The Great Escape

This week brought a significant change to our lives in the form of my retirement! After more years of working in a demanding and stressful profession than I care to admit, the time was right to take a leap of faith and move on.

We’ve been planning life in retirement for several years now and knew that we wanted to do more traveling both throughout the US and abroad. There is quite a bucket list.

We had a good think and many conversations about how we wanted to travel. Because I feel the need to discuss everything to death. Always. Poor Theo. Like so many of our contemporaries, we were drawn to the idea of RVing, but not in a bus-sized vehicle that would fit an entire rock band, but rather something we could pull with an SUV. Portable, flexible…like a hotel room on wheels that could go anywhere we wanted. And with an inside loo…that was a real necessity for me!

Have you any idea how many of these things exist? We researched and visited and kept narrowing our choices until we settled on a 19′ Escape travel trailer. These are not sold at dealers, but only from the manufacturer in British Columbia. We visited with an owner locally who was kind enough to let us see their trailer and pepper them with all our questions. We also visited the manufacturer last fall to have a very close look and, well, pepper them with questions. See the note above about my tendency to over think.

Now all the decisions are made, money has been exchanged, and our new little trailer is waiting for us to pick him up!

A retirement celebration along with a road trip to collect the trailer were turned into a massive excursion we have dubbed “The Great Escape.” Starting in Missouri, we are headed west with stops in Colorado, Nevada, and California; then up the coast to Seattle and BC. After we pick up the trailer, we are headed back through Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nebraska. I will spare you a discussion of the over thinking and spreadsheeting involved to plan this trip. You can thank me later.

Everything needed for a month-long trip and the essentials for our trailer were crammed into our SUV (thanks to Theo’s amazing packing skills) and off we go!