After years of dreaming we are beginning our full timing lifestyle. Since 2002 I have worked as a Project Manager for a lighting company that is based in Norman, OK. I enjoy the work very much as it involves full time travel to various projects around the country. While I was off working projects Joan was working and minding the home in South Dakota. I would spend four or five weeks on the road then drive home for a week or so. After two years of living in hotels we decided it was time to begin living our dream while I worked instead of waiting until I retired. Like my sister Darcie says "Married people should live together."
The first thing we thought about was what where we going to do with all our "stuff". We had a house full of furniture and a garage full of "good stuff" that we had to either find homes for or give or throw away. None of the "good stuff" was going to be thrown away.
This decision was made in February of 2004 and we quickly found a permanent home for most of the furniture. Joan's brother David and his family had spent the past three years working in an orphanage in Cambodia and had returned in December. When they left for Cambodia they did what we where trying to do, give away all of their stuff. Here we had one family with too much stuff and another who needed stuff, perfect solution. David and family came to Black Hawk with a Uhaul and took everything they needed. It was a good feeling to see it go to someone who needed and deserved it.
It was decided my "good stuff", mostly tools, parts, hardware and misc items I had been carting around for 30 years, was going to go to my youngest son's garage. Since he is a new first-time homeowner he has a use for alot of "good stuff", especially the mower and the big TV.
We decided we would transition from the house to an RV via an apartment in the Dallas area where I had been working several of projects. We felt this would give us around six months to find and purchase an RV, get rid of our remaining things and move into the RV.
I dragged a Uhaul trailer with half our things down to McKinney, TX and put it into storage. I found an apartment in McKinney and returned to Black Hawk four weeks later to get Joan, clean out the house, put it on the market and move the remaining things to McKinney. We moved into our apartment in March.
While driving through Fort Worth after a job I passed by Vogt RV, a Tiffin Motorhome dealer, and since I had heard some good comments about the Tiffin line I stopped in for a look. Two hours later I was driving home to get Joan and bring her back to the dealer to see our new home. Now we had been looking at motorhomes for the past three years. We had pestered numerous salesmen with questions, monitored the message boards of various models and traded emails with several full timing couples. We had done alot of research and knew what we wanted and what we did not want. The 2004 Phaeton 40 QDH I looked at that day had everything we wanted and nothing we did not want. The salesman we worked with settled on a price that was less than we where willing to pay. We placed the order that evening (on my 51st birthday) and took delivery 10 days later. More pictures here.
Now we had an RV, an apartment, a house in South Dakota and a storage area full of "good stuff". Two days before taking delivery our real estate agent called to ask if we would accept a full price offer on our house with no contigencies and a closing date in two weeks - I THINK SO! My son Jay came to our rescue, he drove from Norfolk, VA to McKinney, TX with a friend, packed our storage area and most of the apartment into a Uhaul trailer, hooked it to my Ford Expedition which was going to my oldest son in Rhode Island and hauled it all back to Virginia. We where now living in an RV and had an empty apartment under lease until October, so much for well thought out plans.
A week after my son left we where showing the RV to my boss and mentioned we had an empty apartment under lease until October. He asked if he could sub-lease the apartment from us since he was in town three or fours days a week and the hotel rates had just gone up. What a deal, we must have been destined to make this move.