For quite a while now we have become more and more aware of the fact that we are ACROSS the ENTIRE country from our parents. And we bemoaned the fact that when we were needed, it was quite difficult to get there to help. And, of course, we’re aware that life is short and time with family is important. With the pain that comes with us not having kids, also comes the flexibility of being a little more free to go where we’re needed.
So we started praying about our next steps once Matthew finished with COMPs, was ABD (all but dissertation), and no longer had SoCal residency requirements for classes.
These are some things we considered carefully:
- Ginger’s trigeminal neuralgia will not allow her to live anywhere that has more than a few days of less than 65-70 degrees. That makes location difficult for us. (If you missed the post about that…it’s here.)
- It’s been a long time since we’ve lived close to our parents and been close by to help out when they need it. However, #1 above keeps us from being able to just outright move to either Alabama (close to Ginger’s family) or Tennessee (close to Matthew’s family). (Yes, it can get colder than 65 in Alabama in the winter!)
- The fact that our rent in CA went up again helps make the decision about staying exactly where we are a little easier. Unless we win the lottery (we hear it helps to play in order to win), we simply can’t stay where we are.
- If we moved out of the area, Ginger would need to find a different job. Fill in here your own thoughts about the process of finding a new job and what all that entails!
- Staying in CA where the temps are mostly warm or moving somewhere else where temps are mostly warm (FL) doesn’t completely make sense. That still wouldn’t get us close to our parents.
SO. What does that mean? We kept thinking. And praying.
And that led us to this question: if we’d like to do all those things and need to do it based on the temperature, why not become mobile? Why not have some way to move between all those places? And when all of them are too “cold”, we could easily and temporarily move on to somewhere with warmer temps.
So how do we do that? We move into a motor coach! Yup. An RV! Not kidding. Not even a little bit. Actually, we’ve always talked about and dreamed of doing that…although I’m not sure how much either of us really thought it would happen. But it makes the most sense. We can go where we are needed. We can go where it’s warm.
The moment this option entered our mind, the more it makes sense. The more we’ve prayed about it, the more we feel peace about it. And the more we’ve thought about downsizing our lives from stuff, the more free we feel.
We’re gonna do this! Join us for the ride!