Bi-Coastal

As Terry and I were on a long Pacific beach walk at the Torrey Pines State Park north of San Diego, I stopped for a moment and looked at my watch. Not for the time, but for the date. It occurred to me that just a little over a month before we'd been walking along the shores of the Atlantic in the Florida keys. Wow. Both coasts within the space of less than two months. Never done that before.

The Amtrak Route to San Diego.

Bahia Honda Park in the Florida Keys.

As we've spent a whole lot of windshield time in our travels, I'm finding that America's getting smaller. You probably know that feeling that the distance to visit relatives or maybe a summer cabin always seemed longer until you started driving it more frequently. As you become familiar with oft traveled routes your mind seems to shorten the distance between landmarks. You find yourself saying, "Four hundred miles? That's an easy day."

In the thirty months since we started our RV adventures I'm pretty startled to see that we've racked up 50,000 miles. That's not a number big rig RVers generally hit as their owners tend to think of them more like large yachts that are moored for longer times at one location. To us, our Navion is more of a speedboat. As one View owner said to me a couple of years ago "gas and go." And that's proven to be true. Today, when we pull up stakes it takes us less than ten minutes to unhook, get road ready, and clip our Honda onto the back.

My rough guess is that in thirty months we've traveled for over ten. And though we're not full-timers, we've adopted many of the rhythms and routines that many of them have. To our non-RVer friends I explain it like this, "For the past twenty five years we've had a second home either in the mountains, when we lived in the city, or the city, when we lived in the mountains. And that's how we feel about traveling in our Navion -- it's a second home on wheels."