So the other day, the furnace kicked on but sounded like the blower motor fan was taking a dive. So, when we got home from work the following afternoon Eric started to take the furnace apart to see what the part number was so he could order a new fan. His wife Carol was holding the cabinet door open and Eric was taking a picture of the model number on the furnace. Carol spotted the American flag that had been sucked over a bay wall and into the blower motor. We are both so glad Carol had seen the flag. She sure saved us a lot of money and work!
Eric will not be putting up some screen material to keep similar items from being sucked into the furnace in the future.
We started our Full timing adventure in 2010. We had lost our home due to the financial downturn in 2007 and 2008. The veterinary practice that Carol had worked at for 25 years as a veterinary technician, had closed it's doors because the owner had decided to hang up his stethoscope. We put our house on the market, but we couldn't drop the price fast enough to keep up with the falling value of the collapsing real-estate market. We cashed in some of our 401k to try to keep the boat afloat, but ultimately decided that we had to just walk away from our home.
We rented a home for a while, until our daughter Katie moved out on her own. We kept the Fifth wheel trailer that we had bought when we both still had jobs, and decided that the time had come to start our full timing adventure. It was something that we had known that we wanted to ultimately do, but we figured we would be closer to retirement and in a much better financial situation than we were at the time. We had taken numerous trips in our various RV's with our pets, and they always seemed to handle the traveling fairly well. So, when the decision was made to start full timing, we figured the dogs would go along with the program. Fortunately we were correct in our assumption.
Here is a little video to give you just a sense of what the lives are like for our four-footed friends!