January 2013: Starting at the Beginning

Well the beginning would actually have been quite a few years ago when I started nagging Mike about taking three months off work. I tried to make it sound like a good deal “We don’t have to fully retire, just three months is all I ask” whine, whine. I was testing the principal of water dripping on a stone. I had no specific plans for the three months. The fact that we would spend it travelling somewhere in the world was a given. How and where hadn’t been discussed.

In January 2013 we went to the RV show in Toronto. We were extremely impressed with how the entry prices of very nice Class A motorhomes had come down considerably since we had last looked. I had never really been in favour of purchasing a motorhome while we are still working full time.  I didn’t think that we could get anywhere that I would want to go, travel around slowly for a couple of weeks and then get back home in one short vacation. It would also mean giving up our travel around the world. We had already decided to rent an RV in Latvia and travel around the Baltics later in 2013. We had been in New Zealand for the second time in an RV just a few months previously. Owning our own RV and only being able to go a few hundred miles from home as our major annual vacation was not my idea of fun.

About two months later I overheard Mike was speaking to a friend. Mike said that he and I would probably be taking three months off next year (2014) to travel around North America in an RV. I couldn’t believe that I heard him say this to someone else before me! My choice would have been travelling around Europe but if North America was what it took to be able to spend three months with my husband after being married for 37 years then I was all for it.

That was the beginning of us looking for a relatively large motor home to rent for three months but I will save that for another day.