Getting Things Started

Well I've done the simple preliminaries to create this blog, but it's a long way from finished.  And this isn't the only thing a long way from finished.  We are counting down the days to being out o' here.  That happens a week from Thursday.10 days from now and we have tons of things to get done before then including leave our jobs of 26 and 28 years.  But I thought I'd start the blog with the history of how I got here.  As you will see David is my passenger although he drives the RV.  :-)

So here’s the shortened version (really... it is shortened) of how we ended up on the road living in an RV. The RV is connected to the kayak. The kayak is connected to the water. The water is connected to my heart. The water makes me happy. I belong by the water.  Although I think he's more of a mountain man, David says he belongs by me.  (isn't he sweet?)  So here we go!

My love affair with water began in earnest many years ago (B.D.) when I was lucky enough to live for a few years only a block from the oceanfront in the North end of Virginia Beach. And the love of that life has been with me ever since. Every day, working or not, seemed like a vacation.  I thought I was the luckiest girl on Earth.  Long story, not relevant now, about why I left.  BUT, years passed and still I visited as often as I could, thought about it too much of the time, longed to be there and dreamed of returning, of moving back.

And then the old Familiar Story many of us have: Stuck where I am because of family, job, responsibilities, and on and on. Not to mention that the cost of living that close to the water these days made it seem impossible.

And…………..time moves on, days turn into weeks turn into years. Only child leaves home for college and then graduate school and I am more and more free to do what I want And what I want is to go back to the water. But there is still the job, the financial hit we’d take to retire “early”, ties to this college town and the old secluded farm house in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that I’d help David bring back from the brink of death. And just plain fear.

And then one evening a few years ago, I was at a First Friday’s opening at our local art center.  I went to the studio of an artist whose work I really admired. She turned out to be a very interesting young woman who in addition to everything else was a kayak camper extraordinaire. She had fabulous stories to tell of trips she’d taken to marshes, wetlands, the Everglades, our river of grass. She was SO enthusiastic about how wonderful the solitude was and I thought, “now there is a way to be in the quiet of nature and have water all around”. And so I bought a kayak. Thank you Sea Aviar.  And then, David bought a kayak.

And I went kayaking -  actually more than we went kayaking but then I worked part time and he worked full-time.  Week-ends not being my choice of prime kayaking times for solitude and being alone in nature. Pretty soon I’d done multiple times the too few places to go get lost in the wilderness around my home town and we'd done too much driving to get to those places I really wanted to go where such quiet in the natural world by the water is possible

I didn’t want wild and wooly sea kayaking or white water. I wanted quiet and contemplative flat water kayaking, marshes and wetlands, slow moving rivers and tributaries, lakes without power boats. That’s when the idea of kayaking in National Wildlife Refuges began to take form. And as it did, so did the questions of how to do it? How to just take off and travel down the Eastern seaboard and around Florida and up and over along the gulf coast visiting every national wildlife refuge I could kayak.

Camping and kayaking? If I couldn’t move back to the ocean this is what I would do. Although we were life long tent campers and backpackers, I realized we couldn’t visit all those refuges on 2 or even 3 week vacations if we spent the rest of our lives doing it. It would take extended – read that months/years – of time to do what I was dreaming. (My dreams never were little things-ask David) And I didn’t want to spend such an extended period of time in a tent sleeping on the ground. There’s where the RV dream first crept in.

Ok I'm sure that's more than enough for today...........stay tuned....more tomorrow........