Time Flies

I was in the middle of another daydream about how in ten years we are going sell the house and hit the road when I realized we had been saying "in ten years" for quite a while. Somewhere along the line we came up with the idea that it would happen in ten years and even though time has marched on, we never changed the number. Well it turns out it was on Sunday, October 17, 2004 when Rob posted in the blog about selling the house and hitting the road. I've reposted it below:

---------------------
ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES
I have thought about this a lot in our current economy, and considering our current one income/one paycheck away from the dreaded cardboard box economy...it's becoming more attractive as the election (our possible impending doom as a culture if bunnypants wins) draws near. Here's the plan:
Put the house on the market.
Sell everything we own with some traveling exceptions.
Sell the house, pay off the loan and have about $125,000 to play with.
Buy a crew cab truck with a camper shell, load it up and hit the road. Bank cards and cell phones in hand.Doggies in the back.
Travel across the land, visiting all the places we want to see...picking up work where we can find it to meet the basic expenses, let most of the house proceeds gain interest and invest.
Live in the truck at KOA campgrounds and the occasional hotel when we want to splurge.
Document everything on a wifi empowered laptop w/ digital camera.
East coast,West coast and everything in between...even Canada.
You could spend a year hitting all the national forests in Colorado alone...on the cheap.
It's escapist I know...but it beats the hell out of what's happening here now.
---------------------------------

At the time that post was written, Rob wasn't thinking that he might be a journeyman electrician someday. I still hadn't found a job yet, but I knew we were not in the best position to sell the house at that point in time. I did find a job shortly afterward and it was decided that we would definitely wait. I'm not sure where the ten years came from, but knowing myself I probably crunched some numbers and decided that was a sweet spot in the debt payoff. And so we plodded along with that dream in mind, always ten years away, without thinking about how things had changed or that the clock had been ticking all this time. Well folks, if I stick with my original calculations, it's not ten years away, it's only seven. And it could easily be even less with Rob looking at moving up to a journeyman electrician in another two years. Once he gets his journeyman's license he should probably get another couple of years experience here before we travel, but that still brings it down to just four years from now. In four years, I turn 50 and hitting the road would be a most excellent birthday present for the big five-oh. Or better yet, move it to just a little over two years from now and Rob gets a most excellent birthday present for his big five-oh and decides to blow off getting the extra experience locally in order to get the hell out of here.

Yep, I think we should plan for four years and shoot for two. Hmm... I better get the "sell the house" landscaping established soon!