevel and unable to pull in the slide.  When we were ready to leave, we had to tear down (pull in the slide; unplug from electricity and water; dump the sewer; and pull up the jacks) in the cold and rain (the temperature stayed in the forties almost the entire time). 

 

The highlight of the trip was spending time with our son Tod, his wife, Leah, and our grandchildren, Ella and Alex.  It was Alex’s first birthday, and he was loving the attention.  We also got to spend some time with our son, Kevin, on this trip, since he was also at Alex’s birthday party.

 

On to our next stop on November 21^st, hint it’s a week in Tim’s hometown for Thanksgiving with the Blanchard family!