July 17, 2024. Day 10 of trip.
We woke up at 700 this morning planning on a big travel day: we got to drive across the border from Canada back into the USA. The stated goal of this trip is to visit all 48 continental states in the USA, but we’ve spent more time in Canada so far than in the USA. Heidi put on her “God bless the USA” T-shirt and we all showered in anticipation of boondocking for the next 4 nights.
Shortly after sitting down to breakfast, my phone rang and the caller ID said it was our real estate agent. We’ve been working with her for months now on the process of selling our home, and whenever she calls, it isn’t necessarily bad news, but it is almost always something that is going to cost me a significant amount of money.
Over a month ago, we confirmed that today is the day to close the sale of our house. We’ve had multiple setbacks along the way, so when the phone rang, I expected it to be something along the lines of, “The buyer backed out at the last minute” or “the financing didn’t come through and so we are going to have to delay closing.” We have a rather substantial mortgage payment and I definitely wanted to close prior to our next payment on August 1st. Now that Heidi isn’t working, and I’ve cut back, I don’t want to make payments on an unoccupied house.
Fortunately, today’s call from our agent was nothing but good news. “I’m calling to congratulate you on the sale of your house and let you know that the title company has already filed the paperwork. The wire transfer will be coming through today!”
This was a huge weight lifted from upon our shoulders. When you set out upon a 400 day journey, but your house sale hasn’t closed yet, the number of problems that can develop are substantial. Once the sale closes and the money is deposited, you feel a large amount of freedom.
Prior to starting this trip, I had saved up enough money to pay for my trailer and for Red Rover, but I chose to take out a loan for Red Rover in order to keep up my cash reserves / rainy day fund / emergency fund. Now that the sale of our house is complete, I immediately logged in to my auto loan provider website, requested a payoff amount, and initiated a transfer. Once this payment is complete, we will be debt free for the first time since we got married in 2001. As of today, I don’t have a single debt payment. If I weren’t so far away from Tennessee, I’d call up the Dave Ramsey show and schedule my “Debt Free Scream.“
Any physician who is married to a dentist has significant income, but many people don’t realize the debt burden that occurs. When we got married, I started a spreadsheet called “Debt.xls” and I’ve been tracking all of our loans since that time. Over the time we’ve been married, Heidi and I have taken on 17 different loans for a total cumulative amount of money that is very large and shall not be published publicly.
People debate about the idea of “good debt” and bad debt, and I’d argue that all of our debt was “good debt.” Most of it was for student loans or mortgages which is generally thought of as “good debt.” The most debt we ever had at a single moment was on the day I finished my Internal Medicine residency, July 1, 2008. Since that date, we’ve been diligently working on paying off all of our debt. In 2020, 15 years after completing our training at Loma Linda, we paid off our student loans. We were well on our way to pay off our final debt (the mortgage on or home) and would have paid it of later in 2024 if we hadn’t decided to buy a truck and trailer and go on this trip.
J. Reuben Clark said,
“Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.”
To summarize: Debt crushes you. As of today, I’m no longer crushed by debt. This feels amazing!
This was a lovely way to start the morning, so we finished breakfast with smiles on our faces and started our departure process. We are getting much more comfortable with the departure process and becoming increasingly efficient. I dumped all of our holding tanks and topped off our fresh water tank before we hitched up and headed south.
I bought an RV specific GPS (Garmin 895) to use in addition to Waze and it is supposed to give you “better routes” which avoid low bridges, sharp turns and so forth. This morning, I put our destination into both GPS’s and the Garmin was giving bad advice. It wanted me to enter Hwy 1 westbound for 2 miles, then exit and immediately get on Hwy 1 eastbound for 2 miles back to our original spot and then continue on our journey. I decided to go with Waze this time and got safely onto the highway. Waze then kept trying to get me to exit through downtown Vancouver, so I listened to Garmin instead and stayed on Hwy 1 as long as possible. When you have two different GPS systems telling you opposite things, you pick and choose between them as you desire.
We headed for the Pacific Border Crossing and made our way uneventfully across the border from British Columbia, Canada into Washington State, USA. We headed for the Custer rest area as we needed to eat lunch and kill some time before we could check in to Birch Bay state park. It was over 80 degrees outside and over 90 degrees inside the rig, so we tested out my system to see if we can run the air conditioner off the generator. Unfortunately, I don’t have the programming quite right on my Victron MultiPlus II Inverter yet, so it kept disconnecting the generator. We didn’t want to run out of batteries, so we turned off the generator, turned off the air conditioner, opened the windows, and “enjoyed” the heat of the rest area.
It got uncomfortably hot, but the breeze made it tolerable. We had a good 5g internet connection and I have an unlimited data hotspot plan through Firstnet, so I set up my hotspot and Heidi and I worked on getting caught up on our various computer tasks.
Most importantly, we worked on getting tail coverage for Heidi’s malpractice insurance. You’d think that after working as a dentist for the same company for 19 years that the company would cover the cost of the malpractice insurance after your departure, but Heidi’s company doesn’t provide that service to their dentists, so we have to pay for it ourselves. The insurance applications was designed for you to fill out a .pdf, then print it, then sign it, then scan it, then e-mail it back to them. That’s pretty hard to do on the road, so we came up with a workaround where we filled out the .pdf, printed it to a file, then screenshotted each page into a word document, then took a picture of Heidi’s signature, then inserted the image of the signature into the document, then saved the new document as a .pdf. It was a cumbersome process, but I’m optimistic that it’ll work out.
About 2:30 PM, we headed for Birch Bay State Park and arrived around 3PM. This park is beautiful, but the roads are narrow and the entrances to each campsite are small. After a bit of hemming and hawing, we eventually got 28DBS backed into site 20. The beach here is quite rocky, but also beautiful.
Our site is mostly covered by trees, but there is some sky view towards the road, so we set up the Starlink. It is working well, but it has an obstructed view of the sky (when it works it is great, but every few minutes there is a few seconds of no access).
I made Blackstone grilled cheese sandwiches for supper, we set up our hammock for the first time, Dexter practiced his piano outside under the trees, and Annalise is currently having a Skype online oboe lesson. Annalise picked up Oboe as her “hobby instrument” during the summer before 7th grade and she really is doing well with it. She insisted on bringing her oboe along on this trip even though she spends nearly all of her practice time on the cello, not the oboe.
Dexter and I had fun sitting on the hammock together after supper. At this point in his life, it is a rare opportunity to snuggle, so I’ll take it any time I can get it. He likes to pretend that he is tough, but I think that leaving everything behind has been harder on him than anyone else. If I were to put it in rank order I’d say: (hardest to easiest) is Dexter, then Annalise, then Tim then Heidi.
The sun is currently setting over the ocean and there is a beautiful pink glow. I’m optimistic for a good night sleep tonight. I feel like every time I visit a state park, I get to experience lots of mosquito loving and today is no exception. I think I might bust out the campfire pit after Annalise finishes her oboe lesson if I can convince anyone else to join me.
SAOTD: Heidi who was the most miserable when we stopped at the rest area, didn’t use air conditioning, and it got up to 90 degrees inside the rig.