Starrs Aboard

If you had told me 25 years ago that Ed and I would eventually sell our house, move into a motorhome, and take off across the country, I probably would have laughed.

Actually, I KNOW I would have laughed.

Because this whole thing started with a boat.

Ed and I met in 2000, and by the summer of 2001, we had bought our first big toy together: a boat on Lake Erie.

And, of course, we named her Starrs Aboard.

For the next ten years, Lake Erie was our happy place.

Summer weekends meant packing up and heading to the boat. We loved the water, the boating life, and the feeling of getting away without really having to go very far.

Then, in 2011, we moved to Colorado.

There was just one little problem.

Who knew Colorado was basically a desert with mountains? 😂

Beautiful? Absolutely.

Great place to own a boat? Not so much.

But Ed and I weren’t quite ready to give up having a ridiculously large recreational vehicle to pour money into.

So we traded our boat for our first “land yacht,” a 34-foot Prairie Schooner fifth wheel by Gulf Stream.

Yes, that was its actual name.

Gulf Stream.

Prairie Schooner.

Basically, we traded a boat for something named after a covered wagon, built by a company named after an ocean current.

Obviously, we called it our land yacht.

And that’s when something happened that neither of us really expected.

We fell in love with camping.

For four years, we spent our weekends exploring the Rocky Mountains. And if you’re going to discover that you love camping, Colorado is a pretty spectacular place to do it.

Then life moved us again, this time to Kentucky.

And camping?

Well…

Work happened.

Life happened.

Weekends away became fewer and farther between.

But every so often, the conversation would come up.

“You know what would be nice someday?”

A Class A motorhome.

We talked about it for years.

Then, almost exactly one year ago, Ed finally did something about it.

He went to Florida…

and bought one.

At that point, this was NOT going to be our house.

It was a motorhome.

For camping.

Occasionally.

We had a house. We had jobs. We had responsibilities.

We were normal people.

And besides…

I didn’t even like the thing.

Seriously.

Ed brought home our shiny new Class A motorhome, and while he was probably thinking,

“Look what I bought us!”

I was thinking,

“What have you done?”

I didn’t like the layout. I didn’t like the color. It needed work.

And within the first week of owning it, the thing actually caused me bodily harm.

Let’s just say it involved a stack of towels, a stupid little two-inch step, and me insisting, “I’m a nurse. It’s fine.”

It was not fine.

So no, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.

Funny, though.

Twenty-five years ago, Starrs Aboard carried us away for weekends on the water. Now, we’re getting ready to do it all over again, only this time on four wheels.

So when it came time to name our new home on the road, there really was only one choice.

Starrs Aboard.

Same name. Same two people. A whole new adventure.

And as for how I went from “What have you done?” to “Let’s sell the house and live in it”?

Well, that’s a story for another day…