Road Trip with Me: Solar Eclipse Part 1

Ready for an adventure? Join Camille, and her husband, Bryce, as they travel on down the road toward Texas and the upcoming solar eclipse. Things get off to a bumpy start, to say the least, with unexpected delays in getting her father moved into his condo. You’ve heard about this ongoing, less than smooth, operation in previous episodes. Well, it’s improved, some. But there’s always right field, you know. Camille will fill you in.

But, after a few more delays, off they go.  Cats, sunshine, rainbows (and lollipops?), and then bam! Ah, but Camille tells it so well. So, buckle up and get ready for her unique perspective of things when the situation is less than perfect but not as bad as it could be.

This is the first part of her multi-part Travel with Me series where she takes us with her on the road to a lifetime event like no other and all the excitement along the way.


You're listening to the remote work retirement show. I'm your host, Camille Attell. And this is the only show that helps semi-retirees figure out their remote work options.

I believe the remote work is the new retirement plan and that many retirees have both the ability and desire to work how they want so they can live how they want. Let's dig into today's episode....
 

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  Welcome to The Remote Work Retirement Show, the only show that is dedicated to remote work for semi-retirees, people leaving the workforce, and people working in retirement to help them have the peace of mind that they can live how they want without the fear of running out of money.
 
 

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Transcript

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In episode 96, we embark on an exciting journey. To go see the solar eclipse. This is part one of my road trip with me series. You're listening to the remote work retirement show. I'm your host, Camille Attell. And this is the only show that helps semi retirees figure out the remote work options. I believe the remote work is the new retirement plan and that many retirees have both the ability and desire to work, how they want so they can live how they want. Let's dig into today's episode.... Well, hello again, if you are a returning listener or welcome if you're a first time listener. I am coming to you straight from my travel trailer. Dinette booth. And that kicks off the topic for today, which is the road trip with me series. I've done this. One other time. But this time I'll do a multi-part series. As we head towards the solar eclipse. So couple things I want to tell you before we dive in. Number one I'm absolutely exhausted. So. I was even debating whether or not to record the podcast today, but I thought, you know what, wouldn't it be cool if you just got the real behind the scenes, look, instead of the curated produced podcasts, you could really truly journey with me. As I dragged myself halfway across the country to go see the solar eclipse. So that that's number one. I'm a little tired. You might hear it in my voice. You might not. If you aren't familiar with how I do these podcasts. The second thing I'll tell you is because I'm on the road and in my travel trailer, I don't have all my equipment with me to do the podcast. Normally I have a really good microphone. Today I'm using my headset. I think it will be okay. But if you hear some strange noises, just know. It's my headset and not a fancy mic normally. Uh, if you come back and listen to other shows or go back and listen to old shows, you'll probably hear a slight difference in the audio. The last thing I'll tell you is I had. I had planned to do this series along with the route we were taking. But if you, if you travel much or if you own an RV or some kind of a, if you're nomadic, I guess I should say in any way, you probably know that travel plans. Often get. Thwarted, right? Like the best laid plans can be impacted. And so that's where I'm going to start this story today is that our plans were impacted and that's pushed us back. So I don't have an exciting, I mean, it's exciting. I actually have some exciting stuff to share with you, but I thought that I would do these. These, uh, episodes the series based on some of the locations I would be at. That didn't happen. So I'm just going to tell you the down and dirty. Of what happened on part one. And by the way, we are headed to Texas. So we drove from California. And we are headed to Texas. And we made it as far as Arizona. In two days. Okay. So let me just tell you what's going on here. Let me back up and tell you that. All the whole month of March. Was supposed to be a month of getting ready for this trip. I have this travel trailer that I purchased last year. I wanted to get it out of storage. My plan was to just test all the systems, take it out. Make sure everything was working. I also wanted to introduce my two cats. Mo and Parker. I wanted to introduce them to the travel trailer so that they could get used to it. Now Parker Parker used to travel with, with us back in the day when we were my husband, Bryce and I were traveling in a motor home. From 2016. To 2020. And a little bit in 2021. Okay. So we had been traveling that whole time. Parker was with us that whole time. And he is a road cat. He loves the road. He doesn't love the driving, but he loves being at camp sites. He's friendly. He gets out and he walks around. He loves laying in patches of sun. He just likes it. I think he's a real adventure cat. Now we didn't have Mo during that period of our lives, we got her a little later and then we took her out on the road in 2021. We did one trip in 2022 and Mo absolutely hates road trips. I mean on this particular road trip. I don't think I've seen her come out from under