7-Year Itch

A journal of our full-time travel around the USA in our motorhome.

We celebrated our 7^th anniversary of full-time RVing yesterday, May 20^th. We sold and closed on our house in Colorado Springs on May 20, 2013 and began our journey that day as full-time RVers. We downsized from the 2,500 square foot house we had and moved in to our 37-foot motorhome with less than 400 square feet of living space.

During the past 12-months we made a concerted effort to travel to and visit the last three states we’d never been to: Vermont, Rhode Island and Delaware. We planned a trip to travel in early-summer 2019 up the Eastern seaboard to see those last three states and visit several places that we’d never been to before.

Those new places included: Hilton Head Island, Myrtle Beach, Hershey, PA (Hershey Park), Cooperstown, NY (Baseball Hall of Fame), Vermont (Lake Champagne and Ben & Jerry’s factory), Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the JFK Presidential Library and Museum. It also included Newport, Rhode Island and Delaware Seashore State Park (the only state park that we’ve ever been to that had a bar and grill in the park), Fort Belvoir, VA and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. We also stopped in Tennessee to see America’s most visited National Park for the first time, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We then headed west through Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock and east Texas on our way to San Antonio to visit Julie’s mom. Then we made our annual trek to Colorado Springs in August to see family and friends and take care of some appointments. We kept going west for our annual two-week September stay in Page, Arizona at Lake Powell, followed by two-weeks in Las Vegas.

We left Las Vegas in early October and went to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta for the fifth time, but every year is exciting.

After the Balloon Fiesta, we headed to Tucson, AZ, where we ended up staying for five weeks. We left Tucson in late-November and headed east on I-10 back towards San Antonio where we planned to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with Julie’s mom.

After Christmas we left San Antonio and headed west again. We had decided to winter in California this year and had campground reservations at Camp Pendleton in January and Coronado Island in February.

We had plans in early-March to go back to Arizona and meet up with friends for a Fantasy RV Tours trip across the border to Puerto Penasco, Mexico. At the time, there was very little news about Coronavirus. Our trip to Mexico was uneventful. We had no access to the internet in Mexico and really didn’t know how bad COVID-19 had spread while we were gone.

We returned to Camp Pendleton and made a trip to Costco a few days later to look at some patio lights. It was crazy there with people panic-buying everything. The normally slow going, half-empty campground soon filled up with RVs and families, as schools had closed. We also got phone calls from several Navy campgrounds to cancel our reservations for the weeks and months ahead. At that point, we decided to leave early and drive across country to Florida, where we had an appointment.

The past couple of years we had started thinking about where we wanted to live once we stopped full-time Rving. Last spring in Hilton Head, we checked out the new Latitude Margaritaville 55+ retirement community. They had just opened their model homes and we really liked them. We like the community amenities (Paradise pool, fitness center, theater, bar and grill, etc.) and that your HOA fee covered all the amenities, including the landscaping around your home.   

We had decided early on to look for a 55+ retirement community that didn’t have a golf course, because it seemed that everything in those communities was centered around golf (including HOA fees), and we don’t golf. We researched a lot on https://www.55places.com/.

We looked at a 55+ retirement community just south of Tucson that had beautiful homes, but there was nice golf course, and homeowners had to do their own landscaping and then maintain it.

We finally decided that we liked Latitude Margaritaville the best, but wanted to look at the original one started in 2018 in Daytona Beach, Florida. We liked Florida because there’s lots to see and do there year-round. We especially like Florida being “tax-friendly”, with no state income or estate taxes and lower property taxes. We flew from San Antonio to Orlando in mid-December 2019 and visited Latitude Margaritaville. We went ahead and decided to have a house built. Construction starts next month and it should be finished this coming November or December.

The past 12-months for us were busy as we traveled just over 13,000 miles, but we finished our quest to see all 50 states. We’re really excited about building a new home and going from our 400 square feet of living space to just over 1,600 square feet.

We plan to sell our 2004 Chaparral boat this year that we currently store in Utah at Lake Powell. We also plan to sell our motorhome early next year. We still want to go camping, but will downsize to a camping trailer, maybe an Airstream.    

Stay healthy and safe out there!

Steve & Julie Cornelius