A couple of weeks ago, we took our little expedition vehicle out to Quartzsite to connect with friends. We haven’t been since 2018, mostly because life is just so comfortable here at the Fountain of Youth! It’s an ordeal to pick up and move out to a place with colder weather, lots of dust, and no hot tubs!
But we don’t have any excuses not to go now that we have the Project M.
This year it was easy to go to Quartzsite, without totally uprooting.
Revisiting this sprawling snowbird desert destination and attending the annual Escapees “Party on Plumosa” event was like coming home to old friends, and it was great making new ones too! This is one of the largest gatherings of RVers in the country, and you’re bound to bump into people you know if you’ve been traveling long enough. I forgot how much fun it can be.
It was great to see that the Escapees party is no longer a bunch of old timers sitting around sharing stories of days gone by. Now there’s music and dancing too! The Xscapers (a younger demographic within the Escapees RV Club) have done a great job bringing the generations together at this event and many others. We played cornhole with RVers half our age and danced with the boomers too!
While wandering around, we had the happy surprise of bumping into Dennis and Carol Hill, an adorable couple who we first met somewhere around 2010. They started full-timing at a young age like us, long before being nomadic was cool. We hit it off right away even though they were already retirement age by the time we first met. They gave us loads of tips about full-timing, and referred to Jim and I as “the young’uns,” a fitting title back then. I don’t think we have seen them since 2012, when we spent Christmas in Livingston at the Escapees headquarters. How cool to see they’re still traveling.
While wandering around the event, and especially after seeing Dennis and Carol, it really hit home that time moves way too quickly. On the drive home, I wondered if we are making the most of it.
This unrooted way of life doesn’t lend itself to forging long-term relationships. You have to really try to create them.
When you’re a full-timer for as long as we’ve been, you’ve gotta try try harder than the average person to create long-lasting ties, the kind that leave you with loads of funny stories to tell around the campfire.
Jim and I do our best to hang out with people, but it’s hard when you’re still working and trying to save for that ever-elusive “someday” of not having to work anymore. And meanwhile, life moves faster than you want it to. There’s just no stopping time.
Was it easy for us to take three days off to go to Arizona for this? Nope. Did I want to sleep in a cold camper in January (remember, there’s no furnace in the Project M!)? Heck no! And did I want to poop in a portable toilet, basically a bucket? Eeew! Noooooo! But I did it without regret.
Because if there’s one big takeaway I got from that trip, it’s that we’ve got to take more time to do what we love, with people we enjoy, before we’re too old to do it.
Once again, doing hard things pays off.