Empty Nesters
In 2017, Adriana and I found ourselves about to become Empty Nesters with the graduation of our youngest son and our nephew (who was living with us in San Antonio, TX). After much discussion, we decided that two Empty Nesters should NOT be roaming about a four bedroom house, with three of the rooms constant reminders of our little birdies having left the nest. It was time to downsize.
BCS, here we come!
Our youngest son was headed to College Station, TX to attend Texas A&M, the Best University in Texas (a future BLOG post), so we decided to take this opportunity to downsize and move with him to BCS (Bryan College Station, as the locals call it). Our son would be living in the dorm, but we would need to find a place for ourselves.
After looking at a few apartments and townhouses where many of the A&M students stayed, we decided on an apartment complex that was populated more by medical students and professionals, than undergrad students. We selected a 2-bedroom, 2-bath, with an attached garage.
Now that we had a target in mind, it was time to start packing.
Downsizing
How do you fit a 4-bedroom house into a 2-bedroom apartment?!? The answer is downsizing. We had lived in our house for 15 years, as like most home owners, we had filled every room with treasures, gifts, and memories. This was the scariest decision in the process as we were moving away from a place where we had been so happy for so long. However, I finally convinced my wife that “we were taking the memories with us.”
We started packing up each room, and considering and reconsidering what was essential, what was functional, what was treasured, what was desired, and what was superfluous. At first, nothing seemed superfluous. But as the packing went one, we started to ask “Why are we keeping this?”
Some decisions were easy, such as the first 50-gallon tote of books that had been collected over the years, but now made their way to the second-hand store. Some decisions were more difficult, such as the second 50-gallon tote of books that left for the second-hand store. And some were downright painful, such as our treasured leather couch and loveseat given to us by my parents as a house warming gift.
Eventually we were packed and ready for the trip to BCS.
But we had one last night in our beloved home…
And finally, even Grover was ready to go
We learned many things during the move, but that is another future BLOG post.
What was most eye-opening was the amount of things we moved before giving it away!
Some things are just too treasured to give away.
Stay-cationing
Stay-cationing is the new catch phrase for visiting your home town and surrounding area like you were tourists. Now that we were planning to leave our beloved San Antonio, we made a bucket list of everything we had managed NOT to see in the 30 years since I arrived in 1987, in the 27 years since Adriana had arrived in 1990, and the 18 years since Antonio IV was born in 1998.
We tried to see as much of San Antonio as we could before we left, but also started to see everything we could in BCS when we arrived.
After arriving in BCS, we started to visiting attractions in the area and thought “How can we do this over and over again all over the nation?”. We came up with a few ideas:
1) We could take traditional vacations
2) We could move around the country and stay-cation
3) We could build a tiny-home and travel around the country
4) We could live out of an RV and move around at will
Although the title of this post tells you which decision we are currently leaning towards, I’ll tell you more about each plan and our conclusions in future blogs..