the blankets in like 24 hours. So I'm a little bit worried about Mo not so much about Parker. And again, my whole plan in March was to really test all of this stuff out so I could work out the kinks. And Bryce and I, uh, even even went and invested in a little bit of solar, although invested is that I shouldn't even use that word because. A lot of the folks that I know in the RV community, they really invest in solar, like huge panels. You know, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, we didn't do that. I just bought. Like two panels off of Amazon and we're going to try to hook it up. We don't even have it hooked up yet. So you might be wondering, well, what happened then in March, if you had. A plan for March. Why are you saying in this episode that none of that happened? Well, if you've been following along. Uh, in the last couple of episodes. Then you may have heard me talk about how I was helping my father buy a condo. And I was trying to get him moved in. The idea was we were going to get him moved in. In February. So that I would have all of March to focus on this trip. Well, that did not happen because again, the best laid plans. Often go awry. And so what happened with the whole condo situation is. A 30 day, escrow turned into something like an 80 day escrow. I won't go into all the gory details, but it was not pretty. I had to throw myself at every different version of loan. Uh, loan scenarios and borrowing scenarios. And because we're, we're moving him into a retirement community. The retirement community has its own set of rules. And high level here's what happened. The lender approved me with one version. But the retirement community rejected that version. And then the opposite happened. The retirement community approved me for one type of scenario. But the lender would not. So I had to work so hard. To come up with so many different creative ways. To get this loan closed. And. Yes, it closed. It closed about a week before I was leaving. And then we had to move my dad. Right. My dad who is almost 81 years old. And God bless him has about 80 years of stuff. In his, in his, where he used to live. We had to figure out how to. Uh, encourage him. I'll use the word, encourage. I encouraged him to let go of those things and downsize into a one bedroom condo. A very nice one bedroom condo. I will add with plenty of space. But it's not a three-bedroom house. And he does not have a garage. Okay. So if you could just imagine, and I think. Some folks listening can relate to this because I know. Many many people. Have gone through something similar with relocating a parent or a family member. And I know that I am not the only one. Um, but this was like just a comedy of errors all around. And I'll say one more thing about this. I'm I'm kind of nervous. I'm actually really nervous about this. I. I'm going to say I moved my dad in, but I should not say that. Because then when I went to the leasing office or what I thought was the residence center. To get him registered, get his car approved and get him his membership card. They told me that I had to draw up a lease with my own father. And then I had to submit that lease to the HOA board. For them to approve him as a tenant tenant. Which none of that was disclosed to me. Before the law before the purchase. If I had known that I would not have pushed so hard. To purchase this property. Because now it puts me at risk. It puts him at risk. So. At the time of this recording, we're still in the pending status. Oh, my goodness. Please pray for me. Send good vibes, whatever, whatever it is that you do. Please. I just want this to get approved so that my dad can get some peace and some rest. Because if he does not get approved, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'm going to have to move him out. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. So all that happened before. We were supposed to hit the road. So none of the stuff that I was planning to do with my travel trailer, did I get to do in March? Uh, it was just chaos, honestly. So somehow in the same week, I was able to move my father and get the travel trailer out of storage. I get it packed. Um, Bryce and I worked feverish. Really on getting all the systems together and loading it up and so many different things. So many hurdles to jump through. But we did it. However, we were delayed by one day. Part of that was because of everything happening with my dad. The other part of that is Bryce has had the good sense to look at the weather conditions where we were headed. So one of our, well, the second day we were going to be headed to Arizona. He saw a big storm come in with like two to three inches of snow. So he decided, you know what, it's better that we leave a day later. Give us one more day to pack one more day to get my dad settled. We'll leave a day later. And then we'll bypass that storm because the storm will have melted by then. So we thought. Okay. So now we're into the actual road trip part of this episode. So we get on the road. We drive. We believe California, Southern California. We were going to go to Loughlin, but we decided not to go over any mountain passes because. Our car that pulls the travel trailer is just a smidge small. In theory, our car should be powerful enough to tow the travel trailer we have, which is a Gulf stream. And it's around 3,600 pounds. But the. It doesn't leave us a lot of extra room to pack and have and carry extra weight. We, we really had to be diligent about how much weight we carried. And what we put in. Secretly. I was really happy about this because my husband, who's not in the rig right now with me. Um, he is notorious for overpacking. You know, if you want to bring one or two books on a trip, he wants to bring 10. You know, you need to bring two