A Whole New Adventure

In a previous post I mentioned that Gene and I had been keeping busy with “other stuff” and promised to give more details of that at a later date.  Well, here’s the scoop on what’s been happening in our lives over the past couple weeks and it’s certainly a whole new adventure.

We are, once again, home owners, or at least we will be next week after closing.  So, how did this happen?  Here’s the story.

For several years now I have been missing that sense of community you have when involved with family, friends, work, clubs, church, whatever.  Sure, we see family and friends, both Nashville friends from years past and RVing friends we’ve met in our travels around the country, but a brief visit a couple times a year is not the same as putting down roots and becoming involved with the community.  We love RVing, but there are some things we miss and this is the number one thing for me.  Gene doesn’t feel as strongly as I do about this whole community thing.  Perhaps it’s that nesting instinct which is so strong in females.  He’d probably say he misses the dishwasher most.  Anyway, this has been weighing me down for some time now.

The other thing we’re not real satisfied with is our winter travel.  We don’t like Texas.  Arizona and the west coast are too far away to be in Tennessee at Christmas and back for a visit in March.  Our first winter we spent in South Carolina and the past three winters we’ve been in central Florida.  We’re just not satisfied with those places.  The only reason we head south in the winter is to get out of the cold.

With these two issues heavy on our minds, we came to East Tennessee this summer with the idea of looking around for a permanent home.  Although we each have lived in Nashville for more than half a century, we knew we didn’t want to live in Nashville now.  While we’re still healthy and active, we wanted to be close to good hiking.  Several communities in East Tennessee were on our short list and even a couple in Western North Carolina, but Maryville was the winner.  Not only do we have Great Smoky Mountain National Park in our back door, we are within a short driving distance of Cherokee, Nantahala, and Pisgah National Forests, and have a straight shot into Nashville on I-40 without having to cross the mountain or get into Knoxville traffic.

It has been nine years since we owned a brick and sticks house.  During the first couple of years, we rented apartments when we were back in Nashville for the winter after traveling for the summer in our pop-up camper.  We’ve lived in RVs full-time for almost seven years.

You can imagine that the prospects of moving into a condo next week are both exciting and overwhelming.  It’s a small condo, but it seems so huge compared to the 300 and 400 square feet we’ve been used to for so long.  That part is exciting, plus a dishwasher and a garage for storage.  But then we realized we didn’t have even a single piece of furniture.  Unlike many full-time RVers, we do not have a storage unit crammed full of stuff.  Everything we own we carry with us every mile of the way.  We’ve spent some long days this week at the furniture stores in Knoxville.

We plan to keep the RV, so besides furniture we need everything else that goes along with housekeeping--dishes, linens, another litter box, coffee maker, trash can, and the list goes on and on.  We’re overwhelmed!

We decided to keep the RV because we’re not finished with traveling yet.  There are still so many places to visit and trails to hike.  So, I guess we have evolved (that seems to be the buzz word for change these days) into whatever the opposite of snowbird is.  We’ll travel to cooler climates during the summer months and stay home during the winters.

To satisfy our passion for hiking, the summers will find us on trails in New England, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington and everywhere in between.  Then there are so many of those National Parks we haven’t seen.  Hopefully, next summer we’ll be exploring several of those Parks in Utah.

We’re excited about our little condo in a small development on the edge of town.  I only have this one photograph taken from my new front door.  By this time next week we should be moved in and I’ll post more photos then.

Now that we have furniture purchased and all those little details have been worked out with realtors and inspectors and seems like everybody else in town, perhaps we can get back to hiking some next week.  We’re just waiting for closing now.  I’ll also try to get my act together and post a blog more regularly.

That’s all for now.  Thanks for tagging along.