Making The Leap Part II - When We Knew

 

Champ finished the house, two more grand kids were born and our life became an easy street of Champ being retired and spending his days in town socializing with the neighbors and working in his shop fabricating or modifying one thing or another, ‘piddling’ as he calls it;  me going to work and grandkids coming to stay quite regularly.  Lions Club events, family gatherings, and of course lots of camping trips took up our time and the seasons started to click by at alarming speed.

We were content, yet there was an elephant in the room.  Champ was ready to hit the road, I was having trouble figuring out how to let go of the idea of owning property and my house full of relics from my past and all my previous travelling. We didn’t talk about it much but we both felt the weight of it.

As I talk to people who have taken the step we did last year, I realize the next part is all about the same. One day you wake up and you’re ready.  The catalysts are different for everyone, yet the common thread seems to be that one partner is hesitant and the eager one has exercised great patience waiting for the skittish one to get comfortable with the idea.  Good thing I married a patient man.

For me it was a long process.  In my banking career I got to know many couples who talked about all their retirement plans. I had the privilege of getting to know several couples with a big age difference like ours.  In many cases their dreams came to an end early or were never realized because the older spouse’s health failed or worse.  They always told me ‘’don’t wait to live your life’, ‘don’t spend your whole life working’.  Blah, blah, blah.

Then one evening in June 2015, as my 50^th birthday party was getting underway and I got a phone call stating that my youngest sister age 42 was found dead in her apartment.  The world stopped turning for about the next 12 weeks.  I had experienced a great deal of loss in my life up to that point, including the death my first husband, but this one hit me in places I didn’t know I had. It also made me revalue my life and everything (one) in it. A few months later  I revisited researching the idea of camping and volunteering and the world of work camping opened up like the dawn of a beautiful spring day on the heels of a hard Midwest winter.  I researched quietly and began reading blogs of others and their stories and then one day I saw a John Irving quote on Pinterest printed on the foreground of a pretty picture. It said:

“If you find a way of life you love, you need to find the courage to live it”

It found itself squarely in the middle of my vision wall above my desk at work. I continued to research the lifestyle and the dynamics of work camping and worked up a budget.  Then one Friday night after a terrible day at work I opened the dialogue with Champ and I laid out our current budget next to the full -time work camping budget and the light came on.  The sum of the costs of maintaining the property and my car for commuting to work was almost exactly the amount that I made. I hated going to work and all it was doing was keeping us static!   It was then, that we looked at each other and said “What are we waiting for?” Financially, we were ready, emotionally I was getting there. It was time to do this. We let it marinate for a couple of days and realized we were, indeed ready. 10 years of dreaming and a year of thorough research was about to come to fruition.  Before I got cold feet again, we called the realtor who sold us the house and had it listed within 48 hours.

Now, we had to break the news…