Our home page (http://www.FullTime-Life.com) says that we became full-time RVers when we began to dread going back to our stick-house. This is a little bit more of the story of how that transition happened. We are staying now at Fern Ridge Shores RV Park. It's the first place we lived as full-timers and it's nice to be back.
By 2002, we'd been traveling quite a lot of the time since we retired but were still maintaining our Springfield house (more-or-less). We kept kicking around the idea of selling out, but kind of wondering in the back of our minds whether it was the right decision. Or at least it was in the back of my mind. I think Bill had his already made up. For me, when we were on the road I couldn't have been happier, but when we got back home I still enjoyed the house. Usually when we first got home from a trip, I'd think about selling for a few days and then lose interest and just go back to our normal at-home life. In a home, by the way, that was much too big for two people and with way too much yard. We still had the same house where we raised four children. There were rooms we'd hardly even visited for years!
So the story is really about how I made up my mind that selling out was the right thing to do.
One afternoon in 2002 we were heading south on I-5 toward our home in Springfield after having been traveling for several months. I began to think of the dust and accumulation of papers and so forth that awaited us at the house and literally burst into tears. Life was so much simpler in the RV and so much more fun. I did not want to go home! Or, more accurately, I felt like I was already at home. So we pulled the trailer off at the next rest-stop, pulled out our RV Bible (the Good Sam Directory of RV Parks) and called the nice people at Fern Ridge Shores, a Park about 20 miles from our house. We'd looked at the park before because at that time two of our kids and their families lived in western Lane County near here (our daughter andson-in-law still do). But since it was so close to our house, we never thought we'd stay there.
So we reserved a spot and lived in our RV here at the Lake here for several months while we readied the house for sale. (The picture is our first RV home when we were here that time.)
Once we weren't living in the house, getting it ready to sell was easy. We gave a few family heirlooms to the kids, and got the rest of our stuff ready for the obligatory yard sale. It was easy -- emotionally anyway. It was a lot of physical work to get rid of most of the accumulation of 40 years.
We've never missed the house! It was a good decision for us. Living out here on this beautiful Lake made it even easier as it reinforced what we already knew from our travels. At this stage in our life, we don't need so much "stuff" to be happy. We have everything we need in our traveling home. In it we can enjoy the beauty of many different areas. When we are visiting in Lane County,we feel at home on the Lake. And we can still enjoy our family and friends just like we did when we lived in Springfield for all those years. It's nice to be here.
Here's the website for Fern Ridge Shores: http://www.fernridgeshores.com. Danna and Ron, the same couple who managed the park the first time we stayed, are still here and still doing a great job. They really care about the park and it shows.
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