The Vugs 180: 2020 Plans

We came home from our 180 adventure a year and a few days ago, January 17 to be exact. We had traveled 31,000 miles in 8 months and learned a lot about what we wanted for our future. The “trip of a lifetime” became what we wanted to do with our lives indefinitely. Traveling together was amazing. Seeing sights, meeting people, relaxing with no stress of intense jobs was exactly what we were looking for and we knew we wanted to figure out how to continue doing it. This is not to say we are running away from Michigan. We love our beautiful state and even when we came home just in time for the polar vortex to hit West Michigan, it was nice to be home.

2019 was a year of figuring out new routines and deciding what was next. We had a general idea but it all felt like “in the future” decisions. We wanted to stick around home for the year, reconnect with friends and family, work on the house a little and really talk about our goals and how we were going to achieve them.

The plan, although at the core stayed the same, changed over the course of the year. When we came home, the plan was to sell the house in the spring of 2020, put our belongings, including the 2002 F250 diesel truck and 2006 Jeep Wrangler in storage, buy a regular cab gas truck and brand new Four Wheel camper flatbed Hawk and wander the country for a few years.

As the year progressed, our garage talks and road trips allowed us to talk out these plans, voice our concerns, our frustrations, and realize what we really want to get out of these huge decisions we are making. What we really want is a simple life that allows us to see more. Wanting less is a really good feeling when you finally get there. We realized even after coming home we were still wanting things we didn’t need. We took a step back and even though a brand new camper would be great, what we had already would work just fine. So that was the first change in the plan. We are keeping our 2007 Four Wheel Grandby truck camper and will just outfit it with a stove, refrigerator, more storage and more comfortable seating and mount it on a flatbed with a lot more outside storage.

Another really hard decision was the the decision to sell both the gray diesel truck and the Jeep Wrangler. We have owned the diesel truck for almost 11 years and have traveled the country a few times over with it. It’s been a good truck and as much as we would love to store it, we see no use for it in the future. The reason we decided to go to a regular cab gas truck was to be smaller, quieter and more off road friendly. The new truck will also be our tow truck if we need it in the future so again, we are evaluating our needs and adjusting to them.

We have owned the Jeep for 2 1/2 years. It was my dream to have a paid off Wrangler in our paid off garage and I pictured myself driving it on beautiful Michigan summer/fall days with the top off to work or to the beach. Since being back, I realize that my dream has changed. We were so happy to have that Jeep along with us last year. We put 9,100 miles on it on some of the most beautiful trails and roads in the country. It was perfect for us and our dog, Gus, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. But looking forward, we know we don’t want to haul a trailer again so we would be storing the Jeep until we figure out where we are going to stay for an extended period of time. So again we would be paying to store something that we really have no use for.

These decisions have been really hard. It’s hard to let things go once you have them because you think “someday” you’ll want/need it again. By simplifying our lives, we are accepting that we are okay with saying goodbye to things that don’t fit our lives or our goals.

We took the first big step a couple weeks ago when we found the next truck for our overlanding rig. It’s a 2005 F350 regular cab V10 gas truck with only 85,000 miles. It was located just outside of Omaha, Nebraska. We had been looking quite extensively all over the country for exactly this truck which we found out was really hard to find.

We left January 5 in the diesel with the camper and pulling a trailer. We left around 6pm knowing we wanted to go through Chicago a little later. We drove about 4 hours and spent the night at a little boat launch in Annawan, IL. We made our way to Seward, NE the next day to Meyer Automotive. We did a test drive and decided this was our truck. We loaded it on the trailer and went back to Council Bluffs, IA to meet my friend Angie who I had met back in 2003 at the FBI Academy.

We hadn’t seen each other since 2014 so it was so fun catching up with her and seeing her in person instead of just watching each other’s lives on social media. I’m very thankful for the job that I had for 17 years because it brought me all over the country and I met some really great people. It’s really fun to reconnect with some of those people even years later. I’m looking forward to more fun visits in the coming years.

The next day we took a little detour to Cresco, IA to Alum-Line. Of course in Vug fashion, we blew out a tire while headed north on Highway 35. We are used to this at this point and were just happy it wasn’t raining.

We had heard really good things about Alum-Line and were excited to talk about our options for a flatbed. Even though we are not buying a brand new flatbed camper, we decided to put our slide-in camper on a flatbed and have boxes built in to give us outside storage. We were very happy with our meeting and excited to design the flatbed to meet our needs at a decent price.

We made our way home on Tuesday the 7th and talked most of the way home about storage, the camper, the truck, and much more. I love our road trips because we throw out weird, crazy, never-really-thought about that ideas. We’ve found ourselves getting tunnel vision in the past when we are excited about something so we have been trying to continue to think outside of the box for all of our decisions and have found that once the excitement wears off, we still really just want to save money and live simple. By selling the diesel truck and Jeep, purchasing an older truck, keeping our old camper and buying a reasonably priced flatbed, we will be so far ahead of where we would be had we bought a brand new camper and pay to store two vehicles we wouldn’t use for years.

I’m a visual person, so once we got home, I asked Craig to lay out the flatbed and camper in the garage so I could see where everything would go. We are so excited to see how much extra outside storage we are going to get. That was a huge issue for us both. We didn’t want to have to store outside things on the floor of our camper. The brand new camper wouldn’t have given us this much outside storage so that just reiterates our decision to keep what we have.

The next huge endeavor is going to be putting our house up for sale in a couple months. It’s going to be really hard to say goodbye to this house we love. We have so many great memories here but we both realize that to stay here changes what we can do in the future. We will be selling the house by owner to start. We know the pros and cons of this, but this is a decision we have made since we have the time to be home and deal with it all. We are doing our research and hopefully we find someone who sees the value of our beloved home.

We still have no dates for our next adventure. It’s all about timing. The sale of the house will determine when we leave. We will for sure be here until June to watch two of our nephews graduate. We have a tentative plan as far as what route we would like to take, but again that really depends on when we leave.

We’ll keep updating on our progress. We just wanted to share what’s been going on.