Home Is Where You Park It

The saying goes "there's no place like home", a phrase we've always believed meant home has to be an actual place. For most people that's probably all they've ever considered and that's ok. Yet, there's a subculture of us folks out there, born with a little more wanderlust, that have chosen to sell our homes and most belongings, simplify our lives and take life on the road. For Duane & I, the concept of full time RVing appealed to us from the first day we started exploring what it was all about. This blog is going to be a journal of our adventures. We are officially full-timers.

Since selling our house and becoming full-timers, we never really leave home. Sure, we may travel from state to state, and stay in places hundreds of miles from where we stayed the night before, but we're always home. We sleep in our own bed at night, watch TV in our own living room, cook in our own kitchen and live our lives in our own space. Maggie knows where she'll be sleeping at night!

The difference for us is where we park. What we see out our windows might be a beautiful desert landscape one week and an ocean shore the next. We could be enjoying ourselves next to a mountain stream for a few days, then find ourselves having our morning coffee in a gravel pit after a nightly stopover. Yet everywhere we go, we're home.

What is Home anyway? When we look back at our lives and think of all the events that have taken place, bringing us to where we are now, it's not really the house we're thinking of when we think about "home". It's the experiences, the friends and family, the family dog, everyone and everything that's enriched our lives along the way that we really remember. So for us, home isn't so much a dwelling that keeps us secure, home is where we store our memories. Home is our journey.

We've spent the last six months in Mesa, AZ, at Sun Life RV Resort. It's been a wonderful place to be for the winter. We've thoroughly enjoyed living close to Duane, Cecilia, Liam & Emily (more on them later). Over the winter we've learned a lot and we've made great friends. We've learned the workings of our fifth wheel and we've learned the stories of other folks out there, living in some sort of a house on wheels, making memories along the way. Most importantly, we've learned the two of us are still best friends and we can easily live together in a very small space and get along.

As I began writing this post, we were parked at an RV repair shop while our new solar electric system was being installed. We slept well in our own bed, safe within the locked, chain linked compound next to a few other RVers who were having work done too. Just for one night those people were our neighbors.

We still have some work to be done before leaving Arizona, so our good friends John & Lora Newby made arrangements for us to stay in visitor parking in Happy Trails RV Park. It's a beautiful spot, right next to the golf course, post office and activity center in the resort. The sun is shining, it's another spectacular day in the desert, and we're home.

When we leave Arizona, our short term plan is to take the next six weeks driving back to Alaska. We've made arrangements to be parked in one of the school parking lots in Wasilla for the summer. Since it doesn't get dark in Alaska in the summer it leaves a lot of time for mischievous youth to vandalize schools for something to do. Our job will mainly be to provide a presence that might make someone think twice before wreaking havoc. In return, we'll be provided with a place to stay with water and electrical hookups for the summer. Not a bad deal in our opinion.

What happens after summer? We're working on a few things. You'll have to check back often to see what we're up to. There's a great big country out there just waiting to be explored. We intend to experience as much of it as we possibly can.

There's a saying that states "It's the journey, not the destination that matters" and in our case it's true. We hope you'll enjoy reading along as we begin our journey. We hope it's a long, long time before we reach our destination, while we're Haulin' Home.