After visiting Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, our desire to leave California was growing. Moving back to Colorado, South Central/South-Western was on the table. So was the Kingman, Arizona area. We decided to plan a recon trip for mid-January 2021 and give our 60-day notice at the end of January 2021. In mid-December, we received an email from our property management company that would forever change our lives.

A little back story. We moved from the Denver Area to North County San Diego in August 2015. The biggest reason for our move was my fibromyalgia. I had noticed when the barometric pressure would change, my pain level would skyrocket. The snow made it horrible; the cold got in my bones and never left. Denver has weather fluctuations like nowhere else I have ever lived. On paper, San Diego seemed much better for me pain level-wise. It was. It is. But San Diego comes with many other things, and it was our time to move on.

Our landlord had fallen on hard financial times through COVID-19 and needed to sell a couple of properties. Would we be willing to move in 30 days for $5,000? Five people, one of whom was moving at the end of December, a 2,000 square foot home, one dog, 30 days to move. Maybe not for $5,000, but it wasn’t entirely out of the question. We sent back our response and received a request for the real estate agent to take a look at the house. When the agent came and toured our home, he apologized because he believed the house would sell fast. Because we work in the real estate industry, we knew the house would sell before he arrived. A whole week passed before we heard back that they would accept our offer. We kept the original January 15, 2021, move-out date, so we had about three weeks left. Time to kick it into gear.

• Facebook

Where were we going to live? We tossed the Colorado and Arizona idea around. Just move up all of our planning. I posted our dilemma to my friends on Facebook. One friend asked if we wanted to borrow her RV for a month or two while we figured out what we wanted to do. This really got me thinking. And dreaming. I woke up one morning, turned to Tom, and said, “What if we live in an RV full-time?” “Really?” he asked. “Yes!” “Okay” Then the question became, what do we do with all of our stuff?!?

I started posting free items on Facebook to my friends but didn’t really think that was the best way to go. One friend suggested my local Buy Nothing Project Group. I joined and started listing things as single items/groups of like items. That quickly became too much to keep up with. I had a lot of stuff to give away. After following guidance from another member and reading through posts, I decided to have a Free Yard Sale. We would gather everything we wanted to get rid of and put it in the driveway from 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM on Sunday afternoon. Post my address in the Buy Nothing Group, and voila, all my stuff would disappear. Right?!? It really did kind of work that way.

Let’s sidetrack to the Buy Nothing Project for a moment. If you haven’t heard of them, they are a group that promotes giving and receiving from those in our community and building a community in the process. I had excellent success with it. I don’t believe I had a single person flake on me. Months later, I discovered I may have flaked on someone because of the Messenger sorting system. If you’re reading this, Sorry, person I may have flaked on. A note on the Free Yard Sale. Don’t post your address early and tell people to show up at whatever time. You have the rule-followers who will wait, and you will have the non-rule followers and the neighbors going through things before the rule followers have a chance to show up.

With the help of some terrific friends, we put the majority of our belongings in our driveway and front yard, free for the taking. It is a weird feeling watching people shuffle through the contents of your life and toss it to the side uninterested. By 3:00 PM, we had a few oversized items left, including a couple of mattresses. If people had taken the mattresses, we weren’t sure what we would sleep on for the week. At exactly 3:00 PM, we were relaxing on our couch, in the front yard, when a man with a trailer pulls up yelling, “I’ll take it all,” as he pulls to a park across the street. He took everything minus the mattresses. We poured him a shot of our favorite tequila, Suavecito Anejo, as a thank you for taking such a massive load off our shoulders. And out of our front yard. The remainder of our belongings were headed to storage.

• Facebook

We borrowed a truck from the storage facility, gathered a couple of my oldest child’s friends, teenage boys, to help us move everything into storage. We rented a twenty-four-foot by nine-foot storage unit, and when we were done unloading the truck, the unit was nowhere near full. We had things we wanted to save forever, but we also had our RV boxes. The items we believed we wanted to have when we found our home and moved in. We closed the door on our storage unit and temporarily moved into The Marina Inn and Suites. This was still during California’s COVID-19 strict lockdown, and we were only allowed to stay in the hotel because we didn’t have a home to stay in anymore. We spent the next three nights there as we cleaned and tied up loose ends in Oceanside, CA.

On Thursday, January 14, 2021, at 2:50 PM PST, we were pulling out of the parking lot after turning in our keys. Destination: Denver. Our plan was to drive straight through to Denver and temporarily drop off the dog with the adult children who lived there. We knew we would be hotel living for a month or so, and that is much easier without a dog. And easier for the dog. Our straight-through drive turned into a meandering wander through Utah and Colorado’s back roads. Follow along for all the adventures we’ve taken and will take in the future!

What are some of your craziest moving stories?

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