pairs of shoes on a trip. He'll bring like four or five. Right? So the fact that we had to travel light was great. Because I can travel. I have no problem with that. And when he goes backpacking, he, he goes backpacking in the Sierras where he used to quite a bit. He can travel light. But I think he sees an RV or travel trailer the way he sees a house like, oh, well there's plenty of room. So let's just fill it up. And I'm more like, no one, I bought one pair of shoes. No joke. Just one, because they're the kind that you just slip into so I can use them for slippers and I can use them for walking and I can use them for everything else. I brought. Uh, two sets of silverware that are not even silver. They're like a M. Some they're not plastic, but there are another material that. I wouldn't say they disintegrate or you throw them away, but they will keep for a long time. Right? I'm that kind of person. I'm the minimalist. Okay. So we got everything in, but we decided not to go over those mountain passes just on day one, because we didn't know how the car would perform. I should also mention we have taken the travel trailer out one other time. We did a trip back in November. Two Borrego Springs in California. And. That trip was a good test, but we did not pack the travel trailer with much of anything. So we really didn't know how our car would perform when this was truly packed. So we get on the road and we decided, instead of going to Loughlin, we would go to needles, California. And then that would position us to then get to either, Holbrook Arizona or Winslow Arizona. We were kind of debating between the two. We had never been through Winslow before on our other road trips. And of course you have to see Winslow. I mean, It's famous. Right? It's the song, which I can't sing right now. So we decided to go for Holbrook, which was a big, big day on day two. So day one actually was really good. I mean, it was raining really hard, but. It, we got through it. We got to the campsite, really nice campsite in Needles California. All those great desert sounds. The birds were chirping. And then right after we pulled in. There was a huge, beautiful rainbow right across the sky. And then there was a second rainbow right above it. I saw a double rainbow. I don't think I've ever seen a double rainbow before. My husband tells me these things happen all the time, but I've never seen one. So for me, it was pretty darn magical. So that was day one.. So day two was a real journey because. Remember, this was the day that we were supposed to bypass the snowstorms in Arizona. Well, new storms came in. And so as we were going over a couple of passes, we got the, the hardest. Hale slash grapple slash slushed thing you've ever seen. I mean, maybe you've seen worse actually, because I live in California. So what do I know? But this, it was ferocious. I mean, this came in so fast and so heavy. And I got really, really nervous on the roads because we were going over these passes. So you go up, you go down, you know, And at one point, my husband said, we need to pull off. Now when Bryce says we need to pull off, you know, It's a bad situation. He's really good under pressure. He's a great driver. He's he's very much in control, so I knew things were bad. So we pull off. Many people pulled off to the side of the road. But many people didn't and cars were just flying, flying, flying. So at one point I said, we really should get out of the car. And I was like, whoa, it's that bad? He's like these other cars are going very fast and the roads are slick and I'm like, oh gosh. So now I'm terrified we get out of the car. I'm like climbing up a hill in the snow because I'm like, well, if someone hits our car or any other car, it's going to slide into the side. So I'm getting up this hill. So I'm climbing up a snowbank. It's like 33 degrees. I mean, my one pair of shoes, I didn't wear socks that day. Of course. And you know, I'm barely dressed for this stuff. So. Luckily that storm settled. After about 20 minutes, we got so lucky. And then we thought we were out of it, but of course. We hit another similar storm. We had to pull off again. This time, we were able to make it to an exit. We pulled off. And my husband checked the weather. We looked at the map. I'm really into these radar maps where you can see. How storms move and how quickly. We had exactly a 20 minute window. To get out of that area before we would get socked in by a much longer storm. So he's like, we gotta just go for it. And we were only, like, at that point we were only 10 miles away from our destination. But of course still at elevation, so still dangerous. So luckily that 20 minute window held up. We got about. I want to say about six or seven miles in, we were driving really slow. And then it started to flurry again that not that heavy hail slash grapple stuff. And whew, we got off the freeway and we're able to pull right into our campsite. So. It was, it was intense. I mean, it started off as sunny skies and really a nice day with dry roads. But it ended with, uh, just these intense storms. So here we are. I'm not going to do anything today. I'm not going anywhere. I was going to go see the petrified forest, but I'm just going to chill out. I'm reading a great book called remarkably bright creatures about an octopus. Maybe you've read it. And I'm drinking coffee sitting in the sun. And, uh, working of course. All right. Well, stay tuned for part two. Thanks so much for listening. If you're looking to get back into the workforce, change jobs, work remotely, or learn artificial intelligence, check out my free remote work training so you can get ahead of the trends and stay ahead of the pack. Click the link in the show notes, or go to www.camilahealth.com and press the free training button.