Hi, my name is Connie, and this is the story of how a high school English teacher ended up living an adventure on the road in an RV offering proofreading services to the world. Hopefully, you will find it inspirational and funny. Believe it or not, it all started in the summer of 2017 when I went on a Match.com date. I had been divorced for a few years and wasn’t looking for anything serious, but I found my destiny anyway. I met my husband, Mark. It doesn’t usually happen this way, but the first time we met in person, everything clicked, and that was it. My crazy matched up to his, and we’ve been together ever since.
Mark and I are both very social outdoor people. We love camping, hiking, kayaking, and traveling everywhere. We even hiked the West Highland Way in Scotland together, 100 miles of rough terrain and pure joy.
When we met, Mark was working in industry as an emergency safety manager; he hated it 🙂 I was a high school English teacher teaching senior English in the teeny town of Dandridge, Tennessee. I had been there for over 20 years, a big achievement, yes. But I had spent my childhood moving all over the United States and missed exploring new places. Mark was an army brat, and he spent his childhood moving all over the world. We both had wanderlust that didn’t really match up to our jobs. We’re both veterans, Mark in the Army and I in the Navy, so we’re not afraid of new experiences.
When we started discussing our future plans, we both agreed that we wanted to travel as much as possible, exploring the United States. So, we began formulating what we came to call the master plan. When Mark was in the Army, he had undergone some training as a medic and had always thought that he probably should have been a nurse. So, we decided that when his son, Logan, finished college, he would return to school and earn his degree in nursing. This would allow us, when I retired in 2026, to travel around the United States, moving approximately every three months. This plan was very exciting. Our insurance would be covered, and we would have the security of my state teacher pension.
We figured we would just wing everything else. Mark moved to Dandridge to be with me, and we adopted a sweet little puppy named Lexi.
Well, you know what they say about making plans, as soon as you think you’ve got everything figured out, something happens to change everything 🙂 The universe was listening when we were making our master plan. A few months later, Mark was laid off from his job, and we decided he might as well pursue his dream of attending nursing school. At the age of 50, he returned to school, and it was tough. He was working part-time at the University of Tennessee Medical Center as a CNA and attending school full-time, but he managed to do it. After finishing school, he returned to the University of Tennessee Medical Center to work in the emergency room as a nurse.
Which brings us to me. I was teaching away at Jefferson County High School, just as I had been for over 20 years. We knew what Mark was going to do after I retired, but I knew I wouldn’t do well in retirement if I didn’t have anything to keep me occupied. So, I started to consider my skill set as an English teacher. I decided that after 30 years of grading English papers for teenagers, it would be nice to help adults with their writing. I took some courses on proofreading and began preparing. I volunteered to do Beta reading for an author I followed, and I enjoyed it.
Although we had camped in a tent for years on vacation and were very happy doing so, we knew that wouldn’t be practical once we started traveling, especially with the dog. We started looking at travel trailers and RVs and all the different types available. We knew nothing, but we figured we’d learn. In the end, we decided a class A RV, towing my little Fiat behind, would be the best way for us to go.
In the meantime, several significant events occurred. COVID-19 hit, which changed how Mark had to go to school and how I had to teach at school. Logan got married and started working in special education with his beautiful wife. The state of Tennessee then decided that the nine months I served during Desert Storm, while in the Navy, could be counted toward my retirement. This sped up my retirement date to May 2025.
We also decided to rescue another little dog, Otto. When I retired, it would be the four of us hitting the road together.
In the Fall of 2024, we began preparing. We started cleaning out the house and preparing it for sale. We decided to focus on traveling throughout the Western United States. Neither of us had spent any time there except for a few vacations, so it would be a new environment for us.
The search for the perfect RV wasn’t going well. At first, we thought we should get a used RV and just fix it up. We looked at several and had them inspected based on the suggestions of everyone. All of them, without exception, would have cost us more money than if we had gone with a new one. We started looking at new class A RVs, and in January 2025, we finally found the perfect one.
Boy, when we started cleaning out the house, we realized how much stuff we had accumulated. We sold a little of it, gave a lot of it away, and finally put the house up for sale in April.
Mark had been speaking with agents at several travel agencies about nursing jobs out West. He interviewed and got the job at Good Shepherd Hospital in Hermiston, Oregon. This put everything in place for us to leave on our adventure at the end of May.
As I finished school, everyone kept asking me to do a travel blog so they could follow our adventures. So, I set up this webpage to cover my remote proofreading and a travel blog:) We plan to spend the next ten years exploring as many states in the West as possible. We are starting in Oregon and will move to the Southwest in the Fall. Join me as we explore Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and every quirky, weird place we find along the way.
Hopefully, this will keep me busy and out of Mark’s hair:)