And so we begin ...

Tobey and I like to travel. Before we got married I had never been outside of the U.S., but that would soon change. Our honeymoon trip to the Club Med on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas sparked the travel bug inside me. Since that week in 1980, we have had several opportunities to travel all over the world. I even went to school in 1995 to become a travel agent! Tobey has often joked that he was worried that something was wrong if I didn’t already have our next trip planned before we had even returned from a current trip!

Several years back, Tobey also started reading International Living Magazine and the Hobo Traveler Newsletter which prompted another twist to our travels – Tobey’s fascination with the possibility of retiring to a warm, tropical climate.

With that idea in mind in the fall of 2006, we purchased our 24’ Jayco Greyhawk motor home. Tobey thought we could drive to Panama (one of the hot spots for US expats according to IL) and check out locations in Central America along the way.
　

However, since we were new to the RV world and I was still teaching, we would need to limit our forays to summers for a while. We started off slowly – our first night was spent parked in front of our house! In the spring we ventured out to Rocky Mountain National Park and included our college-age son & our high-school age German exchange student. The 3-day weekend was a success so we were ready for bigger & more extensive travel. Our German student & his family flew back to Colorado in July and we planned a 2-1/2 week trip to Yellowstone & Glacier National Parks and into Canada to Banff. We all had a great time & Tobey & I were becoming quite adept at packing/unpacking, planning/cooking, limiting water usage (boondocking), and dumping our home on wheels.

I retired in June 2010 so the planning for the Panama trip began to take shape. We began to search travel forums for groups to caravan with and read others’ experiences in earnest. Christmas gifts included Mike & Terri Church’s Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping and 99 Days to Panama by Dr. John Halkyard.

After using Microsoft’s Streets & Trips software to plan a six-week summer trip, Tobey started mapping our Panama Experience. He soon discovered that we really were not ready to devote the time necessary to do the trip justice so we have scaled back to make this a Mexico only trip. And so we will begin …