We thought we knew what we wanted, and we thought we knew exactly what we would do when we got back to Florida. Then COVID-19 turned the world upside down, and then we created our own mess, and then we made it even messier. Long story short, we’ve got new wheels, and we have no idea where we’re going!

Our original plan was to put the boat up for sale by owner, get moved off the boat, and if we couldn’t sell the boat ourselves we’d leave it with a broker. We need to be north of the Florida border by June 1st (hurricane season – this is an insurance requirement), so that will likely be the sell ourselves vs. leave with broker divide. Now that I type it out, we’re still following that exact plan, but with about a hundred more question marks.

While we were in Georgetown, we finalized our listing and added a page to our site: Island Spirit 37 FOR SALE! The day I posted it, the stock market dropped 7% amid the oil price war, dropping so fast that trading was halted for 15 minutes. Do we have good timing or what?

A week later, my parents texted me that school and all sporting events were canceled.

From there, it felt like the world rapidly changed. Maybe we were a bit insulated in our cruising lifestyle, island hopping instead of watching the news as closely as we should have. By the time we got to Black Point, we could see that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. We headed to Staniel Cay for one last grocery trip before we headed back to the States. We didn’t dawdle, but we had a few things we wanted to see before we headed back so it was two weeks before we made it back to Florida.

As our arrival in Florida neared, we started seeing reports that marinas were no longer open to transients. We needed a marina so that we could get moved off the boat. Fortunately, we found an opening in Ft. Pierce so we secured our place here on April 9. At this point, we were taking the plan one step at a time. It was a huge relief to be at a dock again. We could focus on the next step: find a Class C RV to move into!

After days and days of scanning Craigslist and FB Marketplace, two things became clear. For one thing, all the affordable RVs were being sold by private sellers, the dealerships were much too expensive. That was in direct opposition with the second thing, which is that we would need to pay a private seller cash, and we have no way of getting cash. It’s clearly a huge oversight on my part that we’re in this position (this is my mess!), but we bank with an online bank and a Charleston-based credit union. Neither of those can get us cash in Florida. All the banks are closed here so we can’t walk in an open a new account. More importantly, all the DMVs are closed so whatever we buy can’t be driven for a month while we wait for a license plate and registration to be processed by mail!

The Class C RVs that we were considering ran about $30k at dealerships and about $20k from private sellers. Even if we could get the cash, there’s not a chance I’m walking around with $20k on me. Slowly this whole plan fell apart, and I’m glad it did.

We aren’t at all committed to an RV, it’s simply a means to an end: it’s a place to hold our stuff and bring us from here to…wherever is next for us. Think of it as our AirBNB/U-haul combo, without throwing money down the drain.

Eventually we decided a better option would be a truck and travel trailer. On April 14, over breakfast, I told Kyle that we should really make it our goal to buy a truck today. By 6pm we had purchased a Toyota Tundra!

We found two trucks that we liked equally, which gave us some financial leverage. In the end we purchased the one that was slightly cheaper, and the dealership took care of the tags and title for us (so we don’t need to go through the DMV and wait, we can drive this right away!). For a few days after, I kept thinking things like “we can throw that in the backseat!” and then remembering we bought the truck that didn’t have a back seat.

Back to our laptops to find a travel trailer. Here is where we had a fundamental disagreement. An RV is a burden. I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on an RV and have that cash tied up in something that will be difficult to sell, so I was looking for something old but clean, and cheap. Kyle was looking for something fast and easy, probably a newer used model from a dealership. Again, there’s the cash problem: all the money in the bank won’t help you if you can’t get to it. But the dealerships have such a high markup, we’d never get back what we put into it if we bought from a dealership. And if we’re just going to lose a bunch of money, we might as well spend it on an AirBNB. No options were off the table. We went back and forth a hundred times.

We made three trips across the state, the first of which was to a dealership where the salesman spent about ten seconds with us so that was a stupid waste of time. FYI, Florida has so many cows. I had no idea!

The second trip we saw a trailer that we would have happily bought, but the private seller who would only take cash, and we were still scrambling for ideas on how to acquire a few thousand dollars in cash. We were also trying to coordinate with another seller, she’d already sold her trailer but her dad had a trailer for sale as well and we were hoping we could see that one too.

Naturally, she didn’t get back to us until we got home again, but she sent some photos and it looked promising!

