What do you want your life to look like?

This is my favorite question to ask clients. We can’t know what we are working towards if we don’t know the destination. Of course, the journey is part of the fun, but we do need to know where we are aiming. I have always made travel a priority in my life. No matter how little money I had in my travel budget I made something happen. Way back in 2012 my husband, daughter and I were enjoying lunch out during a school break. I reiterated how much I wanted to travel cross country and had wanted to for a long time. I don’t know what I said differently that time, but my husband looked at me and said “Let’s do it then.”

We spent the next months scouring the internet for information on camper vans. When I was little, my brother went cross country in a van he had outfitted as a camper and so I always envisioned cross country travel in a camper van. In the Spring of 2013, we found a Sportsmobile for sale two hours away that was in our price range and looked like a good fit. We saw, we liked, we bought it. We did a few “shakedown cruises” as my Dad used to call them. There wasn’t much to tweak but we got used to how the pop top worked and got the kitchen outfitted.

In 2014, we took 3 weeks and went out west via Duluth Minnesota. My husband was able to spend the first week seeing clients which allowed him to expense mileage and paid our gas bill and paid our hotel lodgings. It was a win for his business too because these clients were not near major airports, so they didn’t get many visits. Duluth was a stop because we have friends there and it sounded like a cool place to visit. Our daughter got sick within 24 hours of leaving home. Strep throat when you are stuck in a van or days on end is not fun. Unfortunately, she gave it to her dad and to a lesser extent me. We pushed on with our trip and made the best of it. Everything improved greatly once we all got better. The biggest mistake I made with that trip was putting too many miles into consequent days. 500 miles a day is a lot of driving 3 days in a row. We had a timeline because we wanted to go to the Grand Canyon and reservations are a must in the summer. Even with all the driving, it was a trip of fantastic memories.

The next year, we sold the van and bought a vacation home. But we always knew we wanted to head out on the road again when we retired. This time with no timeline.

What do we want retirement to look like? Roadtrips galore! Visits to see family on the West coast and Southwest. Visits to friends we don’t get to see because of distance. A trip to the Pacific Northwest is a long-time bucket list item. All these retirement plans start with research. I found a listing for the “biggest RV show in America” in Hershey PA (largestrvshow.com) and knew we needed to make it a road trip. We planned our summer vacation around the show which happens yearly during the second week of September. Between the “33 football fields” of RVs and the seminars and vendor booths we learned so much. We found a few class Bs and a class C we liked. We spent quite a bit of time chatting with the guys from Sequoia Salt who custom build camper vans. We learned all about ways to find free boondocking camping and dispersed camping. We got inspired by a couple who have been fulltime RVers for 12 years. If you go to the show, I recommend attending on weekdays and 2 days is necessary to see everything and not be burnt out.

We will spend the winter doing research and sketching out our dream camper van. Who knows what we will end up with at the end of our research. That’s the fun of it. But most importantly, we know what we are moving towards. A retirement filled with road trips! May you take the time to chart your own course and always have fun with it!