RV living

This week has flown by! It continues to be very busy at work despite being "off-season" and the weather has been beautiful so it seems that everyone at the RV park is outside and visiting in the evenings. I escaped socialization only one night this week because I locked myself in my RV and didn't dare stick my head out so I could finish reading a book. Once the weather turns colder, we will probably all stay inside and then perhaps I will have plenty of time to play computer games, read books and be a hermit. For now though, this seems to be the time when everyone wants to be outside and visit with their neighbors and it seems I can't walk to the dumpster without being called over for a chat or two or three along the way.

The RV park where I stay is not a resort park or a vacation spot so it tends to attract long-term residents. Some are full-timers who live in their RV year-round, others are folks that are staying in their RV for many months while their new house is being built and a few are there because it's more convenient and cheaper than staying a hotel during long-term medical treatment in the Austin area. Most people stay at least a month or two and many residents have been there for over five years.

I expected to encounter predominately retired folks in an RV park, but a large number of the park residents are my age and are still working full-time. Some of these workers are "travelers" who work on long-term construction projects and move on once those are finished, but others have regular full-time jobs in the Austin area. There are even a couple of college students and people in their late 20's/early 30's who have discovered that living in an RV suits them better than renting an apartment. The one thing you don't see much of is people with children and that suits me just fine. It's not that I hate kids, but they are not always well behaved and I don't miss one bit the brats down the street from my old house that used to scream at the top of their lungs on a regular basis.

People live in everything from tiny campers to large "park models" which have up to 400 square feet of living space. There are a few million dollar diesel pusher motorhomes, but there are also a few well-maintained older travel trailers that might be worth $2000 on a good day. There's plenty of diversity here and a surprising sense of community that I thought I would be missing once I no longer lived in a traditional neighborhood. In fact, I've gotten to know more of my neighbors at the RV park in just 4 months than I ever got to know in my old neighborhood where I lived for 15 years.

I'm content so far with my decision to buy the RV and I suspect I'm much happier here than I would be in an apartment. My long term goal was to eventually buy some land and a mobile home, but I may rethink that and work towards buying larger RV in a few years instead. Either way, my current RV should provide me with some trade-in value at that time and so I'll come out further ahead than if I had rented an apartment for a few years. Of course, there's no telling what the future will hold; I could win the lottery and that would probably change a few plans.