RV TRAVEL, DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES

Jim is a full time RVer and it tickled me when I got to meet his friend, Shawn Newman. As an attorney, he is living the stress filled life that made Jim turn away from business as usual, retire early, and hit the road full time in an RV. Many people envy that lifestyle. But, if Shawn had retired we wouldn't have learned about all the good ethnic restaurants in town. We ate at Capitol Cho, a Korean restaurant with great food, and we spent a wonderful hour catching up with the news, and the food, and the brews in Olympia. Shawn does a lot of pro bono work, has tried cases in State Supreme Court, and is mentioned in Ann Rule's true crime book, End Of The Dream. He once represented Scott Scurlock, the guy who lived in a treehouse and made his living robbing gas stations. www.newmanlaw.us

We visited his friends, Sandy and Ted Wallden, who fed us a sumptious homemade lunch of spinach torta, fruit salad and banana bread. Their RV lifestyle is called snowbirding. They typically spend cold months in Yuma, AZ, park in the same place every year, and thus have a whole community of friends in two places. Then they return home to Bremerton and park their rig. Jim met them on the road.
Whereas, Larry and Jan Seberg don't even own an RV. They have a Thousand Trails Park membership and rent an RV owned by the park. They have their choice of about 40 different places to stay just on the west coast, but typically move to Palm Springs every year for 3 or more months and return to Olympia. We had a deli lunch at the Red Wing Casino, belonging to the Nisqually tribe, of which Larry is an elder.
The RV life is new to me. Right now it is like one long vacation, but there is another style of RV life possibile. That is where the full time RVer, Jim, has a groupie, me, who follows along in a van seeing every nook and cranny of this U.S. and regrouping with the "mother ship" along life's RVing highway.