At the top of Yankee Boy Basin in Ouray, Colorado- July 2017
We just spent a wonderful week on vacation in Southwest Colorado. It wasn’t long enough! We weren’t ready for the journey to end, but it gave us a new perspective and renewed energy to pursue “Launch 2019”. In fact, we are now working on a new idea to hit the road in 2018! It brings me to a phrase I’ve thought about often over the last few weeks. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” In other words, we could wait until everything is ideal before we hit the road, but what if we decided to try “good enough” and get out of suburbia sooner? Sounds good to us.
We’ve been doing research and reading about other people who are also hitting the road to travel and work and explore and live full-time in an RV. We decided the best thing would be to buy a truck and a fifth-wheel bunkhouse camper. All of that is a lot of money and we’d be incurring some new debt which isn’t what we really want to do. So, we’ve revised the plan, we are going to keep our Excursion for now. We’re in the midst of upgrading the known Achilles Heel parts of the 6.0 diesel engine. We’re going to find a bunkhouse travel trailer, in good used condition. We’re planning to do some necessary upgrades and work on the house before we put it on the market next spring, but we aren’t planning to sink a whole lot of time and money into it to sell it. Hopefully. The new plan, along with moving some money around means that we could realistically be ready to go a year from now. The biggest variable is how long it takes to sell our house and how much we sell it for.
Back to the topic of vacation. How much stuff do we really need? We crammed the Jeep full of camping gear, clothing and food and had everything we needed to live comfortably for a week.
Packed to the brim with supplies for tent-camping in Colorado!
We all agreed we would have been happy to continue like that for much longer than a week, but real life, our house and my job dictated our adventure had to end. I didn’t miss any of our “stuff” back home. I enjoyed our time in the mountains. Rain and all. We came home to humidity and bugs. Lawn that needs to be mowed, a garden tractor to fix (again) before we can mow, two big trees to cut up, a refrigerator dying a slow death, and the list goes on. First priority is getting the Excursion back together again, then we can work on the rest and also use the trailer to get rid of more stuff we don’t need.
I realize I have been paralyzed by the amount of work to be done and often end up accomplishing nothing. Again, letting “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. Maybe I can’t clean out the entire garage in a day but I can clean off one big shelving unit! Which I did today, and I feel pretty good about that. I haven’t kept up with this blog because I feel like I need to have a great topic to write about and I need to have the perfect structure and flow. It turns into a chore because I need to try to make it perfect, and then in the end I don’t write anything. What if I just write something imperfect and let it be good enough? I’ll get better at this as I go along! One little step at a time.
3 Reids on the Road 