A New Home Base

Travel is and will continue to be our lifestyle for the foreseeable. We have new things to see and familiar places to revisit and friends and family we love to spend time with. But we know that at some point we'll need to consider reducing the miles - we can do that without really "slowing down" if we can find the right combination of activities, friends, nearby places to go and things to do - for part of the year.

When we quit our jobs for good and began cruising fulltime, our daughter Shannon was a terrific mail-forwarder, sending whatever we had received by post to wherever we dropped the hook. When we "swallowed the anchor" and began RVing, we turned to an organization of fulltime travellers called Escapees (or SKPs) which offers an array of activities and services from providing a "home address" for insurance, voter registration, and the like to an excellent mail service to membership RV parks to annual gatherings for fellowship and continuing education (called Escapades), and many other perks. The costs are very reasonable and we highly recommend them to our full-timing friends. There are over 15,000 members and they even have some political clout.

Among their membership parks (about two dozen around the country) they have traditional facilities with pools and spas and sports courts and meeting/activity centers for stays of a day or a week or a month or more, and others which offer RV-sized lots for purchase or sites for longterm lease. One of the great benefits of the organization is that any investment for a purchase or lease is protected by a long waiting list of members who want the same thing. The long list is a disadvantage when you're looking to commit, though. With some of the parks, it can take four to five years for your name to percolate to the top. Our travels have given us the opportunity to visit many of these lease parks, and this winter, we have found the one we would love to use for that base of operations.

It's called Jojoba Hills. It's a gated community of 230 RV sites in the Palomar mountains near Temecula, CA with great amenities, tons of activities, and lots of friendly residents. Temecula has just about everything we could want for shopping and dining and gaming, and the ocean is only 35 miles away, and San Diego and LA are about 75 miles.

And, the wait is only two years. We'll see how things go, but for now, we're on the list.