Adventures in RVing, vol. 2

Oh, hello there! We’re not really lost in the wilds somewhere; we’re just spending the summer traveling back and forth between the Western Slope and the Front Range. This is only a 300-mile commute but it’s so much more adventurous than it sounds!

Monarch Pass 01 sml

If you drive between the Western Slope and the Front Range you must cross the Continental Divide (whether you want to or not). On this trip, we chose Monarch Pass.

Cattle Drive 01 sml

Sometimes you get caught in a cattle drive. Livestock always have right-of-way.

Shady Creek 01 sml

Our house (on the left) is tiny compared to some of the big rigs we’ve seen!

Flair 02 sml

Learning to back N into tight spots is one of my newly acquired skills.

Hot Seat 01 sml

N can drive the RV and take photos. Don’t try this at home, kids.

IMG_20180609_074639898[1]

Apparently I can drive and take photos, too. Isn’t Colorado pretty?

njb_5245.jpg

In case you’re wondering, wooden clothespins do not solve vapor lock. We’re hoping a new fuel pump will.

 

RV book club

Pretty much every RV we’ve encountered on our travels thus far has had a television, and most carry a satellite dish. We’ve seen some TVs on the big rigs that would cover an entire wall in our tiny home, if we could even get the thing through the door. For us, though, no TV. And no Netflix, either, because even though we have a device on which to watch, most parks don’t have Internet service strong enough to support streaming. (Serious RVers also carry Internet boosters.) So we read, and that’s not intended as a complaint.

RV Books 02 sml

A selection of reading material at an RV park.

We packed an eclectic selection of books, of course, before throwing everything else into boxes and jamming it all into a rented storage unit. We happened to be camped at the fairgrounds when our local county library held their semi-annual book sale there, so we grabbed a few then, too. And most every park we’ve stayed at has had a book exchange, typically located near the laundry facilities. I’ll confess that most of the books at the RV parks are not to my taste – they lean heavily towards bodice-rippers, legal thrillers and Stuart Woods – but truly, I’m happy when anyone is reading actual paper books and I am not passing any judgment on these. And there are occasionally diamonds in the rough. So what are we reading these days on the RV?

Continue reading

Downsizing

An announcement: we’re on the road again. Four weeks ago, we sold our house. Three weeks ago, we bought a vintage (“vintage” is an official rebranding of just plain “old”) Class A motorhome. Two weeks ago, we moved out of our house into our RV, and now we’re full-timers.

68th-01-sml.jpg

Above: our first home. Below: our second home. 

Flair 03 sml.jpg

Please forward our mail to this address. Thank you.

Selling our first house wasn’t easy, by any stretch. People do this all the time, yet for us it seemed a monumental task. We disliked every part of the process, from working with real estate agents to staging the home (goodbye, cherished family photos!) to disappearing on command during showings and open houses to negotiating complicated repair and inspection requests. Signing the papers at closing was painfully bittersweet. Ultimately, though, both the worst and the best part of the entire tedious process turned out to be the sorting, the culling, and the discarding.

Continue reading