I have no idea why anyone would be interested in us or what we are doing but the heading said “Introduce Yourself!”.

We are Deborah and Gerald Dollar. We’ve lived in the Seattle area since 1980 when we moved from New Orleans, La. My education is in biology but I worked in medical sales for 28 years. Deborah has a degree in early childhood education and owned a preschool and daycare until deteriorating health forced her to look for less physically demanding work in 2005. As you might gather from my user name and avatar I am an avid scuba diver.I have been a divemaster since 1997 and and an instructor since 2002.

To get on with the story, I quit work in 2008 at the age of 60. You will note that I quit work, I did not retire. Retirement requires planning, resources and thought. My employer of 23 years sold the division I worked for and sold me with it. The new company was obviously just using the old higher paid employees to help them with their transition and treated us miserably. I got sick of it and walked away.

Fortunately, I had worked for my previous employer for 23 years and had a small pension, retiree health insurance, a 401 K and an employed wife. I thought I would go to work part time at a low pressure job and bring in a little supplemental income. However it was winter in Seattle and every morning I would get up, put on my robe and fuzzy slippers, and watch the weather and traffic reports. It didn’t take long to figure out that sitting there, watching the tube and drinking coffee beat going out in the rain and traffic to go to work.

Life was good. I did a little volunteer work, taught a few scuba classes, rode my bike and went scuba diving whenever the mood struck me. We quickly found out that, while our income went down, our expenses went down even more. We were able to travel often and were enjoying life thourghly. The only fly in the ointment was that we had not sold our home in 2007 when the market was hot and multiple offers were common. Well, that and 180 days of overcast skies, almost constant drizzle and winter sunsets at 4:30 PM.

In 2009 Deborah had a health crisis that necessitated her missing work. Today it seems if you get sick you get unemployed fairly quickly. This was the second job she has lost due to health issues and we decided that she was probably unemployable. The doctors and social security agreed with our assessment so in April of 2009 we both became permanently unemployed, me by choice, her due to disability.

At this point our house became an albatross. We could not sell with all of the repos on the market but we really did not need all that space and we wanted to be free to travel. Finally in 2010 we bought a tow vehicle and a popup trailer. We also talked our youngest daughter into moving back home and watching the house as well as paying for utilities when we are not home. We now spend winters in Virginia, where we have another daughter, and summers in Seattle. We travel back and forth towing our little popup.

This year we couldn’t leave Seattle until the end of October and we wanted to be in Virginia by Thanksgiving so we only had about three weeks on the road.Our preference however, is to wander nearly aimlessly taking 6-12 weeks to make the transition. Last spring we traveled 5000 miles and passed through 14 states on our trip from Virginia to Seattle.

Right now we are waiting out the housing market. As soon as we can sell our house we intend to purchase something a little larger than a popup and hit the road full time. In the meantime I read RV Dreams and plan.Now, since I cannot imagine anything I can add that would be helpful to anyone I will return to lurk mode.