It's a Wander-ful Life!
Wed Mar 24, 2010
Author: Cody Bozarth
Source: Journal-Courier
It started as something of a joke.
Jeremy Weatherford and his wife, Kim, had been living in South Jacksonville for a little more than two years. He had a job as a software developer for a company based in Ohio. They were planning on moving to Cleveland by the time their son had to start school in 2012.
“Ever since I started working from home, we’ve been joking how I don’t have to be anywhere particular to work. I just need an Internet connection and a phone,” Jeremy Weatherford said. “We joked about how if we had satellite Internet, I could work on the road while Kim was driving.”
They also talked about how inexpensive it would be to visit his parents in California by driving there in increments rather than paying for plane tickets.
“All these jokes kind of transpired into, gosh, we can really do this,” Kim Weatherford said.
After attending a recreational-vehicle show and finding out what would work for them, they bought their new home — a fifth-wheel RV and a truck to pull it. They left town in the summer of 2009 and their old house in South Jacksonville was sold soon after.
Since then, the Weatherford family has been hopping from state to state. Last year, they used the residences of old friends to map their route to a summer vacation in Colorado and Christmas in California.
“Everyone has that list of people you’d love to go see if they were a half an hour out of your way but you can’t really take a trip just to see them,” Kim Weatherford said.
Typically they stay in an RV park for a week or two and drive to the next location on weekends.
Jeremy Weatherford said some people find it unusual his family lives in a house on wheels, but he’s met many other people around the nation who live the same way.
“In our experience, it’s a fairly unusual lifestyle for younger people, but it’s becoming more common for older, retired people to go full-time, sell the house and live in an RV, travel around and visit grandchildren,” Jeremy Weatherford said.
“Once the school year started it was pretty common for us to be the only people under 65,” Kim Weatherford added.
They’re back in Jacksonville now, visiting her family and organizing some of their old furnishings. When they sold their house, much of their furniture was still in it and they’re planning on having a yard sale soon to get rid of much of what they don’t need. They also had some minor repairs done on their home and used the opportunity of being able to stay with family to get it done.
“That’s one disadvantage. You need to take your whole house to the shop when it needs to be fixed,” Kim Weatherford said.
In their travels, their two children, Ian, 3, and Rinnah, 1, have been to more 200 different parks and playgrounds and about 30 different museums and science centers. Kim Weatherford said it took some time for the kids to get used to their new surroundings, but they have settled in well.
“If you ask him what things he misses, he says things like ‘the garage door,’” Kim Weatherford said. “You know, ‘the steps.’”
Ian said he likes the new house and Rinnah refers to most RVs as “new house.” Ian said he’d really like to go visit the son of one of his parents’ friends, Spencer, with whom he made friends when the family was visiting Phoenix.
“It’s put such a sense of adventure in him,” Kim Weatherford said. “If he hears about something or sees a picture of something, his reaction is, ‘I want to go there.’ ... He doesn’t have a concept of distance yet. He remembers a museum in Seattle he wants to back to and says, ‘Can we go there today?’”
While the family does enjoy life on the open road, it’s certainly not without its inconveniences.
“Something we were very aware of is we were losing connections with the local church, local play groups. Any of those social networks in place,” Jeremy Weatherford said. “On the flip side, that’s the main thing we’re looking forward to once we do settle down. Putting down our roots again.”
“It would have been nice to know more about RV and truck repair,” Kim added.
On a few occasions, bad weather and illness would keep them confined inside the small space. Once, they were stuck in Bakersfield, Calif., during bad weather and couldn’t leave without going into snow.
“Anytime we’re all sort of stuck in the RV it gets kind of claustrophobic,” Jeremy Weatherford said.
Kim Weatherford said it can be tough when her husband is in the bedroom working or on the phone and the children are only a few steps away making noise.
She said overall it has been a good experience.
“We’ve had a lot of moments where we’re sitting outside in lawn chairs in February and watching the kids ride bikes. We feel like we’re on vacation,” she said.
Their trip has been chronicled regularly online. They started blogging when they were missionaries in Thailand for about a year as a way to keep friends and family informed. But when they moved back to South Jacksonville and had their first child things were less exciting.
“I tried to blog a little bit once we got back here, but we thought or lives were kind of boring and we didn’t have a lot to say,” Kim Weatherford said. “We felt like one week just ran into the next and ran into the next. When we started looking into the RV thing ... we thought that might be an actually interesting blog.”
Jeremy Weatherford said the blog also serves as a online scrapbook of their trip.
So far, their future plans are traveling to Florida for a visit to Disney World before they begin wandering up the East Coast. They’ll visit friends along the way but don’t know for certain where they’ll find themselves.
“There’s lots of choices,” Kim Weatherford said.
