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An Epilogue to our Odyssey (October 29 2006)

On March 16 2006, we arrived in Santa Fe after spending a miserably wet winter in the San Francisco Bay Area. We quickly located a temporary rental house and began searching for land to build a home. Over the course of three months we looked at over 50 pieces of property ranging from over-priced lots in marginal areas near town to a charming six-acre piece of land on the Pecos River in the Anton Chico land grant. By early June, we had settled on a small parcel southeast of town with a killer view to the southwest. We dodged a bullet when the deal fell through because of a pending lawsuit by the title company since the building challenges would have been expensive to overcome. Our alternative turned out to be the right piece of property and the next stage of our journey is chronicled in the EcoNest section of our Web site.

It's been a roller coaster ride over the last two years but we have absolutely no regrets about our decision to make our new life in Santa Fe. Even after six short months, it feels like home. Someone I met recently referred to New Mexico as the 'Land of Entrapment' (versus the official state motto -- Land of Enchantment) and we have definitely been captured. The journey continues. After we finish building our house, I need to explore gainful employment again since I'm certainly not ready to retire.

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Friday, August 26, 2005 - West Glacier, Montana

From the outset, I had planned on keeping a journal of our modest trek around the US. As with with everything else in our life in the last year, other events overwhelmed us and tonight is the first night I really felt like making a journal entry. I suppose one might call this a 'blog' but I'm not a blog reader so I really have no idea whether a journal and random observations from the road constitute a blog. Blog seems a bit trendy given the rather 'retro' spirit of our Airstream traveling rig so I shall use the decidedly anachronistic term 'journal' to describe my random postings. My ego is sufficiently in check to realize that these ramblings are not particularly interesting so I expect the only readers to be friends and business associates who might ask "Whatever happened to Gary and Kathy?" or "What are you doing now, Gary?".

How did we find ourselves sitting in a 25' Airstream trailer in an RV park outside Glacier National Park? People who know us as confirmed denizens of the urban milieu might find our current status as full-time RVers somewhat out of character. The thought of joining the RV world was the furthest thing from our minds in September 2004. Had someone solicited my opinion of the RV community, I would no doubt have made some caustic comment about gas-guzzling road hogs poorly driven by geriatric drivers. At the time, I was working in a small, dysfunctional startup as interim VP of Marketing and Kathy had decided to take an early retirement package from the Federal Reserve Bank where she had worked for 20 years in information technology. We were getting ready to sell our house in the Marina District of San Francisco but we really had no plans beyond that. We were researching property to build a second home but I assumed I would continue working in the high-tech world and Kathy was exploring different ideas for a second career.

The odyssey really began when Kathy was diagnosed with stage IIIc breast cancer in mid-September. Everything changed. At the outset, after you recover from the initial shock, you make a valiant attempt at maintaining a 'normal' life -- working, continuing to exercise, proceeding with the decision to sell the house -- but 'normal' was somebody else's life, not ours. Four months of dose-dense chemotherapy followed by surgery, post-surgery recovery and then seven weeks of daily radiation therapy simply removes 'normal' from your vocabulary. I speak only as a spouse and care-giver during this time that nothing in my life has been more challenging than that nine-month period. I can only imagine how incredibly more difficult it was for Kathy.

In the midst of all this turmoil and Kathy's declining health as a result of chemotherapy, we finished remodeling our house, sold it and moved to a loft south of Market in SF. As the coup de grāce, I was unceremoniously dismissed from the startup where I was working. January 2005 will go down in my personal history as a month I don't ever want to repeat. I can also speak as an authority that being a care-giver to someone undergoing the kind of intensive treatment used for Kathy's cancer does not align well with the demands of an executive role in a startup. Notwithstanding sincere expressions of unwavering support, in the end, it simply doesn't work. Only Superman has the strength and energy to perform both roles well. Anybody who asserts otherwise is either a liar or a callous lout who has no concept of care-giving. Trust me, it's not simply doing a few more household chores than usual.

Leaping forward several months, Kathy had completed her radiation treatment in early May and we had began to venture out in short road trips to investigate vacant land in Northern California. We still had not decided precisely what were going to do with our lives but we were exploring the idea of working with our son in small-scale real estate development. He had just received his Masters in Urban Planning with a Certificate in Real Estate Development from the University of Pennsylvania and had some interesting ideas in the area of sustainable or 'green' building [NOTE: If you should happen to need a very good remodeling contractor and are concerned about conventional, environmentally-unfriendly construction methods, check him out at http://www.ebersolebuilders.com/. This is more than just a shameless plug for Joshua -- he really does great work.] I had not decided whether I was an unemployed high-tech executive, semi-retired or in career transition (I still haven't decided ...) but the real estate market was kind to us and high-tech began drifting south on my list of options. With Kathy drawing a small pension and our relatively modest life-style, we realized we actually had a few degrees more freedom in choosing our next path than we expected.

Our search for property became an exercise in futility. While the real estate gods favored us on the sell-side, it was definitely not a buyer's market for property that could be readily developed. We must have looked at 40-50 pieces of land over two months and found nothing that was interesting or economically viable. We finally made an offer on property in Sonoma County over Memorial Day weekend and it was at that point driving back from Sonoma that we began thinking that it was time to get out of the market completely for six months or a year. I commented that if our offer was not accepted (fortunately, it wasn't), maybe we should just buy a travel trailer, take the new truck we bought to use in our real estate development venture and tour the US until the real estate market cooled down. Kathy wholeheartedly agreed and, that night, I hit the Airstream Web site. Two weeks later we bought a new trailer ...


