After 30+ years of marriage and raising a family, we have a lot of stuff. Most families do, so we may not be that unique but I do believe we have much too much, stuff.
The many corporate moves where we didn’t have to do the packing and moving insulated us from the shear volume of stuff we had accumulated. Our last move after we left the corporate world however, required us to do it all. This was a real eye opener as to how much we had accumulated. This combined with the fact we were downsizing after we became empty nesters meant we had less house to put all this stuff into. This forced us to step back and re-evaluate what we wanted to do with the next phase of our lives. We went through quite an evolution from let’s build our retirement home to let’s sell everything and travel full time in a motor home. Let me explain.
The first key milestone in our evolution was realizing how much time and effort we spent on maintaining a house and the landscaping. Now if you like doing that kind of work, great but after building multiple homes and making numerous moves around the country, we were getting burned out from this kind of maintenance. We just didn’t get any satisfaction out of doing that work anymore. We also realized that we spent an inordinate amount of our available time doing it too. The second key milestone was then looking at how much stuff we had accumulated to be able to maintain the house and landscaping. Lawn tractors, leaf blowers, rakes, shovels, etc., just for the landscape maintenance. Add to that cabinets full of lawn care products, flower pots, hedge trimmers, chain saws, etc. The list goes on. Then there’s all the tools and supplies for maintaining the house itself. This was just as big as the previous list. We had a lot of stuff just to maintain our stuff! After doing the construction on several homes ourselves we had more tools than the average homeowner. More stuff. And some of the stuff we used to maintain our stuff needed maintenance too. Anything with an engine needed periodic maintenance for example. Did I enjoy maintaining all this equipment? No!
We did acquire a number of big toys over the years as well, primarily boats. Living in the lake country of northern Michigan it’s almost a requirement to have a boat of some kind. We do get a lot of enjoyment from being on the water and summertime in northern Michigan is hard to beat in that respect. But guess what? These things require a lot of maintenance! And if you do it yourself you need more stuff to do the maintenance on your boat stuff. Here we go again. More stuff to maintain my stuff. Automobiles are a similar problem although it’s pretty hard to be without one of those.
Now we could avoid all this home maintenance by buying a condo and having all that done for us or we could hire out all the lawn care and home maintenance for a regular home. We did give that some consideration but simply writing checks for everything to be done for you would require staying in the rat race of the corporate world that much longer. We had already concluded that working until “normal” retirement age was just not something we were willing to do. One way or another we were going to find a way to get out while we were still healthy enough to lead a very active lifestyle. We knew of too many examples where people worked to full retirement age and then were not in good enough health to enjoy it. So, our thinking continued to evolve as to what that next phase would look like.
By now we had pretty much concluded that we didn’t want to settle into a lifestyle of just being in one place, maintaining the house and yard and all the other things we had accumulated. There had to be more to it than that. We also knew that we really enjoyed traveling, especially to the wild and scenic areas like the National Parks. I wanted to spend much more time photographing these places and do it at a more leisurely pace. One of the frustrating things about the one or two week vacations is there just wasn’t enough time to explore a place and get some memorable photographs before you had to pack up and head back to work. Usually I would have to schedule these trips months in advance and then have one week to explore. Every once in awhile the weather cooperated. Many times it didn’t. “You should have been here last week” was all too familiar a theme.
A number of years prior, during one of those “two week vacations”, we took a trip to Alaska. Little did we know but this was a huge milestone. We just didn’t realize it at the time. Instead of doing a cruise like many do, we decided to fly into Anchorage, rent a motor home and drive around the interior of Alaska for ten days. No agenda, no timetable other than we had to be back in Anchorage in ten days. We had a blast. It was a relatively small motor home, probably 24-28 feet, but we lived in it for 10 days as we drove around exploring the wild areas of Alaska (That’s it on the banner image on our home page). We explored Denali and Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks. Did an airplane landing on a glacier. 
Went to see the Iditarod sled dogs and many other memorable things. All on our own schedule. Needless to say in ten days we barely scratched the surface of that magnificent state but it sure wet our appetite for more. We also happened to run into a couple that were full timing in an RV and taking the summer to travel throughout Alaska. In talking with them we learned that prior to the RV they lived on a sailboat full time and sailed to many parts of the world. We both thought, what a cool lifestyle! This ten day Alaska trip turned out to be a defining point in figuring out what we wanted to do. We didn’t fully realize it at the time but looking back on it, it was a key experience.
After deciding that we wanted to spend a significant amount of time traveling and exploring the wild places of our country, a final key evolutionary milestone ties back to maintenance. If we were to keep a home and also spend many months on the road traveling, what about all the maintenance that needs to be done on the stuff back home? How much time would we spend worrying about whether things were OK at the house or feeling guilty because we didn’t get that maintenance project done before we left? In addition, what about the financial maintenance of keeping a home while we spent many months not in it? So maintenance, both physical and financial, was a key element in our decision to go full time. We finally concluded that we just didn’t want to have that burden. We wanted to be able to go where we wanted, for as long as we wanted and not worry about things back “home”.
So there you have it. Our thought process of why we have decided to sell everything and travel full time in a motor home. We’re not quite there yet so we can’t set a definitive launch date but the decision process is complete. Now we have the task of getting rid of all this stuff we’ve accumulated. It’s a lot of stuff. It’s a daunting task. But we’ve started, and it feels kinda good.
