Dream the Dream

We began exploring the idea of living full time in a recreational vehicle (RV) around 2005.  Today (2013) seemed so far away at that time, and the idea was just a wild dream.  However, that dream just kept coming back, it wouldn't go away.  With every season and every year we found ourselves revisiting that same old dream.  We had a game we would play in the quiet mornings as we enjoyed that invigorating first cup of coffee together.  One of us would say to the other, 'we are sitting on the banks of the Snake River in Idaho...' We would smile and laugh, and repeat this game often, all the while dreaming up new places that we wanted to enjoy.  We were living on a small farm in Stockton, MD at the time the full time RV dream came to us.  In a way it was our second dream; the first dream was the Stockton Farm.

We moved onto the farm, we came to affectionately name Cloverland Ranch, in 1994.  It was about 10 years of effort to get the ranch up and running in the configuration that we wanted.  We loved that place and would do it all over again given the chance.  We figured the farm dream would be a 20 year adventure, and that is just about the way things turned out.  We left the farm in 2012, 18 years after the start.

While we were living on the farm, and dreaming the RV dream, we talked about buying a camper to take occasional camping trips away from the farm.  DW (dear wife) had the good idea that we should buy a horse trailer with a large dressing room, and in that way we would buy only one trailer since we also needed to maintain a horse trailer for our equine family.  That's what we did when we purchased a 4-Star 3-Horse Slant Load with Dressing Room in 2004.  We had an HVAC installed in the dressing room and planned to finish the remainder of the space ourselves. 

We finished off our horse trailer-camper and enjoyed it very much.  We used the stock compartment to carry along our toys; including canoe, bicycles, coolers, grill and camp stove, tables and chairs and other essentials.  The first trip we took was to Kiptopeake State Park on the southern tip of Virginia's eastern shore.  As we set up in the park I was startled by the close proximity of our neighbors.  After living on 10 acres surrounded by 1,000 acres of forest having a neighbor 50 feet away came as a shock!  We soon learned how friendly campers are and will enjoy our time in campgrounds across our great country.  At the same time we knew we wanted some solitude as well, therefore including features on our full time RV that would enable dry camping was a new requirement.  We began looking at solar chargers, batteries, inverters and generators.  These things would give us the capability to camp "off the grid" and in remote locations on National Forest Service (NFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.  After a while thinking, reading, and experiencing, we slowly started to zero in on how we would make our dream reality.