A blog is born
Our retirement plans of travelling and living in a camper and moving across the country promoted a lot of interested, skeptical, and curious chatter among family, friends, and colleagues. For those that were cheering us on, I wanted to provide a way for them to follow along on our journey – and for the skeptics, may they be inspired. I also decided that journalling our travels in pictures and words would be a much more interesting keepsake for us. So began this blog.
2018 Rewind
To learn how to create the website, fine tune it, and use the tools prior to our “big move” I began our blog on a trip to Madeira in April 2018. The “trifecta” trip was a; ‘visit with Rachel before our move’, a ‘present to us for our retirements’, and ‘a congrats to Caitlin for graduating her BA’.
With our ‘departure from Ottawa’ date coming closer we were busy packing and getting ready for life on the road. This kept the bittersweet sadness at bay. Moving so far away from our girls and all our long-time friends, and retiring, and living a nomad life was going to be a big change. Thankfully Rachel had now moved back to Ottawa and was living with a loving partner Francis. Caitlin had also found a new beau and was working full-time in real estate law and Chris’ dad had passed away and Maggie was looking forward to joining us out west when we settled. Therefore we felt we had the “green light” to go.
We bought a 25″ travel trailer. Chris moved into it (with Miko) in July to get it ready for travel and to learn about the components.
Aug 31st, I retired and the very next day we left Ottawa to begin the next chapter of our lives. All of Sep. we travelled Ontario to BC through Canada. In Oct we stayed in an RV resort in Chilliwack, visited with Nik and Mike and changed over our documents and ID. The few belongings we had decided to hang onto had been shipped from Ottawa and were now in storage in BC until we decide to settle somewhere.
Oct 31 we headed south to begin our six months travel of the US. We initially travelled Hwy 101 southbound along the coast to California before moving inland to explore the deserts. Christmas and New Years we splurged on an RV resort because Caitlin came to join us for that week which was awesome.
In the first two months of travels we have already seen so many wonderful new places. We started in Washington, then Oregon, California, and Arizona. With no set plans for 2019 we look forward to more explorations.