Storage Wars

Chicago Living Room

Chicago Living Room of Rented Apartment

 

We are not the type of people who collect or shop anywhere near the amount most people do.  My wife has never ever gone shopping for entertainment, she hates shopping.  Our houses have always been uncluttered.  We thought we were minimalist, but somehow we now have two storage lockers full of stuff, one in Illinois and one in the Southwest.  We have already had the locker in Illinois for two years, at $114 per month.  Our second locker, big enough to store the truck when necessary, is $100 a month.  If we now travel around for five years, we will have incurred $15,800 in storage fees.  I can assure you that we could come close to replacing our ‘stuff’ for that price, I think.   But we have some pieces of art that mean a lot to us, like Pedro there with the big glass head and basket of blue eggs standing watch over our living room in Chicago.

So if you are contemplating extensive travels, start now to pare down your belongings,

you will still Storage Warsend up with toooooo  much  stuuuufff….

Tourist or Traveler

Sheltering Sky

Sheltering Sky

I was retired for only a couple of weeks, when I saw an interesting statement on a lady’s hand bag while riding the CTA in Chicago.  After memorizing as much of the saying as possible, a search of the Internet informed me it was an excerpt from a novel written by Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky.”

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Retirement Packing – Will it Fit Into the Truck??

Will it fit into the truck?

Will it fit into the truck?

Part of the retirement plan is to sell our car and buy a Ford F-150 pick-em-up truck.  Rather than settle in a single place, we wish to stay in small scenic towns across the Southwest.  Towns like Moab, UT; Taos, NM; and Page, AZ.  The goal is to get me closer to photography.  One cannot get great photos breezing into a town for a night or two.  I want to stay in each town for 3-6 months and experience numerous lunar cycles.  The truck is necessary to do a modern day version of the Clampets when moving from town to town.  So this weekend was the big test.  Will all of our belongings fit into a truck?  Gayle’s belongings could fit into two suitcases.  On the other hand, I have a large Epson printer, printer stand, golf clubs, computers, monitors and photo books and lenses….  On the attached photo, you can see the blue tape on the floor where I have outlined the dimensions of a Ford truck bed.  The indentations are the wheel wells.  The two large boxes at the end are wardrobe containers.  Bottom line is I have more donations to do….