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Hi! from Wullie - I was born in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland. I wanted to retire from the day I started work as I was sure that retirement must be a lot better than working. My first 15 working years were spent in the Royal Air Force where I was given a good education in Ground Radio/Electronics, this continued for the next 25 years while in the employment of Hewlett Packard (now Agilent) - Our retirement plans started when I was in my early forties. We planned and hoped that I would be retired by the grand age of 58. I retired in February 1999 at the age of 55, and so far - ye cannae whak it.
Hi! from Linda - I was born in the Ciy of Oxford where I lived until we married in 1971. Had a variety of jobs, some better than others. My last 19 years were also in the employment of Hewlett Packard (now Agilent) where I conversed with lots of folk from Across the Pond (I love to talk). I always said I would not work a day past the age of 55. Retired in January 1999 at a very young 54 - one year ahead of schedule and its wonderful!
We have been married for year and years!! and no children (yet). In the early days when we had big debt on our house we invested in a small ridge tent. When the debt got smaller and our family increased with Zar our Border Collie, we upgraded to a large frame tent. The three of us had lots of wonderful happy summer holidays in Cornwall, the Lake District and parts of Scotland, with just the two of us getting away for a mad weeks winter sunshine in Spain with our friends from Lochgelly.
After 11 happy years there were just the two of us once again so we decided to trade the tent life for the caravan (travel trailer) life. Most weekends in the summer were spent in Muker, North Yorkshire, on a small farm site with no electricity, no phone, but a great walking area. We visited the local hostelry in the evenings for and a chat with the locals, a pint or two, a game of dominoes, what more could you ask for!. The Farmers Arms was built about 1849, with NO fruit machines or music, and was a meeting place for the local brass band after a hard evening of practice, farmers get together after a hard days work, and for all locals to meet for a blether (chat). Chris the landlord pulls a very good pint of Real Ale, while Marjorie the landlady serves very good home cooked food, and is a demon at the domino table. We highly recommend a visit if your in that area, and just tell Chris and Marjorie we were asking after them.
Our winter holidays were taken at Christmas to enable us to get more time away. We visited many exciting places: Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Cyprus, Spain, Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands. These were planned and booked by Wullie who has a great talent of arranging our type of holiday. This personal tailoring would have been over expensive had it been arranged by a Travel Agent.
We visited friends in Orillia, Ontario on numerous occasions, and it was while on one of these visits to Canada that we started looking at recreation vehicles and talking about an extended visit to North America. We are very fortunate as we both have the same interests - travel, hiking, open spaces, mountains, birds, wild flowers, dominoes, cards, real ale, but most of all we are very good friends which is very important if you want to do something like this. Sometimes we are in each others company for days without anyone else to talk to except each other (Linda talks and Wullie listens).
Two years ago (1997) when we started to get a glimpse of that 'light at the end of the tunnel' we started talking seriously about what we both wanted to do - it had to be a unanimous decision:
The PREPARATION took place over a period of two years at an ever escalating rate. A large amount of information was gathered via the Internet and during a holiday in Canada. We then went on a fact finding holiday to Oregon & Washington (where we intended to start our adventure) a year before our planned departure day, which turned out to be invaluable for our future plans.
By creating this Web page we can keep our friends and relations at home, up-to-date with our travels. Also, we have met a lot of people since we've been 'on the road' who are interested in how we prepared for this 'Holiday of a Life Time'
We have not published our EMail address as we are retired and I'm sorry to say we do not have time to answer any questions you may have.
Hopefully you will be able to find most of the information you need on these pages. We've waited 40 years for this well deserved holiday so we're out to enjoy it.
We would like to offer you another source of information - Good Sam Club - we joined this a year before we came over here, and the information gained was invaluable.
Visit our Preparation page and choose which section is most helpful to you - but be sure to read our monthly progression diary, not only does it tell you about all the beautiful places we have visited they also have a lot of informative Hyperlink's.
