Making Decisions

In late 2015 I knew I was going to be made redundant, it was just a case of when.

The blue ‘friendly’ financial services company I work for was taken over by a larger yellow company and a decision was made to rationalise locations. My lovely office in it’s wonderful south west England – near the sea, near the countryside – location was being shut down at the end of 2016.
So I started to think about options, would I relocate, would I find another job or would I take an opportunity to do something different. When I first joined this company, 22 years ago, I had imagined spending a couple of years filling my bank account before embarking on a ‘gap year’. Somehow I never managed to leave, but maybe this was the opportunity to revive that dream.

I started to do some research, how could we travel and live within a reasonable budget so that we didn’t spend all of my redundancy at once? Where did we want to go? What did we want to do?
We both have a bucket list of exotic locations – Angkor Wat, Tokyo, Patagonia amongst others – but we didn’t feel this is where we wanted to spend this extended period of time. Actually what we wanted to do was to take things slowly, amble about, explore, walk, cycle, kayak, grow roots where we wanted to, and move on when it was right for us.
So a more nomadic existence seemed to fit the bill and a motorhome felt like an ideal solution.

Then a bit more research and – lo and behold – we aren’t the first people to have thought of this. The internet is full of blogs from people who have done the same thing, whether it’s a few months or a lifestyle choice; whether they are single, couples, or families who are home schooling; whether they like cities or the country.

So the decision was made, the plan was put into action, and we started to think seriously about implementing this idea.