As one chapter ends, so another new one begins.

After almost 97,000 miles, 49 states, 3 Canadian provinces, and two Canadian territories, it was time for us to say good-bye to our beloved Polly, the 2019 Class C Forest River Sunseeker that we’ve lived and adventured in since August 14, 2020.  We bought her on March 20, 2020, the same day that the governor of Pennsylvania was issuing shut down orders for the state of Pennsylvania due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We took her home and except for a few little day trips, and an extended weekend to Sullivan County, she sat in our yard waiting to hit the open road.

Once she hit the open road, she never looked back.  Our first trip was down Skyline Drive and the entire length of the Blueridge Parkway before heading into Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and back to Pennsylvania for another weekend with some of our family in Sullivan County.

The miles and the memories are endless.  We logged over 22,000 miles in our first year of full-time RV life.  The places Polly took us to have been beautiful; the people she introduced us to have been nothing short of amazing.

Her full name was Polly’s Footsteps, a tribute to my mom’s old 1967 Plymouth Valient which she had converted into a quasi-RV when she removed the backseat and put in a sheet of plywood and mattress for a bed.  Just like the original Polly had taken my mom on so many adventures back in the 1980’s, ours was doing the same thing for us over three decades later.

My mom eventually had to say good-bye to Polly Plymouth, so too has the time come for us to say good-bye to Polly’s Footsteps.  The circumstances are different, but the results are pretty much the same.  Polly Plymouth stopped running, Polly’s Footsteps was still running like a charm.  However, we were having an issue with the bedroom slide.  It was repairable, a little costly, however, the logistics of the repair were much more cumbersome than the cost of the repair itself.  We would have had to remove everything from the bedroom slide, find a spot to store all those things for the week that it would have taken the shop to do the repair, find a place to stay for that week, and still manage to keep workamping at the Hersheypark Camping Resort.  It just didn’t make a lot of sense to us at that point.  We told our original salesman at Tom Schaeffer’s Camping and Travel Center, which was also the repair shop that we had been talking to, what our thought process was and asked if he’d keep an eye out for a used model that would fit our needs.

As fate would have it, he contacted us in early June to tell us that he had a 2013 Itasca Sunstar 30T with low mileage coming in on a trade.  We happened to have a rental car at the time, so we went down to look at it.  It was super nice and clean, and even though it was six years older than Polly, it had 80,000 fewer miles on it.  That’s right, it only had a little over 17,000 miles on it.  Knowing the slide repair that Polly needed, they were giving us a good number on her trade-in value, and the numbers made sense to move forward.  So, we put money down and set a date to switch into the new rig.

When we left Hershey to take our final family camping trip to Knoebel’s, we had a detour to Schaeffer’s to switch all of our belongings over from Polly into the new rig.  That process took much, much longer than anticipated, and I also had the realization that even though I pride myself in being a minimalist, we still had way too much stuff, so a bag (actually a few bags) for the nearest thrift store were quickly started.

We hadn’t told our family of our plans to switch RV’s, just that we had stop at Tom Schaeffer’s before heading to Knoebel’s.  Needless to say, they we quite surprised.

After my mom said good-bye to the original Polly, she continued her adventures in a Toyota Camper Van, which she called Tommy Toyota.  Will our new camper be called Tommy to continue my mom’s legacy?  No, this “new to us” camper has been named Tucker in honor of our old Yellow Lab, Tucker because when we got him, Sandy and I told each other multiple times on the way to the breeder that we wouldn’t be getting a puppy that day, we were just going to “look.”  We also told each other about the same thing on our drive from Hershey to Tom Schaeffer’s.  Which was that we were just going to “look” at this new rig, but as fate would have it, just like with our old Yellow Lab, Tucker, we ended up not “just looking.”

After our trip to Knoebel’s, we worked July Fourth Weekend at the Hersheypark Camping Resort, and then we were off to Florida to give Tucker a chance to stretch his legs.  Because our domicile residence is Florida, we had to take the new rig to Florida to be registered in the State of Florida.  We had 60 days to transfer the registration, but we wanted to do it sooner as opposed to later while the rig was still covered under the 30-day dealer warranty.  It was a quick trip, leaving Hershey on Sunday, July 5th and returning on Wednesday, July 8th, but it was a great trip to test the waters to see how Tucker ran.  He passed the test with flying colors.

Now the most ironic part of this story, I have yet to tell.

Sandy and I had decided earlier this year that 2026 would be our last year full-time RVing.  We’ll be settling down in the Melbourne, Florida area, for at least a little while in early 2027.  Two major factors led to that decision.  The first of which is that dealing with two sets of doctors, which often are not on the same page, for treatment of Sandy’s ANCA Vasculitus has been both challenging and frustrating to say the least.  That in its own right made enough sense for us to settle into one area for the foreseeable future.

The second factor is that I was blessed to work with an amazing group of people at the USSSA Space Coast Sports Complex this past winter.  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed being around the game, but the team of people that I worked with is really what made me want to be a part of it on a longer-term basis.  I’m really looking forward to getting back and jumping into things there again.

Why would we buy a new RV when we’re planning on wrapping up our Gypsy lifestyle in the beginning of 2027?  That’s a great question, but it just felt right.

When we leave Hershey in September, we’ll be heading across the country for one last journey before putting it into park for a bit.  We didn’t want to roll the dice to see if the slide would hold out with it being extended and retracted almost daily on that final trip, but, as I had mentioned earlier, the logistics of having it repaired prior to that last road trip just didn’t make sense either.  That’s what led us to where we are today.

It’s going to be a bittersweet fall for us as Tucker will be tasked with taking us on my last book tour for a while.  On our way west, we’ll have stops for book signing events in Staunton, Virginia, Pigeon Forge and Clarksville, Tennessee, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Long Beach, California.

Once we get to Long Beach, we’ll have a little break to hop on a 15-day cruise to Hawaii to notch the 50th state of our Nomad travels.

After our cruise, we’ll start to make our trek back to Florida.

We’ll have a mixture of relaxing times, book signing events, and plenty of adventures along the way to Florida.  I’ll have a book signing event right after our cruise in Corona, California.  We’ll have a short break from signing and we’ll be spending four days in Lake Havasu, Arizona.  After Lake Havasu, we’ll spend most of November in Arizona with book signing events in Buckeye, Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Oro Valley before making our way to Texas.

Our Thanksgiving will be spent beach camping along the Gulf of Mexico in Brazoria County, Texas

We’ll spend the month of December at one of our favorite spots, Galveston, Texas, with book signing events scattered throughout the month.

After the new year, we’ll wrap up the final leg of the book tour with stops in Sulphur and Shreveport, Louisiana, Memphis, Tennessee, Decatur, Alabama, and Decatur, Georgia before heading into Florida to settle down for a while.

Not living on the road is going to be quite an adjustment for me, but it’s what we must do for the time being.  This isn’t a “forever plan” for us, it’s a “what we need to do now” plan.

Only time will tell what the next chapter might bring, but for now we’ll continue to make the most of every moment we have.