Category: Not Quite What We’d Planned

5 years in: RV there yet?

Still no.

We were originally thinking it would be a one-year thing. Maybe two? We certainly didn’t imagine it would be a two-RV thing. But we were quite happily wrong, and we’ve now got enough events planned for Year 5 that there’s no way we’re giving this up yet! we’re now almost 3/4 through a year in which almost every planned event has been cancelled, so we’ve had to punt. A lot. And we’re too skittish at the moment to put much of anything on the calendar for Year 6.

We are grateful that we’ve managed to see as many friends and family members as we have — in very small groups, and mostly outdoors — in 2020. But the coronavirus pandemic has caused an indefinite delay on our biggest plan for this year, which was to begin an annual vacation tradition with both sons and their girlfriends. Sigh. Maybe next year.

We did get bonus time with one set of ’em, and yes, it now seems ridiculous that I was worried when Austin/Travis County was at 90 confirmed cases. They have since surpassed 22,000.

So to celebrate our nomad-versary, I shall regale you with our Amusing Tally of Miscellaneous Statistics, updated for 2020. 

In four five years, we’ve used, purchased, worn through, or replaced for any number of reasons ranging from the mundane, to the catastrophic, to just not getting the right thing the first time around (or second, or third…):

Our three configurations, in chronological order
BFT1 + RV1 (2014-2017)
BFT2 + RV1 (2017-2018)
BFT2 + RV2 (2018-present)

We’ve also held memberships/accounts with:

  • 3 RV insurance companies
  • 3 cellular service providers
  • 2 RV owners’ clubs
  • 4 RV travel/social organizations
  • 2 mail forwarding services
About a year ago, we switched from a UPS Store mailbox we’d already owned in San Antonio,
to the Escapees RV Club’s Mail Forwarding Service.
And when we were in Livingston, TX, earlier this year, we were able to pick up our mail at the headquarters building, in person.

And in addition, we’ve experienced: 

1st new workamping job:
Co-managing one of Pumpkin Station’s farm locations in the San Diego area
2nd new workamping job:
Volunteering at the Escapees CARE Center in Livingston, TX
Our preferred types of workamping jobs offer visible results.
Here’s how & why we use these opportunities to supplement Tim’s retirement pension.

I’ll spare you a full reprint of our prior annual reviews, which included answers to the 13 Questions We Hear All The Time, but I’ll update the three two that need it.

How many states have you visited in the RV, I mean like, for more than just a rest stop?

By my count, 37 39: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

My criteria for counting a state as visited are a bit fluid, which I know will drive some people a little nuts. Did we stay overnight? Long enough to do the weekly laundry? Go on a hike or visit a national park? All of those are valid to me. Just driving through on the way to elsewhere, with a potty break at a gas station? Not so much — otherwise, we’d have counted Mississippi about 8 times by now, instead of zero.

And the RV has to have stayed inside the state border too, not just us. Otherwise, we’d have been able to add Hawaii and Rhode Island last year.

Map created at amcharts.com

What’s next? (entire section updated)

After another week here in Montana, where we are happy with lower population density and temperatures than we were enduring in Texas, we’re going to spend some time in Wyoming and Colorado as we make our way back to Texas in September.

It wasn’t our original plan to go back this fall (am I the only one detecting a theme here?) but we’ve been able to schedule some non-critical yet important medical and dental appointments that were impossible to nail down when we were there in June/July.

So it’ll be San Antonio from mid-September until Halloween or so, and the course of the pandemic will determine where — or if — we go after that.

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter for between-blogging updates.

So that’s it for the end of Year 5.
The time for smiling at you from behind our masks will eventually end…
… and then we can smile at you like this, looking back, having made it through.
(Photo: D. Goldstein)

Other updates: We started full-timing in August of 2015, but I didn’t think to do an annual review until the end of 2016, and it was just a listing on Facebook of places we’d visited. After that, I started using a quarterly format for the where-we’ve-beens and what-we’ve-dones.

WheRVe we been? Our (lack of) travels, 2nd quarter 2020

I thought I’d be tapping out this quarterly update from the UP, at a rustic campground in Marquette, where we’d planned to spend this week with friends.

But… pandemic pause.

Every event we’d registered for between July and September, between Michigan and Washington, was canceled.

So we’re still in Texas, waiting to tie up a few loose ends, and trying to figure out what’s next.

I feel a few of you nodding your heads and smirking in solidarity, and I appreciate that we’re not alone in having our plans change, and change, and change again during this pandemic.

We are thankful that for us this endurance test has so far been only inconvenient and frustrating, not devastating.

We didn’t lose jobs, we didn’t watch the jobs we did have become an unrecognizable marathon of awkward teleconferences, and we didn’t have to monitor our children’s online schooling.

Hell, we didn’t even have to explain the pandemic to our kids. Every day. In a hundred different ways. To infinity. Some of you did, and probably still are, and you deserve all the top shelf margaritas.

And we’ve remained virus-free, as have our family members.

Those are all very precious gifts.

So now that all the gratitude’s been typed out loud, here’s my briefest quarterly update ever.

We went three places.
T.H.R.E.E.
From Kerrville, to Livingston, to San Antonio, which was less than 600 RV travel miles.
Last quarter? 3,236.

Here’s another telling image for ya. Below is a screen cap of my notes for our quarterly travels, recording each place we slept and approximate miles traveled.
1st quarter 2020: 17 stops
2nd quarter 2020: just the 3
For the past year, we’ve made between 11 and 18 stops per quarter. Ack.

April: We were supposed to be in San Antonio for all our routine annual medical and dental appointments, but every single one was canceled or switched to a phone consult (by our providers, not us), so we stayed on as camp hosts at Kerrville-Schreiner Park for a few more weeks — our third spring season there.

It’s pretty.

May: We were exactly where we were supposed to be! We’d signed up in July of 2019 to spend the month of May 2020 volunteering at Escapees CARE, a unique respite facility for RV’ers in Livingston, TX. We were worried that the pandemic quarantine would preclude our being able to serve, but we got the all-clear, and that resulted in one of the most gratifying workamping gigs we’ve ever experienced. Here’s where you’ll find my words and pics.

Unquantifiable, the rewards of devoting our time and energy to the people of CARE.
We’ll do it again.

June: We were supposed to be checking some middle states off our travel map as we made our way to a few scheduled stops in MI and WI, but instead, we re-booked almost all the appointments we’d had to skip (see April), and came back to our home base of San Antonio. It’s dog breath hot, and the city’s become a COVID-19 quagmire, but we got the most important pokes, prods, and scans done before things started shutting down again, and we’ve been able to see family and friends in small groups — good medicine, both.

We haven’t really gone out much since we’ve been in San Antonio,
so I don’t have a lot of photos from the month of June.
But we’ve been doing more outdoor cooking than usual,
so here. Here’s a picture of our dutch oven cobbler.

Where to next: We’ll probably try making our way north, to spend some time cooling off in the mountains of CO, MT, WY and/or UT. Following each state’s rules for COVID-19 prevention is a priority, and we will take great care to make sure we travel safely. Or we might just throw our hands in the air and forget about it, and give in to the universe’s persistent nagging that this summer we should probably just stay put. You’ll find out when I blog about this quarter in October.

Or you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter for updates as we go (or don’t).

Please stay well, y’all. Please.

Here’s hoping for this view from the passenger side, soon.

We started full-timing in August of 2015, but I didn’t think to do an annual review until the end of 2016, and it was just a listing on Facebook of places we’d visited. After that, I started using a quarterly format.