It’s Time!

“I just can’t live like this any longer!”  My husband and I looked at each other and then took a good look at our lives again…

​Where do we start?  How do we start??  We were tired of working to get by, and even then, just getting by… working hard to pay someone else’s mortgage, aka rent…  We knew that was quite normal in this life, but I think we were just READY TO REBEL!  🙂  Sometimes one has to hit bottom before he can start the climb up…

​​Thus began our 2017, and the biggest, and most outrageous change we have ever gotten ourselves into!

​When I was a little girl, my cousins, Claudette and Lucille, had a Barbie Winnebago, and I was IN LOVE!! For years, I fantasized that one day my Prince and I, (with our mini princes and princesses), would travel the globe in our big, beautiful RV!  (I MAY be a hopeless romantic…) And in those years, we have visited many an RV store, young and dreamy again — that is until the price tags took the breath out of our idea, like a swift kick to the gonads!   We have travelled the Continent, and so very often wished that we had  our motorhome – all those rented hotel rooms, worries about leaving our dogs behind, concerns about food issues (since I have Celiac Disease)… 

​On one of our phone calls from our youngest daughter, she mentioned that she saw a used school bus for sale in Quebec…dirt cheap! Why not build our own tiny home inside, and travel like our hearts desired?! We chuckled, and kept RV shopping, but not for much longer! Some research later – WHY NOT!?  I mean, we were kind of used to being looked upon as hippy-ish 😉 We had homeschooled our daughters, tried to eat natural foods, and moved 14 times in 25 years.  Like Gypsies, we just needed our caravan!

​The actual next step we made was to have a family meeting —  we wanted our daughters and sons-in-law to give their input and opinions and, yes, we cared about embarrassing them… After they all heartily gave us their love and support (our kids are  so cool!), we dropped the bomb, I mean idea, on our parents 🙂  We are so thankful to have a loving and supportive family!  Family means the world to us!

​So, we started the ball rolling. We gave our notice of vacancy, advertised almost everything we owned was for sale, and began the slightly painful task of minimizing… Ha! “Minimizing” – such a tidy and simple word for tearing down years of what one puts together to make one’s perfect space of comfort for one’s ideal life… It definitely is a more difficult process than the name suggests…

I had a few items of furniture that I was determined to keep and build right into our home on wheels: our queen size bed,  the exact style of which I had dreamed of since girlhood, complete with swirly metal head and foot board; our solid wood corner cabinet and book shelf that I fell in love with and purchased when our children were just babies; and our beautiful antique dining room table at which we fellowshiped many times with family and friends.  There were moments when Fern would say silly man-things such as, “This will not all fit!” Hahahahaha!

But alas, my husband, such an amazingly patient man, made to-scale paper cut-outs of furniture and appliances and such, and we dreamily measured out our floor plan. What a fun and exciting time this will be!! We are young and have something to aspire towards again!