On Saying Goodbye to a Home on Wheels

Five years ago I flew across the country to buy a 39′ Newmar in Poquoson, Virginia. It was one of the nuttiest things I’ve ever done. A few months later we moved into our home on wheels and set about the country for a good, long wandering.

Over the following four years we would live in 7 states and touch wheels in 36 more. As you can imagine it’s been the adventure of a lifetime.

Well, today that chapter came to a close. After the Red Canoe Credit Union handed us a sizable check, Mr. Jones drove our beloved Castillo de Carretera out of our driveway and we waved goodbye to an era.

We couldn’t have sold our rig to a nicer family and wish them joy and fortune in their adventures.

So now that she’s gone I guess one worthwhile question is, how do we feel about letting her go?

I think the initial, honest reply is relieved. We hadn’t used the coach for over a year, and with Monica’s cancer and Halea’s return to brick and mortar high school we didn’t foresee much RV living in the next two years. It didn’t make a lot of sense to have a depreciating asset parked on the side of the house.

That’s the logical process, anyway. Then there’s the ultimate motivator: Fear. Vehicles age poorly if they sit around, and that can get very expensive. The last thing anyone needs are diagnostics at $170/HR courtesy of Paulsbo RV and the shocking list of things gone wrong “just because”.

Logical thought processes notwithstanding, I sit here at the computer sorting through my emotions with a heart that feels somewhat empty.

Despite the fact it sits on wheels, a motorhome can feel like any other home once you’ve lived in it. And once you’ve filled it with memories, just like any other home, selling the RV represents a permanent loss of familial touch points. This is what I’m left with as the initial relief subsides.

There are few greater feelings that pulling out of your driveway in a motorhome, and perhaps there is no greater adventure than taking your life on the road and marrying the possibility of everything becoming new.

You will marvel at strange and beautiful views across the landscape. People will enter and exit your life, some bringing ideas and others drama, with many supplying friendship and kindness unwarned. There will be opportunities to serve in new communities, and emergency hospital visits, and once-in-a-generation storms.

There will most certainly be t-shirts and key chains.

Perhaps a secret service agent will ask you a bunch of questions after you linger too long taking photographs of Timothy McVeigh paraphernalia at the Oklahoma City Memorial. And there might be a time where you’ll sing hymns beneath the pews as the tornado threatens to lift the roof off the church.

The restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina will be amazing! And the motorhome repair invoices will be even more amazing! Who knew a mini-fridge installed costs $1800?

Well let me tell you, it most certainly does. And you won’t want to know what they charge for a new microwave. Or better yet, for an engine! Don’t even think about the cost of a new engine.

Because its sixteen thousand dollars.

If you’re lucky you’ll join a ukulele group in South Florida and plink with a clumsy troupe of kind-hearted souls. You’ll sing songs like Leaving on a Jet Plane as you fumble your fingers around the notes, and if you’re extra lucky you’ll be stuck with the memory for the rest of your days.

The massive crack running up the side of your computer screen, the one your pug put there when he knocked it off the dashboard, will always remind you how you fought to keep him off of the dash, but eventually you gave in and covered it with blankets. Every time you walked up to the motorhome Frank was lounging against the windshield soaking up the sun like the happiest little landatee alive.

Very few things in our world represent freedom as much as a home on wheels. Today we willingly gave that up for all the right reasons. The future could very well involve another motorhome, or more likely a fifth wheel, but right now we aren’t certain about it.

When I look back on the chapters of my life a few of them stand out: The college mayhem years. The traveling cookware years. Our undiagnosed children/garage sale years. The nursing school years and the Texas Years.

Call it recency bias, but I think the full-time RV years were the biggest adventure of them all. For three years we rolled across the USA in a home on wheels, both of our ordinary homes occupied by strangers. Our family spent a lot of money and we saw incredible places, and while it was certainly difficult to manage a family on the road, it was also really hard.

And it was absolutely worth it.

Thank you for stopping by our website! We are the Hoffmann family, a (formerly) full-time RV family that has split residence in Seattle, Washington and San Antonio, Texas (kinda). We have special needs children that we homeschool (not so much anymore), and work travel assignments for the Veteran Affairs Hospital (this is still true). If you would like to learn more about us, check out our Start Here and Biography pages. In the meantime, God bless and travel happy!

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