OOOOOWEEEOOO…requesting permission to come aboard!
After a year and a half of intense study, planning, copious note taking, discussion, and an ever-evolving action plan, we are officially ready to jump on board the Forum, wind at our backs.
This whole story began several years ago as we were planning a Tiny House project at our college in San Francisco and thought, What a wonderful transition it would make at retirement to downsize! Perfect application of technology, eh? But we also love to travel. So we need a Tiny House…on wheels. Wait a minute! Tiny house… on wheels…? What is that? An Airstream, of course; more appropriate technology.
So one step led to a thousand. Once we determined size and comfort zone, a vehicle to lead the way became our whack-a-mole game, trading our Toyota Tacoma for something in the same reliability model, but with larger towing capacity. Quickly, after reading the massive "friendly family" arguments in the Forum on tonnage, payload, and you-all-can-fill-in-the-blanks, we thought we might stay with a Toyota V-8, but payload didn’t come up to our expectations.
The next contender was the newly-released Nissan Titan diesel, which soon died in the payload column. A trip to the International Auto Show found us crawling like monkeys around and through every truck in the building, plying the lovely eye-candy floor models with unanswerable questions. Ford? Yes/No. Others, uncertain.
My partner, Ruth, climbed into a GMC Sierra Denali 2500 HD diesel after butt-brushing the seats of the other brands, and a big smile broke on her face. Big? Yes. Commanding? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Comfortable with accommodating payload? Yes. (Um, I mean the truck, of course.)
Three months later the smell of new leather and the muffled grumble of a diesel dragon hunkers in our driveway. Financing chess commenced rather painlessly, surprisingly, and then we stood outside the Airstream Dealership in Fairfield, California, with cold clammy hands and dry mouths to engage the real estate monster on wheels…and the salesman: master/blaster.
Speaking as a professor, when you do your homework ahead of time, life goes easier for you, that’s a fact. We knew what we wanted, allowed ourselves the skosh room to tweak our plans to fit—thanks to this Forum for much info learned—and in short time placed our order for an International Serenity 27 FB.
Does this sound too cut-and-dried? I suspect all of you know the sorts of discussions we shared on so many décor and arrangement topics that, like rocks thrown into a lake, created waves to affect other decisions. So many rocks and so many waves make treacherous surf to be managed.
It is said that the most stressful times in life are getting a new job and moving. Well, how about retirement, selling two old and buying one new vehicle, buying a 27-foot silver crowd-stopper, and then planning to hit the road more or less permanently—after major home reorganization for part-time renting, disposition of accumulated property, and changing a lifestyle into a couple of hundred rolling square feet? AH!
Ruth can work from the road. We can express our art unencumbered, digital signal boosted to the World Wide Web, solar power streaming with the able assistance of a certain Lewster. We’re looking down that long, straight, curvy, mountainous, converging road into the face of the Muse of Adventure. It’s good to be on board. Looking forward to seeing and hearing you all out there!
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