So it’s been a while. It’s been almost a year since we arrived home from our yearly westward trip in the RV. The end of that trip was pretty much the end of what we considered full-time RV travel for us. It was a fun 7-ish years hauling around the country, but we were wanting to settle down.

Last fall, we still lived in the RV on our lot in Florida. We flew out to Washington state over Christmas to visit the grandchildren. Funny thing about that trip was that we hadn’t planned on Christmas out there because they were planning on flying in to Florida for Spring Break this year. Turns out us flying out there was rather fortunate, given the pandemic arriving in early 2020 and turning everything upside down.

We made our exodus from full-time RV-ing a little more permanent early this year by buying the park model (mobile home) next door to our RV lot and moving into it. It can be seen on the right in this picture. Our existing RV lot is on the left.

In Florida, at least, a Park Model is essentially a mobile home that is permanently anchored to the ground and the axles removed. To further distinguish it from a Mobile Home (which really it is), a Park Model is limited to 499 square feet of living space. Ours is right around that, being 12′ wide by 40′ long.

As can be seen in the photo, we have a 45′ long RV port (that the truck is parked underneath in the photo). Previous owners have also had a stick-built shed added onto the front of the park model (the doors to it are behind the palm tree in the photo). They also had a four-seasons room added to the back of the RV port with a second story bonus room above.

We still own the RV lot next door. We had debated on selling it after we moved over to the “house”, but the pandemic kinda ruined that plan for now. As it turns out, we’re making some money on it by renting it out. We have a couple that will be wintering on the lot starting in late October or early November of this year on into next spring.

We’ve been keeping our RV on the lot when it is not rented. When we have renters coming in, we move the RV under the RV port on the new lot.

As mentioned earlier, our grandchildren didn’t get to fly to Florida to visit us this spring, so we haven’t seen them since the end of last year. With some travel restrictions easing late this summer, we’ve hatched a plan to go visit them here very soon. It doesn’t involve taking the RV or flying out there. We’ll update you on our plan in the next post, so stay tuned.