Journal of A Gypsy Cowboy

"It may be that your role in life is to serve as a bad example."

The Redhead and I began fulltiming on June 7, 2007. The story of our "early" retirement is at Curt's LAST Newsletter The articles "Cheating Death" and "Retirement" should bring you up to speed on where we are.

When I was researching fulltiming I got a lot out of blogs by people who were fulltiming. I found I got the most out of reading the experiences of beginners. There are some mistakes all beginners make, it seems. Old timers might not even think of the importance of making square turns or arranging to go through a tight gate from a left turn when your rig is 65' long. A beginner who scraped the side of his coach or got stuck halfway through the gate will note it and describe how not to do it again. It just cost him embarrassment or a bodyshop bill.

We're beginners. As I said in an article for The Cowboy Chronicle, "We were so ignorant of RVs we could barely spell it if you spotted us the R." We learned a lot, some of it expensively, some cheaply In the Journal when we learned something, I put it in the Journal.

I've also written it to entertain. Not everything is serious. Reading the disclaimer at the home page might be appropriate for the sense of humor challenged.

There is also a Cowboy Action Shooting Journal. The purpose of our travels is to attend SASS matches as well as general retirement travel. We don't have relatives to visit. The cat was allergic to the kids, so we got rid of the kids. There will be some overlap between the RV Journal and the Cowboy Action Shooting Journal. It's inevitable. If that bothers you, get over it.

(Added November 2007: I've merged the CAS Journal with the RV Journal starting with the October events. Skip over the parts that don't interest you.)

I'm starting off breaking the RV Journal into months. We'll see how that goes. Enjoy.