New Beginnings!

On the afternoon of March 27th, Rosie awoke from her winter hibernation! When I arrived at Vault Motor Storage in Merrimack, NH to pick her up, she was enjoying some sunshine after four months indoors.

Right away I powered up the two Lithionics lithium batteries and they immediately came online with no issues. Amazingly, they still had over 90% charge! Next I turned on the generator and after a puff of blue smoke, the generate hummed along. After four months in storage, everything seemed to be working properly.

It was a 30 minute drive from the storage facility to Field & Stream RV Park in Brookline, NH. Months ago I had made a reservation to take Rosie here to get ready for our big adventure. Unfortunately the HOA of my condo didn’t allow you to park an RV overnight so I had to have an alternate plan. It would give me a base camp to perform all the modifications I needed to make, a location to move all my gear in, and a place to transition to as I sold my condo. Before any work, we had to get Rosie into Ford to address a recall on her rear axle. After a day at Ford, we were back to the RV park to begin some modifications!

Although the calendar said it was spring, we had plenty of winter weather left in New Hampshire including a Nor’eastern on April 3rd that brought six inches of heavy snow to the region. This certainly made it more challenging to move out of my condo and into Rosie, but with a closing date of April 5th there was no stopping this train!. Almost every day, I’d make a run out from my condo to the RV park with a carload full of gear and to check on Rosie. I had the heat on in the motorhome, but I elected to keep the water system winterized until I was living in her fulltime.

As my closing date approached, I worked frantically to clear out the condo. Fortunately, I had already sold all the furniture to a liquidator so that made the move much easier. The few items I was keeping but not taking on my trip, went to a local climate controlled storage facility. There were many runs to Goodwill and some of my neighbors benefited from all the things I was giving away.

The morning of my closing, I had one final run to Goodwill and then I loaded up my car with all the final gear going into the RV. It was certainly a bitter sweet moment driving away from my home of the past 14 years where there were so many memories of raising my son, Jack. However, those memories are going with me and owning a home is keeping me from living my dream of traveling throughout North America in a RV. Those few tears were quickly replaced with excitement as I drove off to the closing.

As of 11:48am on April 5, 2024, I was free of the responsibilities of home ownership. I left the closing in Nashua, NH excited about moving into Rosie and getting ready for my big departure date (D-Day) on Monday, April 15th. Over the week between closing and D-Day, I’ll be busy making the modifications to Rosie and I’ll be sharing some of those here.