In The Beginning….

April 5, 2010 by libertatemamo 3 Comments

In order to understand where we’re at, it’s been useful, so I’ve been told, to start at the beginning. So, although we’re almost a month and a half into our RV adventure, I thought I’d take a few days to whisk you back to the beginning of where it all started and that, my friends, was on a muggy hilltop in Hong Kong. To set the scene, imagine 38 degree weather (that’s centigrade to you folks), 100% plus humidity (yes, it’s possible) and a thick, brown smog hovering across the city. We were on a hike in Hong Kong despite the risk to our lungs in yet another day of 500-plus pollution. Paul scanned the scene with his eagle-eyes and said “Wouldn’t it be cool to move into an RV and travel across the open land in the US for a few years?”. With my usual quickness I responded “A what?”. After a more in-dept explanation on the exact details of an RV (that translates to Recreational Vehicle, by the way…or for the layman…a large moving bus-house on wheels) I came round to the response “Oh YEAH, that would be cool” and promptly forgot the entire incident.

Now, that could have been the end of it, but for whatever reason the seed had been planted, and like a true weed it took over and grew in our minds. The whole RV thing kept coming up at various unexpected moments, and like moths to light we felt ourselves inexplicably drawn to RV forums and RVwebsites. Paul started working the long-term finances and I started to think about interior decorating. RV’ing was looking more and more likely, despite the fact we’d never even seen one.

Fast forward to 2 years later. We were now living in a huge 4000 sq.ft house in San Diego, and decided on a whim to go to an RV show. After all, a little peek at what these things actually look like wouldn’t be a bad thing. We went around the booths’ like kids in a candy store…”oooo, look at that one, it has expandable slides”….”oh, and this one has a balcony…cool”. Then, we stepped into a 40-foot Holiday Rambler and the helpful salesman, as they do, asked if we wanted to test drive it. Of course, we weren’t in any way ready for that, so naturally we decided to do it. Like a happy drunken date, one thing lead to another and an hour and a half later we were the proud new owners of a brand new RV. We’d never driven one before that day, had yet to actually spend the night in one, and really had no idea what we were doing, but there you are.