The Idea

We'd been unsettled for a while and so decided to sell the house with a view to moving away from the Bay Area. We'd looked at buying a cabin rental business in North Carolina but ultimately decided the one we'd found was a lot of money based on the fact that we weren't completely sure North Carolina was where we wanted to be. However, the idea had stuck with us so we decided to just make the move.

We put the house on the market with Tracey as the realtor as she'd qualified earlier in the year. Unfortunately, the timing wasn't great as we'd previously booked a vacation in Hawaii. We got lots of interest in the house - everyone who came round loved it, but no offers. I think the problem was that the market was unsettled. There were lots of buyers, but everyone was looking for a deal, so weren't willing to pay full price and they knew that there was no way we were going to let ours go as it was obvious we'd put a lot of money into it. Believe me, it did look lovely. To get it ready for selling, we'd had the roof re-done (it needed it badly), the rest of the marble flooring put down in the spare bedroom and master bathroom (we'd already bought the tile when we did the lounge so it seemed silly to not use it), and a granite top and new center hob and extractor for the kitchen. The place looked like new!

We went off to Hawaii and decided while we were there that if it didn't sell by the time we came back (we'd left a friend of ours who's a realtor in charge), that we would take it off the market and rent it out like we had done with our first house (Noonwood). We had a wonderful holiday and came back to the house still unsold. In a way we were glad as we all loved it so much it was hard to bring ourselves to sell. If we could rent it and still get to keep it, that would be ideal.

We contacted our old agent Bob Stadler who'd rented Noonwood for us and we were very pleased with. Within no time, he had a renter in mind who was interested in the house and furniture. Perfect, as this meant less we'd have less stuff to cart about with us. Then I remember clearly one night in the hot tub (all our best ideas happen in the hot tub). The conversation went a little like this.

"You know we talked about moving?" I said to Tracey.

"Yes" she replied, knowing this was going somewhere, but not sure where.

"Are you set on North Carolina".

"Well, not really. Why?" she replied.

"You know that we'd talked about buying an RV when we retired. And that my job kind of sucks, but the main thing about it is that I'm home office based and could do it from anywhere".

"Yes ...".

"How about we buy an RV and then travel the US? I could work from the RV, and this way we get to see where we'd like to move too rather than just picking a place".

"Wow. I mean, WOW. Are you serious?".

"Absolutely".

"I think it's a great idea".

Within three days we'd bought an RV and the journey started.

How did we get to the point where we were ready to move? It was a number of things really. The local schools in the Bay Area and California for that matter are hopeless. So we were paying >$50k to send Ally and Josh to Harker. We didn't have to, but we view education as being very important. Another reason was health. Almost since we'd first moved to the Bay Area Tracey hasn't been well. Doctor after doctor has been unable to put their finger on the cause. Dr Shaw who was a fantastic doctor combining Eastern and Western medicine who we found got the closest, and basically it amounted to 'Bay Area syndrome' he called it, which really means a combination of too much stress and pollution. In addition, my job at HP has been floundering ever since that idiot Carly bought Compaq (or more like we were acquired). Prior to that I was in a pretty good position with fairly regular access at board level. After the merger, I was persona non-grata (i.e. not Compaq) and so have really struggled ever since. I was at a crossroads. Either 'suck-up-and-bear-down' as a good friend of mine once said, or move to another high tech company, in which case I'd probably be swapping one set of problems for a different set. I needed a change and something completely different.

So the choice came down to: change jobs, change the house, or do something completely different. In the end it was a no brainer. The benefits of the trip would be 1) get to travel and see the US, 2) spend more time together and with the kids, 3) break the cycle of the rat race, 4) health benefits for Tracey and Ally, 5) give us the chance to think about the second half of our career based on what we really want and what's important.

