I would like it to snow this winter.  Not a lot, mind you.  Enough to make it look like winter but not so much as to wreck my back.  As this could be my last cold winter for a while, I want to have some memories – not necessarily fond ones – of what I left behind.  I would also like to get some fresh snow photos of my home town, to feature on my first “where we’ve been” page.  I intend to have two types of pages once we get moving: a “stardate log” series of pages which records our adventures chronologically and the aforementioned “where we’ve been” pages that groups our experiences geographically.  I am hoping to find a map plug-in that I can use for those.  I will have to record the GPS coordinates of each stop.  I want this blog to be a scrap book for us and a resource for others.

Actually, there will most likely be three types of pages because I might want to write on some random topic from time to time, as I have done to date.  These would be pages of interest to RVers.  Call them my “musing” (and, hopefully, amusing) pages.

It took me almost a week to compose my most recent page (“Searching for a Used Fifth Wheel”).  I wrote a draft, then got caught up in trying to find a photo of the nose cap of an Open Range 399BHS. Before I found one I had to deal with some tenant issues, a granddaughter’s birthday, some Christmas shopping, a work crisis and a variety of other mundane Life Events that get in the way of having fun. Anyway, I finally finished it. I have also been doing a lot of planning for our Great Escape. Current target for hitting the road: Friday, September 14, 2012. That is still 9 months away (exactly!), but there is plenty to do between now and then.

And life will continue to get in the way.

As we slowly, incrementally, tell family and friends of our retirement plans, we get two responses:

1. “That’s great! I am SO envious!”
2. “We will miss you.”

The first response is direct and always seems very genuine.  The second response is conveyed more through body language and follow-up questions, such as “How often will you be back?” or “How long will you do this?” Like it is inconceivable that we could actually do this permanently or even for more than a few months.  Well, they could be right.  But if we love it and do it indefinitely, we will surely be missed.  We have been fixtures at social events with friends and family for so long that departing is going to seem like death to some.

But we continue to be serious about proceeding with this plan.  I wrote a page about the thoughts we had as we were trying to refine our RV search a few months ago: “The RV Takes Shape”.

Our plan includes renting our home for a year or more.  We will leave it furnished, but will remove all personal items.  Some of the most precious – pictures, quilts made by my grandmother and the like – will go into storage. But there is a lot of stuff – “belongings” I guess – that reside in my attic that is less sentimental.  For example, I have a lot of books and LP records that I have accumulated over the years and have moved from place to place with some vague intent of using them again at some point.  Well, this time I am not moving to a place where I can store them for free and they don’t mean enough to me to pay to keep them in a storage locker.

So I am putting them on eBay.

I really thought that it would be somewhat painful parting with these old friends.  But not so.  Mostly I have a sense of freedom, like a plane that has lost some ice that had accumulated on its wings. And a little greed – it is nice to see that “sold” total increment daily – and a sense of wonder at what sells and what doesn’t.  My programming books, some of which are, admittedly, dated (because they are more than a month old), have almost no appeal, even when nearly given away.  Hardy Boys books, on the other hand, have a marketing appeal that vastly exceeds their literary value.

There is no accounting for taste.

I also learn things I never knew.  For example, my old Hardy Boys “Secret of the Old Mill” book, published in 1927, has a red cover. I received an email query asking *which* of the 9 “red cover” editions it was.  I had no clue, so I asked how I could tell.  I now know that the first three “red cover” editions had no ads for other Hardy Books at the back; the other 6 did.  Not particularly valuable information and not something that will make me the life of my next cocktail party, but fun to learn nevertheless.

I haven’t posted the LPs yet.  I was surprised to find, however, that my Beatles “White Album” still had the original poster inside.  This apparently makes it more valuable.  I will be curious to see what kind of interest it generates.

My life is for sale. Bid high. Bid often.

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.