Life has a way of showing us, or rather "suggesting" to us, the road to follow. We had slowly become slaves to our assets and realized we had lost sight of the important things in life and had basically lost ourselves. We were so busy working to keep up with the crazy lifestyle and expenses we had created for ourselves that we couldn't breathe and stress and anxiety were creeping into every aspect of our country home living. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely loved living in the country on our acreage with our multitude of critters, but we were burning out, slowly imploding and didn't realize it. It took a couple of life events to "suggest" to us that maybe we should choose a different path, even if just for a moment, a path that would perhaps allow us to sit back, reload and take a moment to exhale. We have always been able to find ourselves again when we would escape to nature and go camping and we loved the simplicity and calmness we felt when we parked our camper in a site, whether it be boondocking or in a fully serviced site. We then stumbled upon a YouTube video of a couple full-time living in their RV and travelling the continent. We decided (well, I decided) at that moment that life was too short, we are young enough, healthy enough and financially secure enough that we, too, could do this. Although it was a crazy notion, with the support of our friends and families, we took on the seemingly impossible -- to sell our acreage and move, full-time, into an RV.
We made the decision to change our lifestyle sometime around October, 2021. We set about making the necessary arrangements to make this happen. We both officially retired from our jobs (myself from my second job as a veterinary technician, formerly an RCMP officer, and Julie from 26 years of policing with the RCMP). We purchased a new-to-us 2018 Grand Design Solitude 375-RES fifth-wheel trailer and traded our pick-up truck in for a Freightliner M2 Sport Chassis (affectionately known as "Toothless"). We had an elaborate solar power system added to enable us to be fully self-sufficient even when boondocking. We took a financial coaching course to better manage financially with a lesser income. We sorted and resorted all of our belongings into various piles, one with things to keep and put in storage, one with things to keep and take with us, one with things to not keep and go to a garage sale, and one with things to not keep and go to donation. These piles were forever changing right up until the very end. We rented a large disposal bin and everything that didn't go in one of the piles went into the bin. We carefully selected good homes (both temporary and permanent) for our animals that we were leaving behind (we had decided that the dogs, all six of them, were coming with us), sold our home and acreage, and on May 30th, 2022 there was no turning back. The movers arrived in the morning and transformed our lives into many moving boxes and wrapped in moving blankets and on the 31st everything was moved into 2 storage units in Calgary. We turned over our keys to the happy new family on June 1st and for the first time in both of our lives we were officially "homeless", of no fixed address. As we drove down the driveway for the last time there were many emotions and tears that squeezed themselves into the time frame of the 250 meter drive. . . fear, excitement, sadness, doubt, happiness, relief and freedom to name a few. The thought that once was "we can't do this" became "we can do this, and we will do this to the fullest!"
