Shirley and I made a HUGE lifestyle change in the summer of 2014.
Of course this is on top of the other HUGE lifestyle change we made Nov 2010. Back then, we sold our suburban home in North Ogden, Utah and purchased an acre-and-a-half in West Weber (west of Ogden) with the plan to develop it into a self-sustainable organic mini-farm.
It turns out that building up a self-sustainable organic mini-farm from scratch in the desert climate that Utah offers turned out to be a LOT more work than we bargained for. We want the healthy living, organic food, hands in the dirt, active lifestyle though. We found a solution when we learned about WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming) where host farms and people who want to volunteer and learn post profiles and meet up! In the summer, fall, and early winter of 2013, we had 5 volunteers (we called them wwoofers) come out to our place. They were amazing, wonderful people. We figured out that we wanted to be the wwoofer volunteers and NOT the host farm.
So, the next HUGE lifestyle change was born. We purchased a 36-foot fifth wheel RV (2013 Columbus Palomino 365RL) and a Chevy Silverado 3500 1-ton dually diesel truck. We sold everything that would not fit into the fifth wheel, including the house/property. We originally planned to tour the country stopping at organic farms to volunteer and stay with them for chunks of time. Some of the organic host farms are doing really interesting things (some are completely off the grid, some are making their own bio-fuel, some are into bio-intensive gardening, some aquaponics, basically, if someone could be doing it, it’s being done!).
We’ve since changed our minds to do whatever tickles our fancy… visiting family and friends, volunteering to help an RV park (i.e., work camping, or work hosting), boondocking, volunteering at a no-kill animal rescue, volunteering at organic farms, checking out neat natural wonders, or whatever! After all, we are retired.
Making this lifestyle change was a horrendous amount of work!
It was a shocking amount of labor and planning to get all our stuff sold (holy moly, we’d somehow collected a LOT of stuff). And it was surprising how much we had to do finish those little things we hadn’t gotten around to in order to get the house ready to sell (i.e., things like painting, finishing the baseboard in rooms we replaced the flooring, installing cleanout covers, and staging it). Of course, we had to do all of that while keeping the lawn mowed, weeds under control, and house cleaned.
It has all been worth it. We are really excited about this new phase of our lives.