5 May 2020. Like all of us, we are ready to go, enough is enough, ready to get out. We all have our stories to tell about the Covid-19, and thank God ours is a good one. We nor anyone in our family got sick, or lost a job like many thousands of Americans, and we hope your story does not have any tragic tales. We are just inconvenienced, isolated, frustrated, and trying to learn the new normal. We are forever grateful for all those on the frontlines keeping us safe.
Being a full-time RVer means you have no “safe-spot” to go when the the world is coming to an end. Over the past 5 years, we never thought about a large scale “what-if”. In the Army, we where trained about “flash to bang time” for a nuclear explosion. But guess what, who cares how far the explosion was away, the result was inevitable. Our biggest safety concerns while traveling this past five years, is equipment, each other, our immediate surrounding area, and being constantly aware of mother nature. We always try to make sure we avoid her fury when we travel, but “stay-at-home”, everywhere and everyone. Who could have imagined?
We depend on a variety of places to stay as we criss-cross our great country, and those places, campgrounds, military bases, to include some of the cities and state borders were closed down. Stay at home, shelter in place. Wow, did anyone every think this could happen? Not complaining at all, we still love and enjoy our nomad lifestyle, but it is fact, and we felt very lucky we could ride this Covid crap out in the desert where we just happened to be. We were isolated, but we found enough groceries when we needed to, and we had water… Water is a precious resource, think about that, not having any water the next time you turn on your kitchen faucet. We never did without, we always had or found everything we needed. But, like all of us, we were facing a different reality whenever we drove the BFT to town. Not sure what to expect, there were shortages of just about everything, and where are all the people? Holy cow this is for real. I’m thankful my wife is as tough as they come, and we riding this Covid train out of town. Hey this is good therapy, thanks for reading this!
So to continue our story, after 18 months of planning and dreaming our journey was to begin arriving in Arizona on 2 January 2020. We bought a Big Foot truck camper (BFTC), boondocked out in the desert with our good friends Delores and Virgil, then we were going to travel together to Alaska via the Alaska Ferry system. We booked 7 ports of call, a 10 week trip, driving on and off the ferry, that would have taken us up and beyond the Inside Passage of Alaska to Kodiak Island and then to Homer. We were going to boondook in some of the most isolated locations we could find and fish and live off the land…(okay, this in my story…). Then travel back to he Arctic circle, and swim in the Arctic Ocean, after which we would slowly travel back to the lower 48 before the fall…Okay, I’m awake now sorry, I was day dreaming…
When the weather started to get hot, and I mean HOT, we left the boondocking lifestyle in the desert on 10 April and moved to a full-hookup campground in the small town of Quartzsite a full 5 miles away. As we, and rest of America was on a stay-at-home order, we had no where to go but hunker down and be safe. Isolation is not a problem in the desert. But after living in the BFTC for 3 months with no where to go, and it got so hot outside, (high was 133) we could not even go outside. So we did like many of did, streamed lots of SciFi series, dreaming of escaping this craziness called Covid.
So on 11 May, we are leaving the Q to go to DM AFB in Tuscon to pickup our home that we left in storage. We will stay there about a week, packing the Cedar Creek, doing maintenance, and prepping the TC for a 2 year storage. While there at DM AFB we are getting the BFT serviced and installing a new sat dish, We fired Directv in January, after subscribing with them since 1994 when it was called United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB). That is one source of aggravation gone…
We are looking forward to getting back on the road and exploring our great country with a 5700 mile route planned. From here we will head north, boondocking along the way once we get to cooler temperatures. We plan to spend 14 days visiting Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, 14 days in Rapid City, so we can see the 4th of July fireworks at Mount Rushmore. From there to to visit Karen and Troy for a week before we head to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where we will spend about 3 weeks.
We are flexible, so who knows where we will actually end up this year, but it will be in America. The greatest country ever…
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