Hi! We are Steve and Debbie Olson, and we became fulltime RVers in June 2016. We have been married since August 27, 1977, and we have one child, our daughter Stephanie who is married to Jon. Both of us are from the great country of Texas, from Beaumont and Houston. Steve spent his 36-year career with AT&T, and Debbie is a retired Litigation Legal Secretary. Welcome to Our Great Adventure!
FROM THERE TO HERE: HOMETOWN: ANYWHERE, USA
We have always been very predictable people. Once our daughter got to driving age, she knew where to find us within a two-mile radius of home on Friday evenings after a long work week.
We bought our first pop-up tent camper in November 1977, three months after we got married
We did the steady progression upwards, from the pop-up to the 19 foot Road Ranger,
24 foot Dutchman Duck (complete with the HUGE smiling yellow duck on the front),
30 foot Montana travel trailer,
33 foot Crossroads Cruiser fifth-wheel,
to our present trailer, a 37 foot DRV Mobile Suites.
We have always loved the outdoors and the RV lifestyle. We retired from Houston, Texas to Crossville, Tennessee, atop the Cumberland Plateau, in December 2008.
Throughout all our travels, even though I was never ready to come home, we always said we wanted to have “home base.” “Home base” was very important to us. It gave us roots and stability, the very words used to describe Steve and me. Predictable. “Home base” gave us security.
This would all change in February 2014. Our daughter Stephanie was still in college when we moved to Tennessee. My dream was that she would follow us and move to Nashville, a cosmopolitan city for a cosmopolitan Houston girl. But she fooled around and fell in love. With Jon. And they married on February 8, 2014, in Galveston, Texas, an event that would change not only her life but also our lives as well.
In January – February 2014, we took a six-week trip to Texas for the wedding. After the wedding we went to the Texas Hill Country, a glorious place to camp. While at a campground in Fredericksburg, Texas, we encountered two ordinary people who would change our lives forever: full-time RVers. We have met Full-timers before, but these people in Fredericksburg said something to us that clicked. They said, “Your house that you have: it’s full of JUST STUFF!” JUST STUFF! OMG! How many sermons have we heard from many pastors who said, “Don’t get hung up on your material wealth!” “Don’t store up your treasures here on earth!” “The love of money is the root of all evil!” Yet outside of church, outside of a pulpit, these two people said something that clicked with us. “We have too much crap!”
So for the next year we prayed, and we prayed, and we talked, and we talked, and we discussed, and we debated this thought: can we give up “home base,” our security, our beloved treasures, and go on the road fulltime? The more we talked, the more we thought, we can do this! We started sharing with our family. My daughter and niece cried. “You have always been predictable,” Steph said. “All my life I knew where to find you and now you will be in Anywhere, USA, and I won’t know where you are, traveling to God knows where at your age.” I almost heard from Steph, “You could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere, and I won’t know about it!” My niece said, “Where are we going to gather for holidays?” I’m thinking, “At the next generation’s homes! It’s time to pass the ladle!”
We talked with our financial planners: they gave us the go-ahead. Our doctors cleared us for full-time travel. We had CRAP to go through, boxes of stuff for me to shred after my Mom died in November 2013. A storage unit of stuff to get rid of. Medical devices, canes, potty chairs, etc. inherited from our four parents – things that we kept for when we needed them. Why, I don’t know. It’s a sad testimony when walkers, canes, and potty chairs give you security!!
Our church family was a different story about clearing us for take-off. We love our church family. They are an active group of love-filled United Methodists who have helped us grow tremendously in our faith. They said over and over, “You can’t go: we will miss you too much!” We just smiled and said, “We are going!”
Our biggest hurdle, we thought, was selling the house. We placed it on the market on April 10, 2016, and we had a full-asking price offer (we paid all closing costs) in SIX WEEKS! Unbelievable for Small Town, USA. This was meant to be! We closed on the house on June 26, 2016, and by July 7, 2016, we were in Starke, Florida, beginning the process of establishing our residency in Florida, Green Cove Springs, where our mail forwarding service would be our legal domicile. We left Starke on August 6, 2016, and made our way back to Crossville, TN so Steve could continue his eye doctor appointments in Knoxville, TN for his cornea transplant that he had November 18, 2015.
And that’s our story! You can follow my blog and Steve’s blog as we document Our Great Adventure. We are so excited to share this with you!
And that’s our story! You can follow my blog and Steve’s blog as we document Our Great Adventure. We are so excited to share this with you!