A 24 foot Winnebago Navion to be exact, and it seems we had made the Plan C decision just in time, as when we went to pick it up after purchase, the owner of the dealership offered us a few thousand dollars to wait for another one to be delivered sometime later. And given the pandemic eliminated all of my global travel, actually all air travel, I was free to work from anywhere there was wifi, and working from the dining room of an RV not only seemed acceptable, it seemed quite attractive. On a parallel path, my work (this is Doug by the way) in a global role for one of Omnicom's ad agency networks was also in the midst of dramatic change and I had made the decision that my future was going to lie elsewhere. While that change didn't happen for me overnight, my mindset had definitely shifted to what's next. Plan C? Yeah, what the heck was Plan C going to be? Move in with the in-laws? Or pursue the pandemic fantasy we had been kicking around and purchase an RV and see the USA in our own self-contained, rolling pandemic pod. Plan B - rent a place for a year - foiled by someone's desire to be one degree of separation closer to Joe Burrow. So Plan A - plot our next steps in Canada - foiled by the pandemic.

(This is unrelated to the story, but who thinks that way? 'I'll pass on the 50+ aged couple with no kids, and instead rent it to a 220 lb 22 year old just a couple of months removed from college living.)'

We eventually found a place that was a good fit, but at the last minute the landlord abruptly backed out and said he was going to rent to a Cincinnati Bengal instead. And we'll rent a place to give living 'a bit more urban' a year long test drive before making a decision on our next permanent home. While we had no idea where we would go next, we figured we could head to a cottage in Canada - as we did every summer - and take a few months to figure it out. The first major change was that someone reached out to see if our house was still for sale and we immediately said yes (our house had previously been on the market because with both kids off to college the plan was to downsize and move to a place a bit more urban and a little less suburban). In the Spring of 2020, the pandemic pretty much changed everyone's lives, but our changes seemed to be on steroids. Let's start with the how - because it's easier. Leaving the comfort, support and familiarity of friends and family in Cincinnati to end up on a farm in rural Vermont (to call it rural Vermont is admittedly a bit redundant) where we basically knew no one. Our friends and family wonder how, and why, we so dramatically changed the course of our lives.

Golden farms website of glendale