Even though we love Herman, next time around I'd definitely take the RV on a test weekend before buying. That'd give us chance to find out all the problems and get them fixed before buying it! We did get storage included for 3 months which was good as there was no where to keep it where we live. The good thing about RV's is that they are classified as second homes so not only is it quite easy to get 10 and 15 year loans on them, but they are eligible for full tax relief. Awesome!

However, buying the RV was only the beginning. In addition to getting all the problems fixed, there's a load of add-on's that we didn't know anything about. For example. A tow bar for the jeep (>$1,000), brake assist ($2,000), steer safe (to overcome steering wheel vibration and road wandering ($1,000), ultraguard skirt to protect tow vehicle ($500), navigation system i.e. Layla ($1,000).

Tracey did a lot of research about home schooling since this seemed to be the only option open for us. We ultimately decided on K12 as we liked the approach, the flexibility, the ease of use and especially the curriculum. There was the possibility to get the State of California to pay for it, but you needed to have regular meetings with your allocated teacher which would be good for 'normal' circumstances, but not for us. It meant that we had the whole curriculum mapped out with regular testing via the computer. We had the books shipped to us before we left and then hey presto, we were on our own! It did mean however that having an internet connection became even more important, not just for Phil's job, but now for the kids lessons.

As I mentioned, we'd already got the house rented including contents. However, there was still an enormous amount left over after we'd taken what we needed in Herman and what we'd decided to leave for the renters. So we got a lock-up ($100/month) and rented a van one weekend to shift everything out of the garage. It turned out that it was one of the hottest weekends on record with temperatures over 100 deg's as we all pulled together to get this enormous amount of stuff shifted in the 4 hrs that we had the van for. I remember working in just a pair of shorts with the sweat running off me so fast I could hardly see and drinking about a litre of water every 30 mins. It was unbelievable (no way I could do that now - man I was fit then). We did it with about 10 mins to spare!

Just renting the house sounds easy, but there was a huge amount of work involved. I've mentioned already that we'd done a lot of work in preparation for selling (roof, marble floors, granite work surface in kitchen etc). But we still had a load of stuff to do. Job No1 was so get rid of a lot of the stuff we simply didn't need. I took about 8-10 pickup loads of crap to the dump (man I love that feeling - about the best fun you can have with your clothes on!). Tracey did a marvelous job of selling the rest on eBay and Craig's list (much better - we must have raised more than $1,000 in total!). We needed the painters in to repaint things into neutral colors (an essential for the Bay Area), odd job men to fix all the little nagging problems (e.g. leaky taps), not to mention doing the inventory. Time was so short I remember still working on the inventory right up to the last day. I was up at 4am on the day we were supposed to move out to inventory my beer collection in the bar which I'd decided to leave. Believe me, it takes a long time to inventory 250 bottles of beer. We were still working on it by 10pm that night. In the end, we called Pete over to come and get the kids as they hadn't eaten and it was getting so late. Not to mention the fact that we had no where to live! It was about 11:30pm by the time we locked up and left to go and crash at Pete and Nousheen's. We'd said that it would be for a couple of days. In the end, it was for a month!

The post office will allow you to redirect your mail. However, since we'd be on the road, we didn't have an address to direct it to. Thank goodness our wonderful friends Pete and Nousheen offered to let us re-direct the mail to their house. Each month they'd sort it and then send us the important stuff to where ever we'd be. It's worked great and we are so thankful to them.

Since we've been on the road we've found out that there's a club called escapees.com which has a mail redirection service which would be a good option if you don't have anyone who can take care of it for you.

