(I promise this will not turn into an hour by hour blog.)
On our first night, we have a problem. First, there was a loud knock on the door and the neighbors are screaming fire. Who could make this up? Indeed there was a brush fire, racing up the hill directly across from the campground. Our first full night living in our RV, as full-time RVers, vacationing in Southern California, was memorable.
Full-time travelers, sitting still
We are full-time RVers and haven’t gone anywhere, as full-timers – yet. We did go places, but our RV sat in San Diego, staying warm, while we were running around Colorado, South Dakota, and Hawaii. All these states didn’t include California, Nevada, and Idaho for our trip to see the solar eclipse. We also flew from California to Colorado and back. Oh yes, we also drove from California to South Dakota and back, not all in one shot, not in our RV. Busy! This post will outline our travels for the last four months.
Hawaii
These last six months has been quite a work-load and didn’t involve going to work like normal people. The previous six months did involve working, at work and getting ready for our full-time adventure. All this begins our fulltime adventure as RVers and as it is with all adventures the road has lots of twists and turns.
South Dakota
In July, it was our intent to move into our RV, staying in the San Diego Area working (at least for me working) as we leisurely sold our house and most of our stuff and as the opportunities made themselves more obvious, begin a new travel life, as full-time RVers.
An old Jewish axiom is “Man plans and God laughs.” This was the plan.
In July, everything was on track. We now owned a nice RV, purchased in December 2016, which we were aging in a nice RV lot and listed the house for sale. The time leading up selling the house was busy, getting everything ready for the buyers and starting to downsize our lives, planning each item, step by step and moving forward with each step.
Our move out was only to be interrupted by a vacation, actually two vacations. Isn’t that a logical plan, take a few days off while making major life changes. The first vacation was to be to see the solar eclipse as Cascade Lake Idaho with the RV and the second one was to be in Hawaii.
Hawaii
Everything changed when my mother passed away in the first part of August. NEW PLAN doesn’t begin to describe the challenge. Our house was for sale, but not yet sold. The solar eclipse wasn’t going to wait and the Hawaii trip already paid for. We hadn’t yet moved out of our own house and now we had two households of stuff to distribute, not just one, and to make matters worse, mom lived in Colorado and sorry to mention it, she was a collector.
Both my brothers and sister worked (one in New Mexico) and couldn’t stop their lives so we had a choice. Sell it all to an estate company or try to make do with mom’s plan. Nothing can be put into words that make any of this easy. We tried to work with mom’s plan.
Sell or give everything away
How to sell everything and move into an RV shouldn’t include any of the above extras as part of the plan. We left California on August 2nd, moved to Colorado for one week, followed by our RV trip from California to Idaho. Hawaii trip was for a week in mid-September. Our house sold and was vacated on September 13. Two days later, we flew to Hawaii. After that, we drove to Colorado. The trip to become South Dakota Residents happened in a blur. We moved to South Dakota on October 26 and then returned again to Colorado to distribute mom’s estate. In August, we knew that we wouldn’t be Californians, anymore but just couldn’t execute the move, while we still had a house full of stuff and no buyer.
By the end of December, we were outside of California for nearly 120 days. And now we sit, in our RV, back in California now, to collect our RV, now South Dakota residents. We haven’t worked at our jobs for five months, can’t go back now and are planning our routes across this country.
Thank you, each of you, and you know who you are, for all the help you gave us beginning our journey.
So here we sit watching a fire
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, across from the campground, the fire raced up the hillside of grass and brush, and at the top San Diego Fire Department put a stop to it as it ran out of fuel. Several acres burned and no houses (also at the top of the hill) were damaged. After getting the alarm we packed our important papers in the car and sat in the parking lot watching the flames until it was apparent that the fire could go no further and wasn’t coming towards us. By now the fire was surrounded both top and bottom.
Here is a link to the google map for the area.
Link to our 2018 Route.
Link to our route San Diego to Las Vegas.
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