The time has finally arrived. After much thought and analysis, I decided instead of traveling and working part-time I was going to retire. So the last day of February the condo went on the market and two days later had the best offer one could get. I couldn’t have written a better offer.
Closed on the condo on 4/15/20 and had possession until 5/14/20. Plenty of time to move from 3200 sq feet to 420 sq feet. Pretty sure there is never enough time to do that. So lots of purging, selling, and trying to figure what goes where on the RV. For example, I kept 18 place settings and tossed 8. I have never hosted 18 people in my condo for dinner why in the world would I think I will on the RV? I did keep 14 wine glasses (actually might be more but who is counting). We had 8 wooden spoons and 7 spatulas, I am proud to say we tossed 2 wooden spoons and 3 spatulas, see I can downsize.
By Tuesday everything was put away in some nook or cranny. I am pretty sure I don’t have a clue where most of my stuff is located and I will have to buy it again. Saturday we made another trip to pick up the last few items in the condo. Holy crap, 7 totes later scattered everywhere in the RV. So today mostly spent finding more hidden spaces to stuff things.
Doing all this during the COVID-19 pandemic is less than entertaining. Campgrounds are closed so where do you go? After many phone calls and beggings, we were able to land within 30 miles of Lansing (so we can finish cleaning the condo while living in the RV). Because we are self-contained and homeless we did get permission.
My original plan was to change my legal address to our dock address (as I own that site) in Montague, and a mailing service out of Florida. It turns out you can’t use the dock for a valid USPS address. So I had to scramble and find another permanent address.
Our original plans (from 2016) pictured below took us through the UP of Michigan, eventually crossing the border in Canada up to Alaska and ending in Yuma, Arizona for the winter. Since the stay at home order is now until 5/28/20 we will not be going through the UP as planned. We are heading out on 5/15/20 through Michigan City and heading west. Will we be able to cross the border in mid-June and head to Alaska. Time to be flexible. Of course, I have all our parks booked through Sept so I am sure lots of rescheduling will be done.
We have officially been in our RV for one week today. This is May and so far we have had one night of freezing weather, so we had to disconnect the water hose. I didn’t put enough water in the tanks so we ran out of water in the middle of the night. One day it snowed a little and almost every day high winds. Friday night was especially bad. In the middle of the night, we kept hearing a pounding noise. At first, we thought it was one of the neighbors trying to fix something. After an hour of the noise and no sleep, I decided to take a walk around the bus and see if I could figure it out. Of course, I couldn’t hear it outside nor could I hear it in the living area, so back to bed I went. Oh no, it just got worse. So two more trips around the RV and no solution. Finally, John got up and went outside and I stayed in and told him when I could hear the noise. After a few minutes, we figured it out it was the high wind getting under the slide cover and flapping it. So he throws a log up there to keep it from flapping, hopefully, it didn’t rip anything. Today’s wind knocked the log down.
So with high winds, low temperatures, and stay home order lengthened, we are heading south and west instead. Meanwhile, this week will continue to organize and re-organize as I am told until every nook and cranny is full. It doesn’t help that we had 12 boxes of Kleenex, 10 large rolls of paper towels, and at least 2 (okay 8) of every other household item you can imagine. Hey, I did throw out 4 food storage containers and one million hangers.
Monday and Tuesday will be our last trips to the condo and bringing back the golf clubs and bikes the last of the items there. Hopefully, the weather clears by Wednesday for a day of golf, then Friday heading out for the long-planned, many times changed adventure.
