And Away We Go! 

About a week ago, David and I became homeless. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but we did sell our house, left Long Island, NY and don’t really know where we are going to land. Why did we do this? Where will we go? How will we deal with a relative lack of permanency in our domicile? You have questions — and so do we. We can answer some of these, but more will become apparent as we travel.

We do have a plan. We’re not completely aimless. But before I go into the plan, let me give you a little background.

Some of you may know this already, so I’m writing it down for the sake of posterity. Over the past 25 years, we’ve owned four different homes on Long Island, mainly in two different towns, and made amazing friends. Where we lived made sense as it was close to family and business. Now, our three kids have grown and we wonder, did we settle for the obvious choice of residence? Where would we live if we could choose? And why CAN’T we choose?

Making a proactive choice of where to live is not so obvious. We’ve been to many areas of the country on vacation and thought, “We could live here.” But you know “vacation-mind” is not the same as “permanent resident-mind.” What we really need to do is live somewhere for a few weeks, figure out the neighborhoods, determine if the people are “our” people, research the good, bad and ugly of a place and see if it feels like us. That takes time and we want to be more informed. Luckily we live in the 2020s where we could rent an AirBnb or VBRO for a month and really do the research. And we feel we can get there safely during a pandemic because we have an RV.

We’ve lived in our RV before. It’s a travel trailer, meaning we tow it behind our truck. You may have seen one of those big beautiful silver bullets made by Airstream. That’s how we roll — literally. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in it since we bought it in late 2016 traveling to national parks with our kids and generally exploring the country. During the first part of the pandemic, we found it’s a great way to stay socially distant and still travel for business and pleasure. So we have the travel part figured out.

Back to “Where Do We Want to Live When We Grow Up.” We do have some requirements of our next residence. We want to be near mountains as we like to hike and ski. We’d like to be near good medical care, after all, we’re getting older. Near higher education is desirable as we want to keep growing mentally by taking classes and being around young ‘uns. Accessibility by airports is a good idea so we can visit far flung family when we want. Our specific home needs good internet and cell service but those will be local decisions.

That said, we’ve determined five markets that we want to explore as a start for our research. Asheville, NC is an obvious choice as David has business there and we like it. We’re also looking into Durango, CO and Bozeman, MT which we want to visit in the winter to see if we can handle the cold. Then we are off to NH and Tennessee. We were also interested in Evergreen, CO so we may stop in more places in Colorado than we thought. Flexibility is key.

To start, we’ve rented an apartment in Asheville and for now that’s our home. We’re busy setting it up and I want to share it with you as soon as that makes sense.

So that’s the beginning. We can’t wait to tell you about all that is happening on the road. We’ve been traveling and quite frankly still trying to get our moving finished. There are a lot of moving parts (pun intended?) and we’re still in the process. I’ll tell you about that too. We want to pass on any tips that can help a future move.

#travel #moving #rvlife