Jett and I both had Thursday and Friday off this week, giving us a 4-day weekend to enjoy family and food and have a lot of fun.

Yeah.

Our weekend has actually consisted of Thanksgiving dinner alone, followed by moving furniture, painting and listing on eBay some of the stuff we want to shed before retirement. ‘Fun’ would be a stretch.

Of course it is all in the name of getting ready for retirement and if the next 10 months are as “enjoyable” as this weekend has been, I will be exhausted by the time I get there.

My eBay tally so far: 58 items listed, 1 bid.  I don’t think there is a lot of demand for 5-year-old technical books (I was tempted to list them under “Antiques”), but I hoped to have better luck with fiction and vintage software (I have a surprisingly large accumulation of Apple II software).

Bottom line: I am minus $19.28 so far, due mostly to me taking the opportunity to buy some Sue Grafton novels on eBay.  She is the one who writes those “‘A’ is for Alibi,” “‘B’ is for Burglar” mysteries.  I don’t know if this was part of her strategy, but the fact that I read ‘C’ and ‘E’ without doing ‘D’ bothered me way more than it should have.  So I will soon have the entire set through ‘N’. After going back and reading ‘D’ I can proceed with the rest without the trauma of further letter-skipping.

At least my OCD is surviving the weekend quite nicely.

One year from now, Thanksgiving 2012, Jett and I hope to be on the left coast, having dinner with my mother and my sister in Tillamook, Oregon.  One year, about $80,000 and about 4,200 miles of driving a big rig separate me from that goal. But as God is my witness (I watched Gone With The Wind last night), I will be there.

Which makes me wonder… how do fulltimers spend Thanksgiving?  Do they team up and each cook one-sixth of the turkey in their tiny ovens?

It is Thanksgiving week which, in addition to turkey and cranberry jelly (which I truly don’t like, but don’t shoot me), means a short work week. Which brings us one easy week closer to hitting the road. The current count, not counting this week:

• 44 weeks to departure (if we leave October 1, 2012)
• 40 weeks to my retirement (assuming I work to the end of August)
• 31 weeks to Jett’s retirement (assuming she works to the end of June)
• 16 weeks until we actually become RV owners (assuming we complete the purchase by the middle of March)

Can’t hardly wait!

In the meantime I am thinking about how to earn money in 2013 (see “Workcamping”) and planning, at a macro level, how our first 6 months on the road will play out. Here are my current thoughts:

• Leave October 1 and head south in small steps, stopping no more than 2 nights in any location.  We need short trips to gain driving skills and confidence and a lot of set-up/tear-down experience with the RV.  And maneuvering it into campsites.
• Spend a week with Jett’s family in Virginia.
• Head west, though WV, KY and MO to arrive at the Grand Canyon by early November.  Jett’s #1 “bucket list” item is seeing the Grand Canyon.
• Head northwest, to my sister’s home in Tillamook, OR, for Thanksgiving.
• Head south, probably ending up in San Diego by early January.
• Stay in San Diego until mid-April.  This would be 3 or 4 months of workcamping.

These plans are subject to change without notice.

I had an amusing encounter recently with a Liberty Mutual insurance agent.  It seems that Liberty Mutual has some kind of business relationship with my employer and a representative appears in the cafeteria once every couple of months to drum up business.  I took the opportunity to inquire into getting insurance coverage for the RV.  The things that are making insuring the coach difficult are (1) it will be in NH for summer 2012, (2) it will not be registered to be on the road until the fall of 2012 and (3) we plan to live in it starting in the fall of 2012.

So far I have not found anyone that will insure it under this combination of circumstances.  I was told by my personal insurance agent that my current carrier, Travelers, would not touch it but that she could get me coverage under another no-name carrier if I agreed to switch ALL my coverage – home, auto, rental property – to the new carrier.  Somehow the idea of completely uprooting all my current coverage to simply add coverage for a new vehicle made no sense.

But the response from the Liberty Mutual agent was even more amusing.  Yes, she said, Liberty Mutual will be happy to cover your coach… SO LONG AS IT REMAINS IN YOUR DRIVEWAY.

I pondered that for a moment, then said “So you will cover it so long as I don’t use it?”  She had to agree that that was a pretty accurate characterization.

Idiots.

Anyway, I have written a page that covers the income/asset side of the budgeting process: “Budgeting for Real – Income and Assets”. It isn’t the most entertaining of the pages, but I had to do it. Now I can concentrate on funner stuff.

No, it’s not the introductory line of a joke. Rather it is just my musing about how I can start out looking for one thing and find something entirely different. I suspect that this will happen a lot once we hit the road.

In this case Jett decided that I needed to find an RV driving course so that I wouldn’t run the rig, with us in it, off a cliff.  I can’t say that some professional training would be a waste.  I have already mentioned, I believe, my penchant for cutting right turns too closely even when driving normal, human-scale vehicles.  It is all too likely that I will do something incredibly stupid/dangerous in my first week on the road pulling a 40-foot coach behind our truck.  An accident early on (or anytime, for that matter) could destroy our plans.  Since the coach will be delivered to our campsite in NH for the summer 2012 season, my first time behind the wheel, coach in tow, would be our exit from the campground.  Out that narrow driveway and onto those narrow rural NH roads.  I would expect that our first stop would be the nearest large parking lot where I could spend an hour practicing some basic maneuvers, such as turning and backing up, assuming I could get us there safely.  But an hour in a parking lot really doesn’t compare, in terms of skills attained, to a full day or two with a seasoned instructor.

So I started to look for RV driving training.  What I learned fairly quickly is that there isn’t much available and what is available is in distant locales such as California and Texas – states that are on the other side of the Mississippi, for God’s sake!  Might as well be on Mars.  Do they even speak English there?

But along with the bad news about the dearth of training opportunities, Google served up an unexpected treasure: betterRVing.com. This is a web site which offers a free quarterly magazine, articles on RV parks and interesting destinations, RV tools, maintenance tips, traffic laws by state, recipes for RV potluck dinners and – the reason it appeared in my search results list – tips on RV driving. I browsed some of the articles and was impressed with how well-written and informative they were. Good photos, too. A real treasure which I highly recommend.

I have already printed four articles:

• “Connecting the Dots with Barney” – an article on how to turn without hitting anything (does that sound like something that is spot-on for me?)
• “The Best Work Camping Resource” – an article, with links, about working while on the road.
• “How to Find a Job While RVing” – similar, but broader, also with lots of links.
• “iRV” – a list of useful smartphone apps of particular interest to RVers.

I also plan on viewing the four-part video course on RV driving.

So I didn’t find that elusive RV driving training, but did find something that is nearly as valuable.  Less expensive, too.