"Winndigo" our new Winnebago Travato
I know what you’re thinking…
What????!!!! You bought an RV!!!!???? You’re quitting cruising? After only one year? Aha! I KNEW it.
No way, Jose. Look, can’t I have my cake and eat it too? We have lots of reasons to do this and have been agonizing over it all summer. Here’s why…
Originally, we had wanted to keep Indigo in Puerto Vallarta next hurricane season. Word is PV NEVER gets hit by a hurricane. Well, guess what just happened. Hurricane Patricia. That’s what. Now, it didn’t sustain major damage due to the protection of surrounding mountains, but still.
Staying in PV will almost triple our insurance cost… add to that major anxiety living in a hurricane zone, hoping we won’t get schwacked. Since we’re still new at this cruising thing, we’ve decided to play it safe and head back up to San Carlos next summer. Again.
But if the boat has to be in San Carlos… we aren’t. It’s just too damn hot. And boring. No way, no how. We will put it on the hard and get the heck out of dodge. Like 99% of the rest of the cruisers.
So the new plan is 6 months of the year in an RV, the other 6 months on the boat. This coincides with hurricane season (May into November)…as well as Mexico’s 6-month visa limit. I blame our friends on Cuba Libre for instigating… I mean inspiring… this madness; we didn’t even know this was a thing until we started talking to them. But now we’ve learned it is nothing new, as hundreds if not thousands of cruising Americans and Canadians follow the same migration pattern, whether to their houses or an RV, each summer.
We don’t plan on leaving Mexico (on our boat) anytime soon. There’s just too much to explore. Yet it takes a lot of time, money and effort to get back to the States. So once we make that trek, we’d kind of like to just stay for a few months at a time.
There are two driving forces behind doing this RV thing…
1. We'll be visiting lots of people.
We both have friends and relatives scattered all across the country. Some we haven’t seen in years, some we only had a mere hour to visit the last time we were together. We spent so much of the last two decades working that any spare vacation at home with family was too short or non-existent. Our quest to go cruising had been an all-consuming goal and it still is... But the farther away we get from our personal connections back home, the more we realize we need to keep those ties strong. Plus now we actually HAVE the time to reconnect. We’ll do this ‘snowbird’ thing for 2-3 years, at least as long as we want to keep our boat in Mexico, and then decide what to do from there.
2. Find a place to live.
We have no idea where we want to live, ultimately, AB (after boat). Another dilemma. Eventually, we want to buy property so Brian can build himself a gigantic pole barn woodworking/welding shop and me a tiny house. We’d like to explore various towns for living potential in Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, (not Alaska)…see the problem? I can imagine the hotel and restaurant bills compiling already. Not to mention I still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone or the Black Hills, etc. Brian keeps threatening to make us through-hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Now we can do it in an RV. That’s sooo more my style!
What????!!!! You bought an RV!!!!???? You’re quitting cruising? After only one year? Aha! I KNEW it.
No way, Jose. Look, can’t I have my cake and eat it too? We have lots of reasons to do this and have been agonizing over it all summer. Here’s why…
Originally, we had wanted to keep Indigo in Puerto Vallarta next hurricane season. Word is PV NEVER gets hit by a hurricane. Well, guess what just happened. Hurricane Patricia. That’s what. Now, it didn’t sustain major damage due to the protection of surrounding mountains, but still.
Staying in PV will almost triple our insurance cost… add to that major anxiety living in a hurricane zone, hoping we won’t get schwacked. Since we’re still new at this cruising thing, we’ve decided to play it safe and head back up to San Carlos next summer. Again.
But if the boat has to be in San Carlos… we aren’t. It’s just too damn hot. And boring. No way, no how. We will put it on the hard and get the heck out of dodge. Like 99% of the rest of the cruisers.
So the new plan is 6 months of the year in an RV, the other 6 months on the boat. This coincides with hurricane season (May into November)…as well as Mexico’s 6-month visa limit. I blame our friends on Cuba Libre for instigating… I mean inspiring… this madness; we didn’t even know this was a thing until we started talking to them. But now we’ve learned it is nothing new, as hundreds if not thousands of cruising Americans and Canadians follow the same migration pattern, whether to their houses or an RV, each summer.
We don’t plan on leaving Mexico (on our boat) anytime soon. There’s just too much to explore. Yet it takes a lot of time, money and effort to get back to the States. So once we make that trek, we’d kind of like to just stay for a few months at a time.
There are two driving forces behind doing this RV thing…
1. We'll be visiting lots of people.
We both have friends and relatives scattered all across the country. Some we haven’t seen in years, some we only had a mere hour to visit the last time we were together. We spent so much of the last two decades working that any spare vacation at home with family was too short or non-existent. Our quest to go cruising had been an all-consuming goal and it still is... But the farther away we get from our personal connections back home, the more we realize we need to keep those ties strong. Plus now we actually HAVE the time to reconnect. We’ll do this ‘snowbird’ thing for 2-3 years, at least as long as we want to keep our boat in Mexico, and then decide what to do from there.
2. Find a place to live.
We have no idea where we want to live, ultimately, AB (after boat). Another dilemma. Eventually, we want to buy property so Brian can build himself a gigantic pole barn woodworking/welding shop and me a tiny house. We’d like to explore various towns for living potential in Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, (not Alaska)…see the problem? I can imagine the hotel and restaurant bills compiling already. Not to mention I still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone or the Black Hills, etc. Brian keeps threatening to make us through-hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Now we can do it in an RV. That’s sooo more my style!
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