Fulltiming Road Runners

Tomorrow morning (Thursday )way early we are leaving for Sturgis South Dakota to get our Drivers license so we will become official residents of South Dakota. We are setting up a residential address with a Mail forwarding company that will send our mail to us wherever we are either on a schedule or at our request. They are also getting our tags and permits on the truck and trailer, which they will send to us as soon as the paperwork is done. It sure is nice to have someone else do the legwork on this for us. All we have to do in person so far is go to the closest town in South Dakota that does Drivers licenses and go get ours. The Sturgis office is is the closest to us and it is only open on Fridays. Judy says she thinks we can get there in about 14 hours so. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day. No trailer on this trip, we will be using a motel. Go get our licenses on Friday morning then head on back to Salt Lake, another long day.

(Judy’s note)
Yayyyyyyyyyyyy — a motel. With a little luck I’ll get to take a real BATH!
I use DeLorme Street Atlas to map our trips and figure out time, gas stops, etc.  For this trip it says 12.5 hours averaging 60 - 65 mph.  I think an extra 1-1/2 hours for gas stop, food, and a rest period or two for Thom is reasonable.

well we just started this here blog thing so we gonna cheat and not cover our first year of living in the trailer, but I will give a little info on what happened before. This post might wind up being edited a lot as time goes by but the following posts will be pretty much left as entered.

Last July our Mobile suits 36TK3 was delivered to the dealer and we found that the Factory rep had changed our order without discussing it with us after we went round and round with her over stuff the owner of Double tree said they would do and she decided they would not (we won that battle pretty much). The dealer was pretty miffed as we were and set out to make everything they could right as to the way it was ordered. I think the dealer did a pretty good job of making things right. There were a few things they could not change and we decided to accept it as it was instead of refusing it and starting over again. This would have cost us another three to four months to get the trailer and we did not have the time to wait for it.

We moved into the trailer in August and lived on the dealers lot for a couple weeks while some things were being finished, and started with the warranty list because stuff happens and they got those things repaired quickly enough.

We then moved to our already rented site and spent the next year ( up to now) living there. The only times we moved the trailer was to go back and forth to the dealers to get some warranty repair things done.  We sometimes spent over a week on their lot getting things repaired, we went back and forth about six times during the year.  The only other move was to Quartzite Arizona for a couple weeks during the Christmas-new years holidays.

So that is the first year short version.

Introduction (August 28, 2007)

About a year ago I decided that a blog would be a good way for family and friends to be able to keep track of us and see what we are up to, (the censored version).  It will also serve as a way to help me remember (I am pretty much brain dead in the memory department) and keep track of the what, when, where an maybe even the why of our adventures.  MY plan is to write using word because I am not well known for spelling then pasting it into the blog.  I would expect and hope that My Wife Judy, (the holder of all that matters) will find time to add her thoughts and views here as well when she has time.

Now about the blog

The blog is a diary of sorts that will be about the things that are taking place in and around the lives of Thom and Judy who are in the process of beginning a period of fulltime RV’ng that has a start date and may just go on until we are done with life and have moved on.

Because it takes me forever to learn and figure out how to put these things together I depend on Judy (faithful wife of about 8 years and fearless companion) to set it up for me and show me how to use it and with a little luck I will be able to figure out how it works with time and need to lean on her less and less so she can do her thing, But for now she be the technical support.

Background

( to be edited as time goes by)

I have been planning on retiring early for years ( since around 1992) and have been planning and working towards that goal ever since. The actual Plan has been evolving and changing ever since. I guess the only common thread has been that it had to involve living in an RV and traveling around some. The really neat thing is that Judy wants to do the same basic things that I want to so it should be easy to keep both of us reasonably happy with the path we are taking.  Am I lucky or what.

Preparation

We owned ( or were buying) a really nice quite large home in West Jordon

Utah (Insert link if its available). Knowing that it was not financially feasible to keep it and still be able to hit the road we got rid of most of our stuff and sold the house. Then moved into an apartment for about a year to continue down sizing and get a fifth wheel trailer ordered. We had already done the leg work and had decided on the brand, size, options and special order stuff and were waiting for the time frame to fit and begin the adventure. We ordered the trailer and it was delivered in August of 2006. After the modification’s and reworking was completed at the dealers. We moved in (while it was on the dealers lot to test and get the initial repair work done ) We had already rented a long term site at the local KOA in

Salt Lake City Utah. The plan was to live there for about a year in the trailer so we could finish getting the things we thought we would need as well as let the things that would fail normally, fail, and get them fixed before we hit the road. We also needed to figure out how to use and maintain some of the stuff. This process caused me to get rid of some of the things I thought we had to have as well as replace some things with similar and usually smaller versions of similar things. Then there was the apparent need to get more things to help make the adventure a bit easier and more comfortable for us. The preparation was a long drawn out, full of bumps in the road, process that I may decide to elaborate on more fully later either in this spot or within the blog later, who knows.

Adventure Start Date

The hitting the road date was set up to be around September 15. I retired early from Salt Lake Community College on June 30 2007 and had planned to work part time there until September 14.  Judy has set up to quit working for Xpedx on the same day to give us a few days to get things packed up and leave dear old Salt Lake on or before September 20 ( our rent for our site is up on that day and who wants to spend more on rent than we need to).