There has been a noticeable silence here on the RT blog.  In fact, if you’re counting, it’s been almost 22 months since the last post.

During our previous post, we were happily sitting in our RV “Bighaus” in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula enjoying the the beauty that the Pacific Northwest has to offer.  Today Bighaus is gone and we’re sitting in a condo in the warm and sunny Florida Keys, just about as far as you can go from one side of the country to the other.

What The?

In early August of 2013, we had an opportunity for a three-year relocation to Germany, and being avid travellers we jumped at the idea.  We were led to believe that the paperwork would be happening extremely fast as the funding needed to be pushed through by Federal fiscal year end, September 30th.  Needless to say, it’s difficult to sell a high-dollar RV, so we listed Bighaus for sale immediately, assuming that it would take some time.

Officially Homeless

Fast-forward, two weeks later, Bighaus was sold, on it’s way to the East Coast, and we went from “kinda homeless in an RV” to “completely homeless” with no RV.  We threw what few belongings we had into a storage unit in Seattle, and spend a couple weeks hotel-hopping waiting for paperwork.

Wheels spin slow, and after going nuts waiting around in various hotels, we realized that the paperwork process was going to take some time.  With everything we owned piled into a rental U-haul trailer, we headed to Big Sky Montana for a month in a rental condo.

Beautiful country, moose, fox, bears in the backyard, Big Sky was all that we had anticipated.  We enjoyed our time there, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, hiking, wildlife, thin mountain air, .  What was hadn’t anticipated was SNOW in Mid-September, and lots of it.  Time to move along to warmer climes.  Still no paperwork.

Go South, Young Man

Since we both like warm, and knowing that San Diego winters aren’t warm enough for our old bones, that leaves Southern Florida. Meandering east through blizzards in South Dakota and Wyoming,  with stops in Minnesota to visit family, we slowly made our way back down to warmer weather.  Still no paperwork.

The initial thought was to rent a condo while waiting for paperwork, and enjoy the sun and sand while we sat around.  Good news – finally in early November – paperwork!  Bad news – paperwork is all wrong, and the opportunity basically fell apart.  Great news – we’re sitting in the best possible place to be stateside for the winter, and we only got into a 6 month lease so we’re free to move around the country once we survive winter.

Still Here

Winter passed, guest came and left, the sun is still shining, the water is still blue and sparkling, we made numerous friends with the snowbird crowd much like our friends in the full-time RV crowd.  We weighed all of our next steps – move along up the East Coast?  Stay put and see if the Keys summers are as bad as mainland Florida summers?  Head back to the Rockies?  Our discussions kept looping back to seeing if we could weather the heat of the Keys summers, and we decided to stay put.  With work and travel for both work and pleasure, having a steady home base certainly makes logistics simpler.

Fast Forward To Today

We survived the worst of the Florida heat.  Mid-90’s are still hot, but with the island breezes the heat is far more tolerable than mainland Florida.  The summer weekend crowds coming down from Miami and Fort Lauderdale can be a wee bit annoying, roughly equivalent to the “going up north for the weekend” crowds you find in the northern states.  Again, survivable though.  We’re looking forward to the cooler 70’s-80’s temperatures of the winter, along with the snowbird crowd instead of the weekenders.  I hope to start pushing out some more blog posts as we get out and about with (hopefully) more free time.

And I hope it won’t take me another year!