The rest of the story - TLE's Perspective chapter two

The day we brought her home

We bought have the "final" coach for going on the road a 1982 Classic Newell.  

Now what?  Can I live within the confines of a 36", no-slide motor coach?  More discussions!  At this point Clarke had been reading a number of blogs written by different types of full and part-time RVers.  The blogs were written by travelers from many walks of life -- retired and not working, young and old working on the road, part-time and full time RVers.  This  was a great help to us, enabling us to see different sides of RV travel from people who stayed in RV parks all the time to the boon-dockers.  Again, many hours were spent around the fire talking about others experiences and how this would help us get on the road. We knew that we wanted to stay in parks sometimes, but that we didn't want to have to rely on being plugged in all the time. We discussed staying in Walmart and other businesses parking lots. Could I do this?  I wouldn't know for sure until we got on the road.  

On the Columbia sailboat in Catalina Island back in late 90's

Next up...simplify our current life.  Could we sell the house before we started out? Yes if we had done it right away but we weren't ready to retire yet and by 2008 there was no way we could make any money on a sale.  Ok, move on...rent the house out.  Talking with our kids we found out that a couple of them would rent the house with some friends.  (Note, we do have a signed lease which includes the care of the two cats we left behind.) Perfect!  We started to clean out our "stuff".  How come we still had so much stuff?  What were we going to do with everything that was in our rafters?  Have some yard sales.  Anything the kids didn't want went into yard sales.  Well, some stuff went into storage.  This process was much more complicated, but when I look back on it I find that the snapshots tell it all.  We hashed out what we thought we wanted and what we felt we could do without.  In the end I kept telling myself I couldn't put 1800 sq ft of "stuff" into 280 sq ft.  You notice I keep using the word stuff.  I finally realized that I could anchor myself with things, or let go to "sail" around the country. 

Our Tioga - camping at the dunes with the kids

Step 2, could Clarke and I live in the coach and not kill ourselves or each other?  We set out to see.  Clarke had found Jurupa County Park and we went to check it out.  Our 
first thoughts were moving every two weeks between a couple of county parks, but after talking to a park volunteer we decided to see if we could be camp hosts. We put in our applications and weren't hopeful, but Dayna, the ranger called us within a week and said she had an opening for hosts that would be in charge of the new cabins they had just installed.  We would clean them and check in and out campers.  Cool..we moved into the park and set up.  There were may things we learned over the next 12 months, but and the biggest was we could live with each other in a small space.  After the first few issues of lost items (you know what I mean!) we came up with a sanity-saver.  THE NEWELL ELF!  Our coach is a classic 1982 Newell, so we decided that since lost items usually turned up again that there had to be a Newell Elf that was taking and returning items.  This was a great stress reliever.  We also quickly learned the Newell Shuffle.  I'm here, you need to be....shuffle, shuffle, maybe a twirl or two.  Now we are ready to go on the road.  

Rancho Jurupa Regional park where we "hosted" for a year

Not quite....