A Seven Week Whirlwind - from "let's do this" to "on the road"
Back in March, Covid-19 pandemic happened. Everyone knows what that means. My company closed their offices, but that didn't effect me (Carey), as I have worked from home since we moved to NC in December 2015. Katie had been working as a dental hygienist since August (after our trip of a lifetime), but was now furloughed while she was helping the kids with school. When her office opened back up a few weeks before school was finished, we decided it was more important for her to be there for our kids, instead of going back to work. Her office took that as her resignation a.k.a. they fired her.
It was probably around this time we started thinking about what school would look like in the fall. Would they be at school full time? Would they start off remotely like they finished this year? With this uncertainty hanging in the balance, Katie went back to work but through temp agencies instead of a full-time position. She didn't to possibly have to quit to work with the kids again in the fall.
At the end of June, we took a week long vacation up to Ohio, our 3rd annual "cousin camp". It is one of the rare times that most all of our family is able to spend a lot of quality time together. Living full-time in an RV was nowhere in our thoughts at this point. My dad turns 70 years old this year, and we figured this was going to be our only chance, so we had an early birthday celebration. We also discussed when we could do Cousin Camp 2021, thinking that would be our next opportunity to all be together again.
Shortly after we got home, the first domino fell. Wake County Public Schools announced that they would be offering a Virtual Academy option, but there weren't too many details about how exactly that would work. They offered the option to sign up for the first half of the year, or the full year, with a strong push to commit to the entire year. This got the wheels turning again about the possibility of traveling the country while living full time in an RV. It seemed crazy (right up our alley), and we knew there was a chance for it to be an epic disaster. We didn't want to not explore it, and then look back in 20 years with regret that we didn't take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We would only do it if the kids were fully onboard. Of course they were! They all said they would miss going to school, and seeing their friends, but we also knew there was a chance that in-person school wouldn't happen at any point this year. On July 13th, we officially signed the kids up for Virtual Academy.
The next step was actually two steps that needed to happen concurrently. We needed to sell our house while we also had to buy an RV. I messaged a realtor friend on Friday July 17th, and we met on Sunday. We had an agreement and the house would go live on the following Saturday, July 25th. That gave us some time to fix up a few things in the house and re-paint everything and clean up all of our stuff to get ready for showings. From the first day, we had 2-4 showings every day. We had an offer on day 3 and another on day 7 that didn't work out for different reasons, but on day 10 - August 3rd - we got an offer from a couple in Colorado and we quickly reached an agreement! Their timeline also worked out well for us, as we had targeted September 1st as the day we wanted to start our adventure. We were set to close on the house on September 3rd.
From the time we started showings, we put all of our possessions into one of three piles - sell, donate, or bring. This soon became five piles because there were things we had to keep in storage, and some things that had to go to the local dump. We were amazed at how much "stuff" we had that we hadn't used probably in years. The first thing I tossed was the box of old cords that I think every guy has, thinking someday he might need to connect his old "X" with "Y" cord to "Z" thing, when in reality they are sitting in a closet and don't even work anymore. I brought old stuff from Michigan to our rental in 2015, and then they moved to our new house in 2017, and they were still in a bin in the closet. We watched a documentary on minimalism, and the key question they asked when deciding if you should keep something was "does this add value to my life?" Why did we hold onto things we didn't get value from, thinking that someday we may need it? A computer that is over 8 years old really isn't worth keeping. I don't really need 35 tee shirts and 25 running shirts. But we get this stuff, and put it somewhere, and never think to get rid of it. Now was a great time for us to do just that. Once we started getting rid of things, we started thinking about how little we could actually live with, and our possessions became less and less.
While the house showings and purging and cleaning was going on, we were also trying to find an RV. We changed our mind so many times on what we wanted to buy. At the start, we had to get a Class A. We wanted diesel over regular gas because that came with more towing power. We also really wanted one with a bunk house, so we had plenty of room for the kids to sleep and have their own space. The problem we ran into was that the few we could find locally were out of our budget. We found others but they were all over the country, and we didn't have the time or money to fly around to look at stuff. We weren't going to buy something without seeing it in person. We also entertained buying a truck with a 5th wheel or travel trailer or a Class C for a while, but nothing that seemed right for us. Either they were too old, not the right layout, too dirty, too small, always something that just wasn't the right one. I even threw out the idea of getting the biggest and best pop-up camper we could find. Part of the problem was caused by Covid - there weren't any new RVs being built, because the factories were all closed. This meant that people who would regularly upgrade to a new one and then sell their old one just wasn't happening, so the supply for used RVs was very small, yet many people had the same idea as us and were buying them up very quickly.
Another issue we had to figure out was our vehicle situation. Right before Covid shut down everything, our little Kia Rio died on us, so we bought Katie a new car. Five days after buying it, she was out of work. We had been trying to sell it for months before the house sold, and now we were in a real time crunch. The day we got the second offer on the house, Friday July 24th, we took her car and our Honda Odyssey back to the place where we bought them both, just to see what they would give us for a trade in. A few hours later, we had executed a 2-for-1 trade, lowered out total debt owed on vehicles by $11k, and cleared up an extra $250 for our monthly budget. We got a Honda Pilot and were well on our way to starting our dream year...
