Coming to a Town Near You!

When Harry and I lived in New York we had a beautiful 3200 sq ft log cabin. When we worked for someone else we used a lot of it but there were parts we didn't use. After we started our own business we probably didn't use even half of it. I miss the cabin but NOT the upkeep. Maybe when we win the lotto and can pay someone to take care of it we'll reconsider it.

Last year, we moved into a 2000 sq ft apartment in Pittsburgh. Somehow, even though it is smaller, we don't even use half of that. The biggest difference is that now our "stuff" is crammed in tighter. We do have a beautiful view... but we haven't exactly been getting along with our Landlord so it kind of balances out. (and that's another rant...)

At this point in the life cycle of our business we are, effectively, in start up mode. Not to mention we are both back in school. We work. We study. A lot. Probably more than we should, but it pays the bills. Technically, the schooling will pay the bills when we graduate.... We don't have time to go out and make grand trips to places and when we do have time we often don't have the energy. Heck, we barely have time to do small things like go see a movie or go shopping. It probably isn't healthy but it is what it is.

Switching gears.

Recently, we went to Philly to meet with a client on-site and suffice to say, Harry doesn't travel well. It's not really his fault. He has food allergies which means eating while travelling is difficult because you don't know "who you can trust" as far as food preparation. Heck I often have problems with the fast food I eat on the highway and I don't have allergies. Now, if I could get him to eat fruits and vegetables it would be easier because he could grab a salad or an apple or something but that's another rant for another day. :)

As we were driving in to Philly we passed a couple RVs on the highway and joked "Hey, if we were in an RV we wouldn't have to worry about packing". Mind you, at the time we had with us two hot plates, a toaster oven, a cooler full of three days worth of meals, and a few extra snacks and such (in case we got stuck). This is on top of all the computer and tech equipment we had. Not to mention clothes and other regular stuff. We got to the hotel, set everything up in the room, started making dinner and popped the circuit breaker. The hotel staff couldn't find the breaker. All the lights in our hotel room (except the bathroom) were out for 5-6 hours. (Turns out that they only labeled two of the three breakers to our room).

So while we were sitting there in the dark we talked some more about the whole "joke" of moving into an RV. We did have WiFi internet access so we started doing some looking around and pretty quickly came to two decisions.

  1. Why pay for space we don't need or use? Why have stuff that sits and takes up space?
  2. If we can't go out regularly, then why not bring the "out" to us.

Which is all a very long way of saying, that within the next year we are tentatively planning on selling most of our "stuff", putting a few things in storage that we don't want to part with, getting a low end RV (don't want to spend too much on something and "get it wrong", so it will probably be something a bit smaller and older) and we're going full time on the highway.

It's a little scary, and feels a little "Anti-American" (Must... Have... ALL... The Things!) to get rid of everything (well mostly). At the same time modern technology makes it easier in some respects. For example, our DVD collection fits in a binder and our file server is a little one foot cube which holds all our music and other digital data. eBooks take up no space and Satellite TV can easily be mobilized. So in some respects we're just excising what we don't use and so it also, to some extent, feels a little "zen".

We've already done a lot of research on things like mail delivery, RV parks, internet access, types of RVs, insurance (health, auto and property) and so on. Oddly, the hardest thing we're running up against is finding an RV with a floor plan that will allow us to put in a desk for a computer work station without tearing out huge amounts of stuff we'll need or paying an arm and a leg for something huge.

It's a lot to learn and a lot to take in but we're trying to give ourselves enough time to make the right decisions and yet still not always have it be "soon". We're going to try and document the process on our web site and of course when we do hit the road we plan to be geeky about it (web cam pointed out the front of the RV? Live GPS plotting? Who knows!)

So who knows, as the title suggests, perhaps someday soon we'll be coming to a town near you!