Strangely enough, getting rid of our cars was the hardest part of the exercise both emotionally and financially. Both Tracey and I love cars so we'd always treated ourselves where we could afford it. Our first splurge was a white 2002 Corvette convertible which we love. At the time of moving, we had a 2.5 yr old Black Lincoln Navigator and a 2 yr old Lexus LS430 which had only done about 12,000 miles, both of which cost about $60,000 new. I tried eBay on the Navigator and got some interest, but it must have been from dealers. The Blue book was $35k but no one was bidding above $20k. Can you believe that? On Craig's list I did get some interest and in fact one couple came round and loved it as it was fully loaded but at $22k thought it was too good to be true so there must be something wrong with it. Losers. In the end I traded it in against the Jeep that we wanted (great for towing and fun as it's a convertible) and got $27k for it which meant I had about $3k returned. Ally was so upset that she cried when we dropped of the Navigator and got the Jeep! The Lexus got more interest but still nothing close to its Blue book of $40k. In the end, I sold it back to the garage that we'd bought it from - they could tell that it was in absolute mint condition and low mileage and were pleased to give me $33k. How stupid is it that people who are interested and love the car are so focused on trying to get a deal that they couldn't see one when they had one. Both people could have bought these amazing cars at well under what I sold them for at trade price. Well, their loss. It still hurt to lose so much money on these cars, especially as we'd always said that we would keep them for a long time. But if you want to do something, you have to bite the bullet and make it happen. Once we'd sold the cars, we were committed, big time! By the way, I still have the Corvette. There was no way I was going to let some git try to beat me down on price on my baby. It's only done 10,000 miles, gets polished like every week and has been garaged under a dust cover the whole time. It's never been rained on! I'd rather save it for Josh! Luckily I was able to get our renters to agree to keep it in the garage for us.

Very important to decide what is important to you on your trip. For us, we obviously wanted to see as much of the US as possible. However, we didn’t want to do long hauls in the RV and we wanted to avoid the freeways wherever possible (something we found worked great on our 2 week getaways in the Corvette). We wanted nice weather so we’d be following the sun and were more interested in the scenery than just visiting the cities so a National Park Pass was essential! We quickly learned what type of campground suited us. Large city sites were dreadful - too crowded, old and with no space. We much preferred State Parks or open countryside parks where ever possible. Initially we were a little nervous about boon-docking (staying outside of RV parks) but quickly found that it worked great, especially if you’ve been traveling and it’s late. We also found a free campsite guide which listed a number of free or cheap sites such as those run by local cities or counties which generally are excellent although with limited hook-ups. Walmart and Camping World mostly offer free overnight accommodation to RV’ers. Since Walmart seems to be popular in the smaller more out of the way cities it’s proved very useful on many nights as you can combine some good value shopping with free accommodation. Plus since it’s quite popular you always feel more comfortable as there are lots of RV’s parked close by to help in case of an emergency.

Used various sources such as travel guides, Trip Advisor and travel articles we’d collected over the years. We’d done quite a bit of the Western US already (e.g. Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, LA etc) so it was easy to take this out of the agenda. Where to stay was done via Trailer Life. Recently we’ve joined Passport America which has been great saving us up to 50% on our campsite fees.

I hate to admit it, but we didn't really do a budget for the trip. We just went ahead and did it! Luckily I got a good pay-off from HP which meant that we could pay for the RV outright - that made a big difference as the payments on Herman were $1,200 / month (remember if you do this that the interest on those payments is tax deductible). Now that we've been going for a while, we're finding that it's averaging out at about $1k per week for everything apart from insurance etc. The totally weird thing is that we are no worse off than when we lived in the Bay Area with me working! I strange is that! The reason is all to do with the school fees. We were paying $50k a year for the kids school. We couldn't really afford it (we'd put them into Harker when Tracey was still working) but didn't want to take them out as the California schools are so terrible. At least this way, we get to be more in control, and so far, we're very happy.

In terms of advice, here's what I'd offer. 1) See if you can arrange to be laid off rather than quit - it's much better! 2) minimize as much of expenses as possible. Eg. pay off the cars, RV, rent the house, cancel non-essential bills such as cell phones etc. 3) Sell as much as you can and get rid of the rest. We kept far too much and ended up having to pay $100 / month to store it. 4) Go for a higher end used RV (diesel). RV's worship their rigs - you wont go wrong with a nice used one. 5) Consider re-financing your house to get a better rate and / or release some equity for the trip.