We're the Bairds, Roger and Mary, and we have been camping practically our entire lives. Both of us enjoyed camping as children with our parents and extended families. Mary spent summers at various state parks in Michigan and Roger spent summers camping in the High Sierras in California and at various national parks across the West when his family travelled to and from Kansas to visit grandparents.
Early campers c. 1971 Higgins Lake, MI
If you count a pop-up trailer as an RV, then we have been RVing for nearly 40 years. We've camped in 2-man tents (as newlyweds), big tents (as the kids grew), pop-ups, and in the last 10 years or so travel trailers (2), fifth wheels (1), and now a motorhome. What we hadn't done was travel for extended periods - until last year.
Our early "RVs"
As with all RVs (and boats), you start to get into "we need a bigger one". We had stopped camping for a while from the late '80s until 2001 when we realized we missed it and we didn't have to camp in a tent or popup. We really could buy something a little bit more comfortable and still go camping. Like my parents had done years previously, we purchased a travel trailer.
Our Sunline 23' trailer with no slides
Followed by a larger travel trailer...
Our Arctic Fox 30' trailer with 2 slides
Followed by a fifth wheel...
Our Carriage 33' fifth wheel with four slides
And things pretty much stayed the same for six years until we realized that the fifth wheel and the way we liked to travel were not the best fit.
When we started planning for retirement, a couple of things started to reshape our thinking: 1) taxes were too high to stay in Maryland; 2) our house was too big; 3) we wanted to travel more in the US. We thought long and hard about relocating to somewhere warmer, cheaper, and close to the West and its great national parks. We really liked New Mexico and were prepared to relocate there after our house sold. To test out our plans and validate our ideas, we purchased a 2012 Tiffin Allegro Open Road motorhome.
As soon as we got the motorhome we started traveling. Our first extended trip lasted 3.5 months and about 5000 miles and we loved it. We came home and started getting the house ready and looking at property in New Mexico.
We put our house on the market the end of March 2013 and promptly took off for a month to give the realtors free access to show the house at anytime. We then realized how much we missed being on the road and by the time we got home. So that little trip started a couple of thoughts - could we afford to live in our motorhome fulltime (yes!) and did we want to live in our motorhome fulltime (yes, but we needed a bigger motorhome) and "how fast can we sell the house?".
We will begin our fulltime lifestyle the end of July. We've ordered the new coach and we should be getting it around Labor Day. We will be fulltiming in our little 32' motorhome with our senior dog, Gabi (a 13 year old rescued black lab) and our two rescued cats, Sam and Milli.
