The Seven Year Itch

With apologies to Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell!

What most RVers get when they’ve been in one place too long – and how long is different with everyone, from a few days to several months – is called “hitch itch.” Hitch itch is the desire to pull in the electric, water and sewer hookups, haul down the antenna and the awnings, close the slide rooms, and hit the road. For where? Sometimes it doesn’t make any difference at all, just OUT THERE and AWAY FROM HERE.

What we have now is different. It’s called the Seven Year Itch, but it’s not the usual seven year itch. We’ve been full-time RVing nearly seven years (September 5 will be the 7th anniversary of Our Life on Wheels.). Maybe that’s part of what’s behind our desire to get the park trailer. We are certainly feeling a need for a little bit more room, but we aren’t ready to stop our traveling. So a trailer on our site will give us more room for moving about, and keeping Rosie will allow us to continue traveling when our health situations allow it.

When you think about it, our staying put this year for medical reasons could be called a sabbatical. When we get going again, maybe it’ll be another seven years before our next sabbatical!

Another part of our seven year itch is traditional with us: every seven years since we got married August 1, 1960, we have (privately) renewed our marriage vows to each other. Usually it’s just acknowledging that we are together, have been together, and plan to keep it that way. No ceremony.

Well, this year will be our 49th anniversary. That’s seven times seven, so maybe we’ll have to go out to dinner or something, have a glass of wine. Come to think of it, we can cook a steak at home and have more than one glass of wine! We’ll see when the day arrives. (As an aside, the nice couple from across the road are also celebrating 49 years this August, and they are staying the summer!)

Back to “hitch itch.” No, we really aren’t feeling it right now, at least not seriously. We know why we’re off the road this year and it’s okay. But as we look up and down the street here in the SKP Saguaro Park, we see that we are the only people still here in the first six sites, and across the road, only two sites of the first ten have anyone in them. Our immediate neighbor to the east pulled out last Sunday morning, heading for a long summer touring Alaska!

According to the official count as reported on the local website, there are only 110 leaseholders (out of 297) and 34 renters in the park today. Occasionally we’ll see a boondocker pull in over one or two nights; we used to have 13 to 15 every night in the winter. The 110 leaseholders here are probably mostly those who have “hung up the keys” and stay year-round, or maybe travel just once in a while.

When we have been traveling and blogging about what we’ve seen and done, a number of our regular readers have told us they feel we are taking them with us to places they have never seen, or places they have seen years ago. They say they are traveling vicariously, through our eyes and on our wheels. This year we are following several other RVers the same way. A number of our friends have taken us through Utah this year, the several National Parks and National Monuments that are spectacular in their desert landscapes, sculpted by wind and water. Others are now in Missouri, seeing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home and Amish homesteads and baby llamas and back roads and ancient cemeteries. Some are getting ready to attend the annual SKP Escapade in Sedalia, MO next week. They’ll tell us all about it in their blogs, and we’ll enjoy along with them.

So what else are we doing? The trailer has taken precedence over remodeling the casita, not for what needs to be done, but for what needs to be paid! Not only the purchase, but having it dismantled from its present location, then moved here and reassembled. And the only furniture in the trailer is the dining room table and chairs, and the bed. So we’ll have to outfit it to make it livable. Are we excited about that? You bet! We’ve got lots of business to keep us occupied in this off-the-road part of … Our Life on Wheels.