Our First Year as Fulltimers

October 3rd 2018 will mark our one year anniversary as full timers in our coach….and it seems like we just started.

But before we get to far ahead of ourselves let’s go back to how this started, the whole process started almost three years ago when I came home from work and told my wife that I wanted to runaway. Ok ladies just how would you react to your sixty plus husband coming out with that statement? Well Laurie my wife and best friend responded with “just what did you have in mind” well I went on to tell of the crazy idea of selling almost everything we owned and travelling full time in a motorhome which even sounded a little crazy to me.

I know some more background would be good, let me start by introducing the characters of this little adventure, myself Brian a sixty something year old that owed his own small business and my wife Laurie with our two cats Divot and Sam, we lived in a nice three bedroom raised bungalow in the village of Fonthill on the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario Canada. I had been through a little cancer thing about a year earlier, but had made a full recovery and was back to the day to day grind, while based in the Niagara region a lot of my clients were in the metropolis of Toronto a large city on the shores of Lake Ontario. So after a tough day of work and an even worse drive home from the Toronto area I was just exhausted and ready to runaway from it all, and that’s what started this whole adventure.

I wish I could say this was all my big idea but the truth of the matter it all started with a Google search for “inexpensive tropical places to retire” which brought up numerous locations in Central America which while sounding nice, meant trips for family and friends, which seamed to complicate the logistics. And another search brought up the concept of “full-timing” in an RV, which would lead to YouTube videos by a collection of characters, each doing there own thing their own way. A few examples be Eric from the “Nomadic Fanatic” in a class C motorhome, Nathan & Melisa of “Less Junk More Journey” in a class A motorhome, and with fond memories Chico of “Rufus & Dufus” in a class A, and the list went on and on from cheap living Bob in his Chevy van to the RV Geeks in their Newmar Mountain Air. This whole YouTube thing almost became an obsession with getting notifications every time someone added a video. But as we watched we learnt from the good and the bad that everybody seemed to go through, size, floor patterns, everyone had their own ideas, people went from fifth wheel trailers to class A motorhomes back to travel trailers and some to old school buses.

And then we discovered this YouTube channel “The Motorhome Experiment” where this character Paul laid out a timeline as to emptying, down sizing, and selling their home to go on a one year long adventure to see this great continent we live on, but they were one of the many that gave us a step by step process in how to downsize our life. And just as a side note Paul’s timeline was nothing less than true hopefully thinking, but we have become friends with Paul and Lorena and their one year has extended into multiple years with no sign of an end. But it was through hours and hours of YouTube videos and RV reviews and ads that helped us to decide what would be the most important items for us, which turned into a check list that all RVs would be judged by as this would become our home not something used a few weekends a year. We learnt about boon-docking, dry camping, full and partial hook ups, solar, compositing toilets, wet bays, inverters, generators, grey and black tanks, fresh water, water pumps, and batteries both coach and chassis. And the conclusion was that we would go with a class A motorhome between 38 to 42 feet in length and powered by diesel motor, a queen size bed, full size shower, a slide would be Ok as long as it was liveable with the slide in for those boon-docking nights in truck parking areas or the Walmart that ever town has.

I know this is starting to appear to be the start of a small novel but it is not where I want to go with this, I want this to be a light hearted, informative, writing of ourselves and our adventures along with the head aches of driving your home down some back road at 100 kmph or 62 mph for our America family. I will explain what we decided on and why we decided on it, and whether it has been a good or bad decision, I will talk about down sizing and the hardship of letting go of treasures, I will explain our solar choices and upgrades that we have done and will be doing, we will talk about the challenge of living in 320 square feet of space as well as reviews on campgrounds and attractions.

In other words I will just be explaining our adventure and would love to have you joins us, I hope to put together some thoughts once a week, but could happen more or less depending on how the spirit moves me, thanks for reading and I hope you will follow us.