I've Got to Start Somewhere ...

so it might as well be at the beginning...to set the scene, you know.

Let me introduce myself and my VERY significant other.  I'm Forrest Shelton Clark, a United Methodist Clergy person, in the process of moving from active service in the pastoral ministry to what we call "the retired relationship." That means I'm retiring, in case that's not obvious.  My wife is Mary Kehoe Clark, a teacher and librarian at an elementary school. She has a few years to go before she gets to retire. That's too bad, since I wish we could both make this transition at the same time, but it just isn't possible. So we'll cope.

When I decided that it was going to be time to retire soon, I asked Mary what she thought about the idea of purchasing a recreational vehicle and returning to our camping and traveling days that we had enjoyed long ago when we were first married and I was a college administrative type (Director of Learning Resources ... I'm a librarian too, just like her) with time to travel. In those days we were young and all our camping was in tents and we loved it. We're both a bit older now and the idea of sleeping on the ground is much less appealing than it used to be. Anyway, Mary was interested too and so I began the research process to see what we should think about.

Right now, I'm not going to rehearse all the steps in the decision of what to purchase. Maybe that'll be an appropriate discussion at a later date. But we decided that we wanted to look at Class C Motor Homes and, specifically, to look for a gently used motorhome that was only a few years old.  As we looked at many different dealerships at all of the options, choices, possibilities, etc., we changed our thinking and began to look at small Class As. What we came up with was a Fleetwood Fiesta 26 (27 feet long) that is well set-up for two people and traveling. That's the picture to the right. We bought this in August of 2009 and got to use it for one camping trip before it was time to winterize and store.

Now, I'm retiring in two months and we are planning to spend much of the summer traveling, visiting some family, seeing some sights and scenery, and enjoying ourselves. In this narrative, I'll talk about dreaming, planning, traveling, and what we've learned and what we've done. Once I get it started, I'll let my kids and some of my friends know that it exists. Until then, somebody would just have to stumble over it on Blogger in order to know it exists.

That's enough for tonight, the first night. There'll be more.

--forrest