Welcome to Patti and Wayne’s Big Adventure

I have never tried anything like this before, keeping an on-line journal, or a journal of any kind.  I’m not sure what we do is really all that interesting.  Wayne and I have spent the last 35 years riding our off road motorcycles and camping around the Western States.  So do most of our friends.  You all know what it is like.  But when we made the decision to go full time in our RV, friends and family suggested we start a blog as a way, other than Facebook, for them to follow us around, and possibly join up and ride.  So here goes nothing!!

They say that today is the first day in the rest of your life.  For us, this is really true.  Wayne and I have made some major changes in our life.  Changes that many would find very difficult to do.  We sold our home in Salt Lake City, had the mother of all garage sales, and donated all the rest to charity.  We sold furniture and other stuff on line and to neighbors and friends.  What we were left with filled a 26’ rental truck.  I admit a lot of it was Wayne’s stuff; air compressor, bike lift and tool boxes.  These went to live with our daughter Becca and Wayne’s brother Rick.   We have made a commitment to full time in our motorhome for 5 years.  As one of friends pointed out, we are truly homeless, in a good way!

This all started when we were young.  We realized that although we still had 20 years until I could retire, that time would go by quickly, so we started talking about our ’20 year plan’.  Yes we actually called it that.  We decided that we really wanted to travel and talk turned to full time rv’ing.  Over the years the plan evolved, but somewhere about 5 years before retirement, we panicked.  What would we do with those items that had been in the family for years such as furniture and photos?  And most important to Wayne, what would we do with all his tools?  Full timing was taken out of what was then the 5 year plan.

In 2007 I transferred to Salt Lake City to finish the last 3 years of my postal career.  It was easy emotionally to sell the Everett house, and we downsized a little bit for the move, dumping things that we had collected.  You know the stuff, the things you keep because some day you might need them.  We moved to Salt Lake and found a house that we loved and a yard that Wayne spent the next 3 years working his butt off developing into a beautiful place to spend our time.

But in October 2010 when I retired, we started traveling in our motorhome.  We would spend the winters in Arizona and the summers in Idaho.  We went home to Washington for the holidays, Thanksgiving through New Year‘s, and spent June there with our mothers.  We went to Utah only to make sure that the house was ok and that the yard was surviving.  When John Purdy called it a very expensive storage unit, he was right. In 2011 we spent 16 weeks total in Salt Lake.  We only went home for a week or two here and there.  We were called the best non-neighbors a person could have by one neighbor.  So during the winter of 2012 were talked a lot about what we really wanted to do, and how we could accomplish it.  So in April we put the house on the market and decided what we really wanted to store and what we could live without.

So here we are, the house is sold, the important stuff is stashed with family and we are ready to start our new adventure.  I thought we would post a couple of times a month on Facebook to keep people up on where we are, but a number of our friends suggested we start a blog.  Our friend Ken does it for his motorcycle travels; he thought we should post our travels too.  I’m willing to try; I just hope I can be as consistent as he has been.  Check back in and see if I can pull this off!!