Other Considerations, What-ifs, and More

Happy New Year everyone!  Now that 2016 is underway, we hope that yours is full of all good things!

What else did we consider in our list of pros and cons?

Being able to spend time with my sister is a big consideration, especially since we are now both retired.  I thought about this a lot and have come to the conclusion that having a home base or not will not determine  whether we can spend time together.  Also, it will not limit the amount of time.  Not having a house would mean I am more free to spend time with her because I will not have to be concerned about normal duties that are required in a stick built house.  Also, John planned for two beds in the trailer and during times when my sister comes to visit us, she and I would sleep in the trailer, and he would use the bed in the van, so we would all be fine.  At some times, we can stop and visit her, and at other times, we can plan to meet to catch up.  

Angel, our dog, is also a big consideration.  He is my baby and John’s buddy, and he loves to “go” and is happiest when he can be wherever we are.  He seems to understand the word go whether we say it or spell it.

My Special Angel

What about the “what-ifs”?

What if we tire of this life style?

Anything is possible, but hopefully, that will not happen for a long while.  If we get tired of this life style, we will need to look at options and decide what works best for us.  Some possibilities we have discussed are finding a place to rent or possibly staying in one location for a month at a time, and switching locations monthly according to where we want to be throughout the year.      

What if our health declines?  

If our health declines, we will have to make decisions on what is best at that time.  When signing up for Medicare and choosing our supplement insurance, we took care to ask many questions.  We did not want the places we travel to be limited by our coverage.  In our research, we found there were many plans, but some require being in a network that only covers a small territory, and that would limit our travels.

More decisions…

Yes, more decisions had to be made on what we would take with us, what to do with things we kept, and how to get rid of everything else, including the house.  Would we put anything in storage?  It made sense for us to put some things in storage, as that would allow us to keep things we were not ready to part with and/or things that we did not have room to take with us at this time.

The list of needs and wants started with me wanting to take my spinet piano.  My mom and dad had bought it for me 50 years ago when I learned to play, and I am not ready to part with it.  Putting it in storage was not an option, so John looked at ways we would be able to take it with us.  That was one of the reasons for utilizing our trailer with the toy-hauler type of drop-down rear door and side door.  As you can imagine, there were other things that we wanted to take and still other things that we felt we needed.  That list, as we came closer to the day to leave, changed so many times.  Honestly, I cannot begin to remember what that list started out with in the beginning, other than it was a place to start.  The important things were the items that made it to the end when we would finally leave.

Since John was custom designing the trailer, he began to make a list of the things we would take, including their size and weight.  This would help him to balance the weight as he did the trailer layout.  We could only haul so much weight, and it would have to be balanced.  Anything else would have to go into the van or a storage space.  It also helped to know the size of items going to storage, so we would have ample space and could manage the layout to make it easier to get to things as needed.

In the next post, we will have six wheels down and rollin’.  If you want to follow our adventures and be notified of new posts, you can subscribe by email or one of three other methods.  Your comments are welcome.