(For those of you getting updates to our travel blog, this is a post I forgot to publish back in late October, 2019, near the end our trip to the eastern Canadian provinces and New England. As expected, we changed some of our plans)
The 3 women are my fantastic wife Nancy, my mechanical mistress Alice, and our beloved dog Frisco.
First, it’s not easy for two people to live full time in a 41 ft. trailer, or any other larger trailer or motorhome that only has 200-300 sq. ft. of space…..let alone 3! But with a little accommodation, we were very comfortable and managed not kill each other (however, I did suffer minor abrasions and a broken ankle :>). We both agreed that when everything is working, we are extremely comfortable in Alice. I often say that all of the things I need to be comfortable and happy are right in our trailer (when everything works). You will have breakdowns…..both in the RV and probably with your spousal relationship! So don’t do this unless you and your wife really enjoy being together, at least most of the time. I’m grateful for Nancy’s support and patience….we’ve had a lot of great times traveling in our fifth wheel Alice over most of the last 15 months and it’s been a great adventure!
Frisco has been a joy to have with us on our trip. As you could see from our pictures, she has a lot of fun exploring with us and is always ready for the next adventure….just like Nancy aka “my little Magellen). It doesn’t her long to make friends when we pull into another RV park!
The other woman on our trip, Alice, has been equally impressive. She has been a steady, fairly reliable, companion. I have done plenty of complaining when she had a problem, but the simple truth is, when you are driving a rolling earthquake, you have to expect some issues. And when we consider the miles driven and the amount of trouble we have had, it seems very reasonable. That doesn’t mean I want to continue to dealing with on-the-road RV problems, even if they are reasonable. I just think houses have less frequent problems with core services, and when you do, help is more readily available. .
We couldn’t be more happy with the quality of the experiences we have had over the past 15 months……a lot of which I might forget if I didn’t have this blog to look at someday to recount our adventure together. I’m not sure how important that really is but, for now, it seems like something I/we might want to do. But we both agree we have had enough of hauling a big rig all over N. America. After we get settled into our new house in Wilmington, we’re going to look at a Class C or see kind of smaller towable we can use to take a trip in every once in a while.
So, having driven well over 30,000 miles over the US and Canada the past 15 months, Nancy and I are ready to park Alice. We are retiring Alice to a great home at Treasure Coast RV Resort in Ft. Pierce, FL, in November. She will stay there year round. We will use it in the winter and any other time we just feel like spending some time in Florida. We both have relatives and friends within 2 hours of Ft. Pierce so it should come in handy. Speaking for myself, I got pretty tired of the drive-setup-repack-drive cycle every 5-6 days. I don’t think we stayed too long anywhere……and frankly, I’d probably get bored staying too much longer anywhere unless we were not sightseeing as much as finding a nice place just to be in a nicer climate for a few months.
We will really miss meeting so many nice people on the road. But that’s why we are going back to Treasure Coast to retire Alice. We met so many nice people there last year that we plan to go back every year for the foreseeable future. We can’t wait to get back in early November.
(UPDATE, Feb 2023: as expected, some of our plans changed. We decided to sell Alice to my brother Andy and look at other options for winter months. Frankly, the “winter” weather here is very mild except for a few days where a cold front dips low into the Southeast US. Its supposed to be in the high 60’s to high 70’s for the next couple weeks in February here in Wilmington)