Meet James Shown, Planning to Full Time RV
AND IN THE BEGINNING . . . there was a couple who wanted to begin the life of living in a travel trailer.
By Guest Author: James Shown
My wife Denise and I had already traveled the lower 48 states in a truck I drove for a living. She would come along with me on occasion and was with me 19 straight months with the last company I drove for. That company moved expedited freight and things moved pretty fast for us and within that period we manage to cover all lower 48 states. Not being a licensed commercial driver herself she still played an important role as my constant companion, never sleeping while I was driving, lending a hand with backing up in obscure places, putting information into the GPS and even fixing us a sandwich and drinks so we didn't have to stop.
All of our personal belongings we didn't have with us was in storage in Lost Wages, I mean Las Vegas, NV. We'd given up our rental home and lived in the truck. This had gone on since we met ten years prior. Sometimes the wife would stay behind if she found work herself. Sometimes I would try to find local work upon returning home. We both wanted to try and make a home for ourselves but after a few weeks of no luck back on the road again I would go.
Eventually we decided we wanted to find a small rural town to settle in thinking this could be a solution to our wanderlust. We really didn't want to return to Vegas as a permanent residence. We checked out many small towns from Flatwoods, West Virginia where we frequented and made friends, to the wooded mountains of east Tennessee where my people originally settled in the early 1800s. Finding the price of land in the east beyond our means continued checking places out as we traveled.
Finally a delivery took us to the small north central Nevada town of Winnemucca. A small enough town of 8,000 people we truly loved it at first. It seemed to be just what we were looking for. But things aren't always what they seem to be sometimes.
Winnemucca is a nice enough town on the surface but like many other small towns today it's plagued by a serious methamphetamine problem, and one really needs to be careful who you get to know. We don't like the necessity of being antisocial which is what many of the town folk seem to be like, and with all due cause. So since we like people, we like new things and we like making friends, three years later we were talking about traveling again. However, I wanted no part of the commercial end of being on the road. And that's how the idea of living in a travel trailer got planted in my brain.
See James' article How We're Planning Our Full Time RVing Life.