RV Mobile Office for Fulltiming
About Us
I am Tom Donaldson, a retired software developer who is still addicted to computing. I worked on many things while on the road, including a web site for RV travel planning: Continuous Traveler.
Before getting involved in computing I trained in an area of psychology known as Behavior Analysis. Before that I was in the US Navy aboard the USS Green Bay, PG 101.
My wife, Kay Jones, is a semi-retired teacher who loves digital photography. Kay kept a record of our travels as we wandered the country in our RV; I guess it is what folks these days tend to call a "blog".
Hit the Road
When I retired, Kay got a job teaching in Crescent City, CA, just across the border from Brookings, OR. We rented a house in Brookings (Harbor, actually) where we lived for a couple of years, kinda. Kay's job got caught up in one of California's budget crunches.
We had not found a property on the coast that we both liked and could afford. We were renting. It seemed like a good time to do something that Kay had always wanted to do: travel around the USA in an RV.
We both spend a lot of time at our computers. So much so that we wanted an RV with a floor plan customized for computing. We both depended upon the Internet a great deal. We wanted an RV that was very friendly to networking and the Internet.
There are very few RV manufacturers that will do any real customization of RV's. There are fewer still that get good ratings for full time RV'ing from the RV Consumer Group. We finally found one that would do the customizations we wanted: New Horizons RV.
Our Travels
Kay kept a "blog" of our travels on her main web site, ImageNomads.com. You can get lots of detail about our wanderings on her site.
We wandered to spots where Kay wanted to take digital photos. She had great fun processing them and putting them online on her SmugMug site. And at the same time she maintained a site on special education for adolescents, K4Teens.info. She was a busy lady!
I did tour the areas where we stayed, but I was generally more interested in playing with my computers: new computer languages, web development systems, etc.
Settle Down
We have purchased a house and moved our possessions from storage and from the RV. We will stay at home and enjoy our "new" home for the forseeable future. We will sell the RV when market conditions improve.
Making the switch from full time RV'ing and getting settled down into our new home took a lot longer than I ever thought it would. We arrived in Brookings, OR, and started our search for a house the first week of August, 2007. By early 2008 we finally got the last box unpacked. There is still much to do, but the house no longer looks like a warehouse (well, except for the garage).
Since January 2008 I have been working full time to overhaul ContinuousTraveler.com.