Well, wouldn't you know it, Monday we got another curve ball. We realized that the Pilot is All Wheel Drive, which in older models you can disengage to flat tow them, but in ours you can't, which means to tow it you have to get a flatbed trailer. An extra expense we didn't expect, and also that put us back to needing a Class A Diesel, as the weight of the trailer plus Pilot is more than any regular RV can tow. We drove all the way down to Myrtle Beach in the middle of the week to look at one we were ready to buy. That didn't work out because we didn't quite have enough money for the down payment. Seemed like a ridiculous decision to me, but we trusted that God was looking out for us, and this just wasn't meant to be.
A few days later, I was running a live race with some friends a couple hours from home. The fact that I was there was pretty random, as this race was scheduled for June, but had been canceled due to Covid, and re-scheduled for August 8th. I wasn't going to run it originally but I wanted to have one last running getaway with my run club and it only cost $25 so I signed up. Katie had scouted out a few RVs she wanted to go look at over that way while I was running, so we had the kids up at 4:00am on a Saturday to hit the road. While I ran, she went on what ended up being a wild goose chase, over 5 hours of driving to find out one of them was already sold and the other was not a good fit. We were getting near desperation, as we were less than 3 weeks from being homeless. We stopped at a dealership about halfway between the race and home, to look at an RV we had looked at previously (and didn't like then). They had moved it from the Raleigh location to Winston-Salem, but when we got there, we found out it was already under contract! They had one other Class A that we hadn't seen on the website because it was marked as a pending sale, but it wasn't actually pending. It was still considered a new RV, but it was a year old and nobody had bought it. We didn't want to buy new because of the immediate depreciation loss, but the dealership had already taken that hit. The layout was not exactly what we wanted, but we were to the point of not being picky. It was a very nice RV with some really cool features like an outdoor TV, automatic everything, and most importantly it was available and in our price range. We were ready to buy it, but we never buy anything without trying to negotiate a better deal, so we asked for a lower price and a washer/dryer combo put in the cabinet that was already setup for it. He said he would have to talk to his manager when they opened up on Monday and would let us know then.
Monday rolls around and we didn't hear anything. We texted a few times and no response. Finally, we got a call, and the news was devastating - he had misquoted the price to us and it was actually a lot more than he said. We were crushed! This meant that once again this RV was out of our price range. On Tuesday, we had a family meltdown. We all cried because we were out of time, and thought our dream wasn't going to happen. We had prayed a lot and so much had happened to tell us this was meant to be - the kids getting the virtual academy option, the house selling in 10 days, offloading the car, selling so much stuff to raise money towards buying the RV, etc. But now with one last step to go, it seemed like all we had done for was nothing. We were going to be homeless in just a few days and now we had to scramble to find somewhere to live. We went to bed and decided to deal with looking for a rental the next day.
Well out of nowhere on Wednesday August 19th, the sales guy called and said they would come down to the price he originally quoted us!! We could barely contain ourselves, but we still pushed back and asked they either come down a little more or they give us the washer/dryer combo. I told Katie we would probably get one of our two requests, and most likely it would be the w/d because the sales guy would want a higher sales price (higher commission). A few hours later, we had a deal. Unfortunately, we couldn't do our orientation until the next Friday (August 28th), which meant we would only have 6 days to pack up and leave. We had hoped to have a few weeks to drive it around and camp in it a night or two to get comfortable with it, but at that point, that wasn't going to be an option for us. We just had to roll with it and would learn all about it as we lived in it. We had our orientation for a few hours, and they showed us everything about it in what felt like 5 minutes. So much information that we would never remember, but Katie video recorded the whole thing for reference later. Before I knew it, we had signed all the papers and bought all the warranty protections we could - this was going to be our house after all.
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| How do I drive this thing? |
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| Old house meet new house |
The six days felt like two. I was off the entire week and we felt like it was non-stop all day every day. We didn't get to open up the RV and properly pack stuff into our cabinets, so we ended up having about 25 bins/baskets/boxes of stuff that we piled into the RV and a cargo trailer that Katie would tow behind the Pilot. We went over to sign our closing papers for the house on Wednesday instead of the originally scheduled day (Thursday September 3rd), because the attorney's office was the opposite direction of where we were heading and we didn't want to waste two hours of time on our first day. Thursday morning, we were still running around grabbing the last few things and cleaning the house so our new homeowners wouldn't come into their new house and be disappointed. Finally, about 11:00 we had the kids start getting their school stuff around and getting into the Pilot - nobody was allowed to ride with me in the RV yet - and they drove around to say goodbye to their friends in the neighborhood. We were out just in time, as she drove back past our house and the new owners were already in the driveway!
Our great adventure had started! Our first destination is Michigan, to get up there and see our family before it gets too cold.... if you have ever been to Michigan you know that October is likely to have freezing temps and snow. But this is going on forever, so the Michigan trip will have to be it's own post. Until next time...
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