Hello world!

This is an exciting time for us.  People know us as Champ and Britt.  This is my  blog about our new lifestyle of living full time in our 5th wheel.

A little about this blog.  My plan is to post twice monthly on topics related to our lifestyle change, anticdotes about travelling with two feline roomates, camphosting and other things that amuse me or inspire me about living this wonderful lifestyle. I welcome questions or topics you want feedback from me about.

A little about us.  Champ and I have been married 14 1/2 years and have owned a camper 13 of those years. We actually met at a campground when my good friends invited me to visit their campsite and he was there. Yes, we were set up and it worked like a charm.

From the beginning we  talked at length about how to handle retirement years with a 13 year age difference. I'm the younger of us.  Champ retired 3 years ago when I was 48. The fact that we are happiest when in a campground and we both have a rather noisy travelling bone rattling most of the time it was not far fetched for us to embark on this lifestyle. We are each others favorite person so the small space was never an issue.  We were seasoned campers and had taken our rig on many long trips, no problem there. The problem was two fold: First, our kids and grandkids were all within an hour of our home. Some people's kids are scattered across the country anyway so they are used to long absences.  We have always been very spoiled to have them all nearby. Second, was finances. Me leaving the workforce at the ripe old age of 51 seemed daunting. We worked out several scenarios on paper.  The one we kept looking at was keeping the house and snowbirding, while I worked part time at our winter destination and tried to work out something seasonal when we were home in Iowa in the summer to afford the upkeep of the house, the travel expense and the cost of my health insurance since I would lose the benefit of an employer sponsored plan.  I began researching the work camp lifestyle as a way to fund our fantasy, while doing that I was working on a budget one night and the light bulb came on.  My salary was nearly equal to the cost of maintaining the house and the extra vehicle.  We started talking in terms of why not just camphost at one of the parks that we spend most of our summer in anyway! All of a sudden a plan came together and the next thing we knew we were talking seriously about diving in full time. Within 60 days we had the house on the market and had told the kids. ( Another future blog post topic or 5)

There is a different story and scenario for nearly every full time couple, family or individual out there doing this. Ours is pretty common. We sold the house and our stuff (more on that in another post) , we will camphost about  10 months out of the year to give us the opportunity to live inexpensively while being able to stay in a given area for several weeks or months to really get to experience the culture and the area. We'll go home to our northern roots in Iowa each summer and venture south in the winter. The good news is there is a cornucopia of possibilities to make this work.

So here we are with our first year orchestrated and lots of resources to find volunteer opportunities all over the country to engage in this lifestyle for as long as we chose to live it. 10 weeks in we can only say, 'why didn't we do this sooner?"  It feels very comfortable and natural for us both.

Let The Adventure Begin!

Stay tuned, I hope you enjoy following us.