by Curtis Carper

Created on: August 22, 2008   Last Updated: November 01, 2008

I never imagined giving up our successful careers, selling all our worldly possessions, and leaving our home town of the past 50 years with no set destination or plan of how we would survive. In 1995 that's exactly what my wife and I did.

It was time to go a different route. We had built a nice life for ourselves, but something was missing, Adventure. It had become a go to work, come home, go to bed and do it all over again in the morning existence. My wife had always dreamed of some how seeing Arizona. She subscribed to Arizona Highways for years, just to admire the beautiful red rock scenery .

I fondly remembered my years in the Coast Guard and longed to travel again seeing new vistas and doing new things. Our present careers were solid, I was a shop foreman for the Highway Dept. my wife worked for an Insurance Company. We could have easily been comfortable for the rest of our life. We had no savings, with car payments, house payments and assorted toy payments, we were living paycheck to paycheck. How could this crazy idea of becoming full time RV'ers ever work for us.

We knew it would require working as we were far to young for retirement or Social Security. Our motivation came from seeing far to many co-workers stay on the job until 65 and beyond just to get that extra $50 a month in retirement benefits. Sadly most of them would pass on in less then a years time once they finally made the decision to retire. I just wasn't willing to take the risk of missing out on this big adventure. We were in good health, the time to throw caution to the wind was now.

After a vacation trip to the Southwest we made the decision to go for it. Starting in March of 1995 we put the house on the market. It quickly sold giving us $35,000 in equity. The cars, and household belongs were sold off during the summer. We bought a new 36' Travel Trailer and a pickup truck to pull it. Staying at our present jobs until the first sign of snow to build up our cash kitty, we finally bid farewell to family and friends in November as the first snow of winter was falling around us.

With no debt, a brand new portable home, and about $15,000 in cash reserve we started our new life. For the first year we stayed in Arizona, most of the time in Tucson. It was wonderful, sending pictures at Thanksgiving of us in the swimming pool while winter settled in back home in Minnesota. We had no problem finding work, though in completely different fields from our past experience.

Eventually during year two we ended up in Denton Texas. It became our home for the next six years. As I still wanted to travel and see new places I took to over the road trucking for three of those years. By 2003 we were ready to head back to Minnesota for now.

Returning home has been good, though we still hope to head off into the unknown again sometime in the future. As we age, our health is changing and reliance on medical professional's may require us to stay planted here in Minnesota.

Looking back on our adventure we are ever so thankful that we took the plunge and did what we did. We continue to correspond with friends we made through those years. Friends we may have never made if we waited until reaching 65, as by then our health might not have been good enough to even consider such an adventure.

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