2020 Update

This Blog documents the RV Travels for James and Monique from 2008 to 2011.  It ended in 2011, and this post is just an update to note that we are doing ok and now living in South Carolina.  (If you call being home bound during the coronavirus “living”.)

As a reminder, the Blog displays the most recent posting first.  So to read from the beginning of our travels, you will need to go to the end and work your way forward.  There are various links shown in blue that originally carried you to other photo albums of additional pictures from the various places we visited.  Unfortunately these links no longer work.  

While working at BellSouth (now ATT), a friend of mine and I got interested in RV’s.  My friend, Ray and his wife Andrea, bought a used RV and really enjoyed it.  So much so that they bought another better motor home.  When Ray retired, they sold their house and started full time RVing.  Ray periodically sent emails about their travels.  It looked like a lot of fun.  Monique and I were thinking that we wanted to downsize when I retired.  So we thought, “why not do the same thing and travel for a few years before finding a smaller house?”  We were living in a two story log house on a very wooded lot in Lexington, SC.  It was a lovely home, but it required a lot of maintenance, like applying wood preservative and painting the trim every 3-5 years.  I didn’t want to keep climbing a very long ladder to do that as I grew older.  So we started thinking about finding a smaller house, but that could be done after we tried the RV full timing lifestyle.  We started researching and reading books about full timing.  We  purchased a used gas powered motor home.  We enjoyed RVing, but decided we would have to find a diesel “pusher” (engine in the rear) motor home.   

I took an early retirement offer in mid-2006. We worked to prepare our house for sale and make plans to travel.  We selected a real estate agent who focused on internet advertising, which was somewhat of a new thing at that point.  His staff took lots of pictures and some videos of our house.  A couple in Bermuda saw the ad.  They were looking for a vacation home in the USA somewhere between Charlotte and Charleston.  (I think they had family or friends in those two places.). The wife flew to Atlanta with her two children, drove over and looked at the house.  She liked it and made an offer.  We were lucky in many ways with the sale, especially because the bottom fell out of the housing market a few months later, and home prices fell dramatically. 

As you will read in the blog, we travelled to Natchez, Mississippi and found a much better used motor home to buy.  We eventually sold our first motor home on consignment via PPL, a company in Houston Texas. 

The blog stops in the summer of 2011.  In August of 2010,  Monique was diagnosed with SLL/CLL, a type of cancer that is not curable but is treatable.  Her cancer did not require immediate treatment, but needed to be monitored every 3-4 months.  We were also beginning to grow tired of some of the aspects of RVing with all the hassles of unhooking and re-hooking the water, power and sewer connections every time we moved.  Plus we didn’t enjoy all the work we did to arrange the RV storage and furniture when we travelled.  We were very cautious about tying down loose chairs and other items so they would not fly around if we had a wreck.  So we decided to start looking for a house.

We liked “Upstate” SC around Greenville.  Plus we knew of a recommended oncologist in Greenville.  So we focused our house search around Greenville, though we also searched the Columbia area.  Ultimately we found our current home which is a small brick patio home.

Monique eventually did need to go through chemotherapy.  It was successful, but there is the potential for the cancer to flare up again and require more treatment.  Fortunately the first treatment regimen was successful, and there are even better new treatments available.  

So, while we enjoyed our travels, we are blessed to be where we are now.  Especially since we now have a 6 year old Grandson who lives nearby that we dearly love to be with.