Two False Starts
Maybe the blog should be renamed Mary and Michael MISadventures?!?
We officially moved into our motorhome on March 1st, 2020. The same week that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic arrived in NC and became a lot more real (to us). Our original plans were to be with family in Western NC for a couple of weeks before heading to Charlottesville, VA to celebrate our friend’s Ph.D. defense along with other friends that were going to visit from California. Michael’s parents were also going to visit for a weekend of Shenandoah hiking. We would then head to the Outer Banks where I would be volunteering at Cape Hatteras Natl Seashore until mid-July. But then the world began spiraling out of control.
A global pandemic was certainly not a scenario that Michael and I discussed during our two years of planning for full-time RVing. It was scary to watch the list of campgrounds and public land closures grow, as we now depend on these places. Thankfully, we had not yet left NC and were parked at a sardine can style, yet adequate, RV park close to our parents. We spent a lot of time drinking beer and watching TikTok videos.
Also, thankfully, our parents live in a beautiful part of our country with numerous options for enjoying the outdoors. At the northern end of Burke County, NC is the Eastern Escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains with its rugged and craggy landscape. Linville Gorge, a federally designated Wilderness Area, is a spectacular location to hike, rock climb, and backcountry camp. On the southern end, are the South Mountains, an ancient and eroded range with gorgeous waterfall hikes. There are also two state parks, state trails, and part of the Pisgah National Forest. Whew, that’s a lot and I am sure to be leaving things out! We were able to visit a couple of places before the crowds scared us away.
We would not be escaping the wrath of 2020 for much longer. On Memorial Day, 2 days before we were scheduled to depart for my pandemic delayed Cape Hatteras volunteer gig, we were out spending the day with Michael’s family. While we were gone, and without telling us, the RV park owner decided to work on the water spigot on our site. He ended up turning on and leaving on a hose that we had connected but turned off. Sparing some details, this hose flooded our motorhome for 4 hours until a neighbor alerted the RV park owner that there was water coming out the bottom of the RV.
The RV park owner tried to help. He admitted fault, put a claim on his insurance, hired a water restoration company, and offered to pay for a hotel and storage unit. Unfortunately, his insurance and the third-party claims administrator they hired were awful. The “you need to hire a lawyer” amount of awful. In the end, we chose our sanity and decided to let our own insurance company handle it.
We moved in with my parents, even Lynx the RV cat. Michael and I are so fortunate, to have two sets of parents that could and would take us in, and that this disaster happened when we were nearby. Armed with the perspective that things could always be worse, we began working on starting over.
Michael went into a frenzy dealing with everything and finding us a new home. I was often too overwhelmed to do much other than pick fruit from my dad’s garden and work on perfecting a butter pie crust. We also had to frustratingly miss Michael’s grandmother’s funeral since we were in the midst of homelessness (of our own, not to trivialize actual homelessness) during a pandemic.
For this (unwanted) do-over we decided to go with a travel trailer rather than a motorhome. While we loved the motorhome and it was very comfortable to live in, a diesel pusher is typically the most expensive way to RV. We did not like handing over hundreds or even thousands of dollars for maintenance and minor repairs. We also wanted to do more off-grid camping than RV park camping. We wanted to be smaller and more nimble so that we could get to and fit in more dispersed campsites. We purchased a 2018 Arctic Fox that seemed like a good option for full-timing and a bigger truck to tow it with. We set off just in time to make it to my next scheduled volunteer gig, a National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Virginia.
