The Background Info

For those interested, in our pre-full timer's life we both worked for the Kettering Police Department. Denny was a patrolman and also worked as a detective in violent crimes. Linda was a civilian police dispatcher. We met at work and married after a few years, each of us bringing a son into the family.

When the City of Kettering told Denny that after twenty-five years of service they would send his paycheck home to him he jumped at the chance to retire. He retired at age 53 in June of 1992. I, unfortunately, needed to work 30 years to earn my retirement so I ended up freezing my pension eleven years shy of my retirement date in September of 1998 so we could travel while we were healthy. Thus we travel on one pension until I reach age 60.

We purchased our first rig, a Winnebago Vectra, in 1993 after seeing it at a RV show at the Hara Arena in Dayton, Ohio. We had gone to the RV show simply as a way to relieve the boredom of a snowy winter's day and came home excited about these "homes on wheels". On our next day off we drove to Cincinnati to look at the Vectras again and ended up signing on the dotted line. I had never been camping a day in my life but I thought that this would be a wonderful way to "rough it"! Since that first motorhome purchase we have owned a 1994 Fleetwood Bounder, a 1999 King of the Road Royalite fifth wheel 2002 National RV Palisades fifth wheel and a 2002 National RV Palisades fifth wheel. Our current rig is a 2011 Heartland Landmark Grand Canyon fifth wheel. More on that later.

Our original plan had once been to retire to our 14 acres of lakeside property in South Carolina, but once we bought that first motorhome we started thinking about traveling instead. We set a tentative date to start fulltiming as the year after our youngest son graduated from college, but when he married his love in his junior year of college everything changed. So in a mad rush I spent six months at a local beauty college to train and get my license as a nail technician, we sold the house, I quit my position two days later and a week after that we were officially fulltimers on our way to Myrtle Beach and a whole new lifestyle. That was September of 1998 and we haven't looked back since. If you have any questions you would like to ask, feel free to contact us at vagabrauns (at) gmail (dot) com.