We’re happy to meet you!

Ever been in a dollar store where you quickly realized how they can charge so much less for name-brand products than other retailers?  After your first look, you probably prided yourself on being so clever as to figure out their gimmick.

That, at least, was our experience, when it dawned on us – “smaller packages at smaller prices.”  If you haven’t shopped in chain stores like Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, 99-cents Only Stores or Dollar General lately, you probably don’t realize that many of them have large food sections filled with packages that look the same as in groceries with labels by companies you trust, but the packages are slightly smaller.  “That actually fits our full-timing RV lifestyle better in many ways, given our choice of rig, the campgrounds we visit, and the routes we travel.”

About four and a half years ago, Monique and I didn’t know anything about RVing; after all, we were tent campers, contemptuous of those monsters sharing our campgrounds.  Then, one day I returned home from work to be greeted by, “Whatdaya think about selling the house and traveling fulltime?”  Having just fought Southern California traffic for two hours to get home, I asked, “Can we afford to do that?”  She said yes, and I said yes, and thus it began … that quickly!

We took eight months to turn our lives around, from enjoying a comfortable suburban home to that scary moment when I pulled away from our house on our “shake-down cruise” to a state park seven miles away (and along the way I dropped off $100 to pay for the damage I did to a truck).

In the months ahead, you’ll hear more about us and our lifestyle, but briefly, after spending many hours at the Pomona RV Show in Southern California and returning home to talk about what we had learned, we decided that a travel trailer would give us the experience we were seeking.  The traveling is more important than the destination to us.  We prefer smaller campgrounds and love taking “pigtail” roads that may not be suitable for larger rigs.

Again, more on that later.

This year’s travels began in Key West — 5,000 miles later, we arrived in Southern California.  This Friday we will begin our climb northward into Washington State, where we will meet up with a caravan going to Alaska for 58 days.  It will be our first visit to the Land of the Midnight Sun and our first time RV traveling with others.  We wanted to start RVblogging now so you can also learn from, or at least appreciate, our experiences along the way.

We have lots of stories to tell and quite a few suggestions that could make your lives easier, like the dollar store item above.  And as the name implies, we have never gotten bored since our travels began.

See you on down the road!