Saturday

Last Saturday. Lathrop State Park. Our last night out before we got back to the kids. Lathrop is another special place for us. About 8 years ago, Judy and I did an out-of-town job in Monte Vista together. There was a small nonprofit in Monte Vista that needed an audit, but there weren’t any CPAs in the neighborhood to do their work. We only worked in Denver at the time, but just to do something different, and to help out a small organization, we decided to travel there in the motorhome. We did the work together. It was fun. On the way home we were struck by the potential of what we had just done. Colorado has lots of small towns that are not near any large metro area. How many small nonprofit organizations are there that don’t have access to what we do?

We could do this on purpose. We could promote this as an extension of what we were already doing in Denver. We could move into the motorhome and travel to small towns all over Colorado if there were enough organizations that needed us. If we were already living in our motorhome, there really wouldn’t be much in the way of extra travel costs, so what we do would be affordable for the organizations that needed us. People work all their lives so they can do something fun and off-the-wall when they retire, like full-timing in a motorhome. We could go full-time *before * it was time to retire. It’s an easy day’s drive from Monte Vista back to Denver, but we got so excited talking about our new idea, we didn’t make it all the way home that day. We stopped early in the day at Lathrop State Park, to spend the rest of the day talking our way through all the possibilities. That was the day that launched our life on the road.

Oh, and the view there doesn’t suck.