They were asking for $3900 for this ancient, crappy trailer that they claimed has all working appliances. As someone who is pretty familiar with the Florida RV market now, that is a steal. As far as I could tell, they didn’t have it listed anywhere because there’s no way they wouldn’t have sold it the day they listed it.

I scraped together all the cash we had onhand, including that emergency $100 bill that’s been in my wallet since high school, and was surprised to find that we had $3700! (We had extra cash because the Bahamas is mostly cash-based. Credit is widely accepted but it’s definitely not a guarantee!) So we still needed $200, which is an ATM-able amount. In a true testament to how out of touch we are, we had no idea how to get money from an ATM. We found an ATM and tried to use a credit card, but it told us we needed a PIN. We went home, logged into the account, and found they could either mail us a PIN or I could complete the 2FA and get a PIN now. Now is good! So with our PIN, we went back to the ATM. Nope, still nothing. It was evening, so we’d have to try again first thing in the morning as we were on our way to see this trailer, and if we didn’t succeed, cross our fingers that they’d accept less.

On April 23, we started driving across the state for the third time. We found an ATM and it let Kyle take $300 in cash out. YAY! We saw the trailer, it looked like it was exactly as advertised: crappy but adequate, with working AC.

We never did meet that woman’s father, but her mom’s name was on the title so we made a deal (I offered less, just to see what would happen, but she said she’d just listed it on FB that morning and her messages were blowing up – exactly as I’d thought, it hadn’t been listed and it wouldn’t last long!). We had to make a quick stop at Camping World and pick up a weight-distributing hitch. It wasn’t strictly necessary for such a small trailer but we’d both feel better about it because the first thing we planned to do was haul this trailer a couple hundred miles in 35 mph winds.

We got back to the trailer and handed over our cash then started to install the hitch. Naturally, it had a defective component, so we hitched up the trailer without the weight-distributing parts, then drove it to Camping World to get that piece replaced. I ended up running the full length of the campus to make sure Kyle could pull straight through around the far side of the building. Keep in mind we haven’t really driven since November, now here we are with a full sized truck and 25′ trailer!

We crossed a bridge over the ICW right before returning to our marina, it’s got 65′ clearance, so we were probably about 80′ in the air. With 35 mph winds. And a trailer. It felt like nothing! But then we arrived at the marina and got out of the truck and felt the wind. We looked at each other and said the same thing: “I can’t believe we just crossed the bridge in this wind!”

And then we both said what we were secretly thinking the whole time but never said out loud: “My biggest worry was that we’d blow a tire!” The trailer doesn’t have a spare and the current tires are a little…aged. This is the part that’s messier: we bought a trailer that needs work, and we don’t exactly have the bandwidth for that right now.

Here’s a quick tour of our 1998 Coachmen Catalina, it’s small but we’ve learned that there’s very little space/storage difference in a 20′ trailer vs a 30′ trailer, and we opted to stay smaller because it will be easier to haul!

All Kyle really wanted in a new home was a bed that could be accessed from 3 sides, so that’s a bummer for him, but look at those giant window!

Okay! So the marina we’re staying at is also an RV park, and we’ve parked our crappy RV amongst all the giant, brand new 5th wheel campers and Class A motorhomes.

We did some cleaning and Kyle killed the colony of ants that was living in it.

We had a downpour and the roof started leaking from the AC, so we took the AC apart and unclogged the drain.

Put it back together…still leaking. So we completely removed the AC and found 3 holes in the roof!

Kyle patched those, now we’re waiting for our next rainstorm, which should be tomorrow. We still haven’t tried the awning yet.

Long story short, we still haven’t started moving in.

Oh, and as for our future plan? Well, it changes daily. Like I said, we aren’t committed to the RV thing, if we want to haul it any long distance we’ll have to put new tires on it. Or we might see if we could feasibly downsize to the truck, then we can sell the trailer where it sits. The problem is that we don’t know where we can go from here. There’s no appealing destination right now, everything is closed. In the current environment, I suppose we’d prioritize a place with beautiful walking trails and comfortable temps. If we’ve downsized to the truck, we may look at monthly AirBNB stays.

Our original plan was to hop in the bus and maybe take it out to the West Coast for the summer, but that was heavily predicated on getting a gym membership for regular access to showers. Also, we planned on campgrounds being open. And parks being open. And breweries being open.

It’s a weird time to be homeless.