Woohoo! One year from today--July 1, 2016--we'll be full-timers!

We first started thinking about this in the spring of 2014, as Cheryl was recovering from one of five surgeries she had that year for early-stage breast cancer. We almost lost her during the first one due to an unexpected complication, and there's nothing like a near-death experience to make you reconsider what's really important in your life. That's when I found Howard and Linda's website and started reading. (Like Howard, I'm a researcher.) Back when I was 25, I had spent 6 weeks traveling the western US and Canada with a buddy in a Westfalia VW camper van, but that was the extent of my RV experience. Cheryl had never even been inside an RV.

A few weeks later, I said to Cheryl, "You're going to think I've completely gone off my rocker, but I have this crazy idea...." Much to my surprise, this city girl who never liked real camping (like, in a tent) was interested. And so we began to learn together.

We visited an RV show in Dallas that fall, so Cheryl could at least see what a modern RV looked like. Then in December 2014, armed mainly with what we knew from RV-Dreams.com, we rented a 32' Class C motorhome in California (that's it in my avatar photo), and spent 12 days traveling around the Bay Area, Yosemite National Park and Napa Valley. We had all kinds of problems with the unit--in particular, the furnace failed and the part wasn't available quickly over Christmas, so we made do with a space heater while the temperature was in the single digits outside. I thought, "well, that's going to be the end of this idea," but in fact we had a great time. We loved the slower pace and the flexibility to make up our plans as we went along. It was such a contrast to the crazy schedule we kept at home with work and other obligations.

Now we were getting serious. In April 2015, we rented another RV--this time, a much nicer 40' Class A--and drove it from Atlanta to Sevierville, TN for Howard and Linda's Spring Educational Rally. Cheryl's one remaining concern was, what would other RVers be like? Would we have anything in common with them? Well, the Rally put that concern to rest in a hurry! We fit right in, and made lots of new friends.

So we made the decision to start looking for rigs. We felt confident enough to buy used, and we settled on a couple of different Heartland Landmark floor plans. Much faster than we thought it would happen, we found a barely used 41' 2013 Heartland Landmark San Antonio fifth wheel trailer, just 200 miles away, near Conroe, TX, and after three consecutive weekend trips down there--one to see it for the first time, one for a professional inspection, and one to pick it up--it became ours last Saturday. The same seller also had a 2012 F-450 with 48K miles on it, and we made a great deal on the combo. The trip home--my first time to drive anything that big!--was uneventful, and we even managed to get that huge trailer backed into a 12' wide storage facility on just the third attempt. Here's a photo of our rig, at a rest stop near Corsicana on the way home:

We've set July 1, 2016 as our official on-the-road date. At that point, I'll be 55 and Cheryl will be 53. There are several work and volunteer obligations that lined up to make that the right date, as much as we might like to go sooner. Meanwhile, we'll take a few weekend trips in the rig, and we're planning a two-week shakedown trip in December. We haven't told very many people yet, as I won't give my notice at my job until early next year, but at least we wanted to share our excitement with the RV-Dreams family!

Thank you to Howard, Linda, and everyone else here for all the information you provide and the enthusiasm you share. We couldn't have gotten to this point without you!