Our touring 'rig' on the way to Glacier Park.

http://www.airstream.com/product_line/travel_trailers/intccd25_vtour.html.

I should note that we had never slept a single night in an RV or travel trailer before buying the Airstream and may have spent a grand total of a half dozen days camping in the last 35 years (remember, we're city people ..). Definitely an impulsive move but here we are -- vagabonds with no permanent address except a mailbox at a UPS Store in San Rafael. We moved out of our loft, put everything in storage and are now living on the road in our Airstream trailer with two dogs and a cat.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that during the interval between buying our new trailer and hitting the road on August 12, I was persuaded by my friends at Paremus in London that I should become their new CEO? I explained to Richard Nicholson, Paremus CTO and co-founder, that I simply was not going to abandon our travel plans, suggesting perhaps we reconnect later in the year if they were still looking for a CEO. I finally agreed to visit their offices in London in late July to assess the situation. By the time I left Heathrow for San Francisco on Friday, I had agreed to take on the CEO assignment in a part-time, remote and virtual capacity. We are testing the limits of connectivity but it's working better than I expected. Cellular coverage is amazingly good even with the wide open spaces in the Western US and you find WiFi hotspots at RV parks where you would least expect it (e.g. Wells, Nevada). More on this part of our new life at http://www.mojaveblue.com/paremus.htm.

Where do we go from here? This first, four-week tour has us heading back to San Francisco for a few days in mid-September for doctors appointments, hair cuts and a few dinners at our favorite vegetarian restaurants. We're off again for three months -- tour route still TBD -- but an extended stay in Santa Fe is probable while I head to London for a week in early October. We return again to SF for more follow-up doctors visits in mid-December. At that point, we need to make the final decision on moving to London where I will be able to focus full-time on working with the Paremus team. We are very much leaning in that direction since we already started the pets on their six-month rabies test required for them to enter the UK.

So, is this our 'new normal'? After two weeks, it certainly feels right and we have found ourselves using the term 'home' to describe the place where the trailer is currently hooked up. We have discovered that it is possible to live comfortably in a small RV and do productive work while traveling through some incredible scenery. For the immediate future, this is our life -- high-tech vagabonds. We plot our itinerary a few weeks travel in advance with WiFi hotspots and cell coverage in mind for at least 80% of our stops.

Closing off now. Topics that might crop up in future entries:

  • RV envy -- is bigger really better?
  • RV parks
  • Airstream trailers
  • Traveling vs. arriving -- the 'itchy feet' syndrome
  • The 'hitching-up' ritual
  • Eating vegetarian and vegan in RV land
  • No more 'flush-and-forget'
  • WiFi hotspots, cell phone service and virtual offices
  • Life on the road with pets
  • What is 'Mojave Blue'?
  • Maintaining your financial life without snail mail
  • Do we really need all that stuff is our storage unit in Petaluma?
     

Saturday, August 27, 2005 - Glacier National Park, Montana

If you avoid the throngs of tourists, this park offers truly stunning vistas. Driving up the Going to the Sun Highway is de rigueur for all tourists and we started early enough to avoid the worst of the traffic. It's quite an amazing piece of road construction, a legacy of the Depression-era WPA program, that would never be built today. A mild case of vertigo made me think better of returning down the same road and we headed east. A good decision since we left the high-density tourist stops behind and discovered the open spaces on the east side of the park. Two million visitors a year and we managed to find a delightful, quiet place for picnic lunch with only one other group in the area. Tourists are so predictable that it becomes quite easy to avoid them and still enjoy the park. Net-net, Glacier was definitely worth the visit but, after two days, we're ready to move on.


View from Going-to-the-Sun Highway.


Lunchtime view in a 'tourist-free zone' in Eastern Glacier Park.


This is Grand Teton National Park which was our first scenic stop on the route to Glacier Park.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - Moses Lake, Washington

We made a short visit to this small farming community in Eastern Washington to visit Kathy's brother and her 92-year old mother who resides in small facility for Alzheimer patients. Surprisingly good farmers market which filled our small larder and even smaller refrigerator. Regular grocery shopping and stopping at all roadside produce stands are part of the travel routine. It's very difficult to dine out in most small towns when one of us (Kathy) is vegan and I'm vegetarian. Restaurants do make an effort but eating a plate of iceberg lettuce smothered in high-fat dressing and with a side order of high-carb potatoes does not constitute a proper, balanced vegetarian meal. I also tested the virtual office Wednesday morning by participating in my board meeting as Paremus CEO. Not really too much different than other telephonic board meetings I have attended.
 

Monday, September 5, 2005 - Grants Pass, Oregon

We spent the previous four days at a luxury RV park in Bend, Oregon. Quite nice but a bit boring being surrounded by class-A motorhomes whose owners polish their $250,000-$1,500,000 rigs daily with feather dusters. Somewhere between the stuffiness of this type of luxury RV park and several of the noisy, crowded and often down-at-the-heels KOA campgrounds we have visited is the ideal park for Airstream owners. And we are different breed of RVer. More on the Airstream world later. See if you can find us amongst the leviathans in this picture ...


Lost in a land of giants.