I've been thinking a lot lately about how this whole adventure started.  Hitting the road in the Roadrunner and 'Living the Dream' one of the most exciting things that we've ever done!  We purchased the motorhome eight years ago.

Interestingly enough, we bought our 2007 Tiffin Allegro Bus right here in Virginia Beach from a private party.  We have never regretted that decision!  We would have never guessed we'd be spending six months at a campground five miles from where it all started.

But here we are and will be for a couple of more months.  Daughter Kelly came through surgery with flying colors and is recovering nicely.  But Grandma and Grandpa continue to provide some useful assistance with the two young grand kids.

Back to the beginning of the RV Adventure and how it all started.  There are many reasons why we decided to sell everything, downsize and get into this wonderful lifestyle.

I know there are hundreds of you out there that regularly or semi-regularly check in and read The Roadrunner Chronicles, so I have a couple (three to be exact) questions for you.  Will you give some input?  Here's Question #1

1.  What is the primary reason you decided to RV? What was your main incentive?

For us -- it ended up being related to the notion that we could not decide where we wanted to retire.  Florida?  New Mexico?  Tennessee? -- we had those thoughts rattling around in the background when we started looking at RV back in 2007.

So if you'd be kind enough to respond an give some feedback -- that would be great!

Questions #2 is directly related to #1 and is this:

2.  Did you have to convince your spouse to do this?  Or were you both on board from the start?

For Pam and me, we started out slowly and talked a lot about RVs and those people that were able to afford them.  We looked and learned for quite a few months before we decided, "This might be for us if we can figure out how to pay for something like that."

It took a good many months of talking about things and then coming up with a way to pay for an RV.
That leads me to Question #3 which is:

3.  How did you (or how are you paying) pay the RV?  

Did you purchase it outright?  Did you cash in savings?  Did you finance it over time?  Did you sell your house?

In our case, we nailed it down to two choices:
We were either going to rent our house out and finance the RV; or sell our house and pay off the RV and tow before we started out.

In retrospect, we are very glad we chose to sell our 'Stix and Bricks' home.  We had 15+ years of equity in it and had been paying double payments for a few years to get the principal down.  By the time we sold it for $450K we had only $80,000 left for the payoff.

(That introduced another set of questions as, "What if this doesn't work out?" and "Are we going to be out in the middle of nowhere a few months from now and ask ourselves, "What have we done!!?"-- we will save that for another time.)

I realize many people can not or chose not to sell their home.  Everyone has to make those decisions that they are most comfortable with.   Always there is a bit of risk involved in doing this but everyone has a comfort threshold and as I have said a hundred times, "There are many ways to do this lifestyle!"

So today I have three questions I am asking for your input on:
1.  How did you decide to start RVing?
2.  Did you have to convince or persuade your spouse to RV?
3.  How did you pay for (or are paying for the RV?

There will be more questions down the road for our readers, but I hope you'll take a minute and respond and let us and our other readers know what your answers are to these questions.

Thanks so much!  And thanks for joining us today on the Roadrunner Chronicles!