We’re heading back to Rancho Manana for a week on Friday to get things ready for our move there. The next time we are home in New Mexico will be the end of September for our actual move to Deming. It’s interesting, traveling so much that you can’t even take time to move. I’ve been packing for months, but honestly, I’m not really sure this is going to go smoothly. But, you do what you can. If I have to head back to Albuquerque and stay a whole week while getting the house ready to turn over to a rental management company, I guess that’s what I’ll do. Actually, of COURSE that’s what I’ll do.
We’ve decided we’d like to spend our retirement traveling and doing fun stuff like out-of-the country work for places like, Little Hands, Big Hearts, in Honduras and Habitat for Humanity, wherever they want us to work. We estimate that we’ll be traveling 1/3 or more each year in the future and we got to thinking, do we even want to sink a lot of money into a house?
At this point, no. We probably will in the future, but for the next 5 years or so, we don’t see the necessity. We have a sweet cabin and this week we bought a new camper, the first we’ve ever owned. We’ll be picking it up in Las Cruces on Saturday and moving it out to our property to set alongside our cabin (with a huge deck stretched out between them at some point in the spring time).
We went with the camper as a solution to a WHOLE host of problems. Now we’ll have a good sized, comfortable bed, lights, a shower INSIDE for the wintertime, a microwave, a 2 burner stove and most important, a refrigerator. I cannot believe I’m going to get ice cubes out of this deal. It’s all about the ice cubes!
We started looking at how much it would cost to add a kitchen into the cabin along with a propane fridge and stove and all and thought, you know what? Let’s put that money into a camper that we can then take all over the place whenever we’d like to head to the Grand Canyon or any other place we’re dying to hike or walk or run or just rest.
This week we get to remove all food/kitchen items from the cabin, effectively giving us a 12×26′ livingroom to spread out in and for me to set up my easel. So basically, it’s an art studio and I’m going to let Jeff live there too. Because I’m generous like that.
We are also bringing along this generator:
It’s a quiet one, built for campers. It holds 2.5 gallons of gasoline and will run for 10 hours or so. Which is GREAT! It will constantly charge up the fancy big battery that powers the lights in the camper and when we want an extra dose of electricity for appliances, for charging phones, computers, or for power tools (a huge plus there!) then we can turn it on and it uses gas pretty efficiently. We opted for this route in lieu of putting in the solar just yet. Because we are not able to be home in Deming for much more than a week a month, we’d like to hold off on putting in the full solar set-up for 2 years. Then just before Jeff retires, we’ll put it in.
Jeff’s going to try tethering off of his iphone for work next week because he has to work from home. We don’t get a roaring good signal out there so he will most likely need to drive into town and bounce between Starbucks and McDonalds all week long to hammer out his work hours. But for one week, he doesn’t mind.
Now that we’ll have some kind of a power source, via the generator, we’ll look into getting hooked up with an internet service that does satellite internet, like Blue Skies or one of those guys. I THINK we can get internet now, as long as we have power to run the equipment when we need it. Even if we run the generator for 10 hours a day it will cost less than it does to drive into Deming and back, much less than driving into Cruces and back. If it weren’t for Jeff’s need for internet access and computer power, we’d most likely only run the generator a few minutes a day. And so we shall, when he’s not working. So there are details to hammer out, as you can see.
This week we’re looking into buying a shed kit, possibly 10×10′ and we hope to be building on it each evening after Jeff’s done with work, and on the weekends as we have 2 weekends to us before we both have to fly out again, him to work in Michigan and me to spend 3 weeks with my little Mama in Seattle.
I’ll take lots of pictures next week and will be able to give an update on our shenanigans in a few weeks.
Wow. After this trip, the next time we head to Deming, it’s to live there. Wow.
