The First Day of the Rest of our Lives!

Today, March 9th, 2023 is the the first day of the rest of our lives. We sold our house and moved into our 2022 Grand Design Imagine 2670MK camper. Happy, excited, nervous are just some of the feelings. First stop is a 365 day a year campground not too far from our sticks and bricks to finish up some loose ends.

How did this all start? We have always wanted to travel, but we either couldn’t afford it or we both could not get the same time off work together. Then one day, around seven years ago, I came across a podcast called Keep Your Daydream. I listened to every episode and said “We can do this!”. The podcast led to YouTube channels of full-time RV’rs, and I so badly wanted to do this, so I brought it up to Brian and he was all for it (but he wanted to do van life, which I could not do, I need space). From that day we started our five year plan.

In 2019, we had bought a previously owned 2018 A-Frame style camper, just to get our feet wet and in the right direction. This really kick our butts to get moving with our plan. First part of our plan was to downsize. We also had to get out of as much debt as possible. I made plans to make double of the minimum payments, which wasn’t always possible, but I got a huge chunk of our debt paid off. This was all halted by COVID in 2020. We couldn’t camp since all the campgrounds were closed, just like most of the world. Brian was laid off and we had less income to pay down our debts. At this point, I was convinced that our plan would not happen. So our five year plan turned into seven years. And yes, we downsized our 1066 square foot home for all seven of these years.

In 2021, I was burned out and desperately needed a vacation. I planned a short trip for Brian and I to get a long weekend at Ocean City, MD. This trip just happened to take place during the Hershey RV show in Hershey, PA in September of 2021. On our way back home to Pittsburgh, PA, we stopped at the Hershey RV show to check out the model that we have been eyeing for a while. We went directly to the Grand Design section and found our model. We talked with a salesman and sat in the camper for a while and I was already in love with it, but was waiting on a reaction from Brian. He seemed to like it but he was not showing much emotion to it. We walked around the show to check out other things and were talking about how perfect the layout was for our needs. We went back to the salesman and asked how we would go about ordering one. Reminder that this was going on during COVID and there were many supply chain shortages and prices were at an all time high in the RV industry. So we got to talking with our salesman and he told us that we would have it by February of 2022 if we ordered from the show. He came back from the finance people and they were willing to give us more than what we owed on our A-Frame style camper and our payments would be fairly reasonable, so we purchased our camper!

Purchasing this camper made me more confident that our dream would actually come true, not in the time-line that I had originally thought, but it would happen!

During this downtime of COVID and Brian was laid off and he created a website that eventually generated money and helped us out a lot. He then went back to work full-time. We were back on track to getting on with our plan.

February 2022, we got the call our camper was in! We drove to Syracuse, NY to pick her up. It was annoyingly cold and snow storms were brewing. We went to the dealership and and signed our lives away, stayed the night in a hotel, then went back the next morning to tow the camper back home. This led to the first issue, we did not have the proper tow hitch and the dealership was closed on Sundays, so we found an auto-parts store that sold hitches, but none were what we needed, so we drove home without our camper. A few weeks later, we were able to get the proper set up to tow our camper back to PA.

We booked our first trip in April of 2022 at a KOA near Grove City outlets. We got there and our kitchen slide would not go out… This led to us taking her to a local dealership to get this issue fixed along with some other small issues. They said it would only take a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months… We were not happy, but we got her back and finished up some last details to get our house on the market. We put our house on the market in November of 2022, right before the holidays, which is not an ideal time, but it all worked out and we had an offer that we accepted in January of 2023. We closed on our house March 9, 2023.

This is the beginning our story and we hope you will stick around to hear the rest of it and to hear about our workamping jobs that we will do while traveling the great USA!

~Happy Travels!