Steven Winokur here. Born in October of 1959 in Philadelphia I've been a native of Philly and its suburbs for my whole life. When I was young, I threatened to go to school in Alaska or California - as far away as I could get - and yet I wound up going to college in Philly as well. I met my wife-to-be, also a native of the Philly suburbs, and we never thought about going anywhere else!
As we built our life together, and were raising our three kids, we never put a lot of stock in travel. We did a vacation here and there, but nothing big, nothing really extravagant.
Twenty two years later, my mid life crisis wound up with me coming out as a gay man, throwing my life and the life of my family into quite the turmoil. But we are a strong family, with strong ties to each other, and with a lot of work everyone is doing quite well.
Professionally, my life took a few interesting turns. I was trained and practiced as a certified public accountant for many years, until in 1995 when I joined a company with the express purpose of taking it public at some point. Working with one of my best friends and a lot of very talented, very smart people, we accomplished that goal, and I can say that I was very proud of the company that we built. When I left thirteen years later, I was burned out and needed to take a couple years off. During that time I lost 165 pounds and exercised myself into terrific shape. Then I chose to join another company where, over the next eight years, the stresses of work and the stresses of life reversed many of those healthy changes.
During all these years I also had the good fortune to date many terrific men. I had two serious relationships; one lasting one year and as of January of 2018, I was six and a half years into another. Things were not always easy... but we were trying to make the best of what life handed us. We had built a good life together, including buying an RV as a bridge between his love of camping in a tent and my ideal of roughing it at the Ritz.
In January of 2018, much of what was good in my life seemed to take a turn south. Work was becoming increasingly challenging, my relationship was increasingly challenging and with the kids all out of the house for good, the house was feeling like more of a burden than an asset. Within an incredibly short period of time, my relationship ended, and retirement seemed like the best course of action to avoid making a bad situation worse at work. But I was 58 years old and didn't want to "stop." I realized I needed to find a new challenge, a new set of goals; one of those goals being to see more of my kids who were now living in Northern California, Southern California and New Mexico.
Feeling like life in the RV was where I was the happiest and with the goal of seeing the kids and the country, I decided that ditching the house and hitting the road was the retirement path for me. No more accumulating stuff... now I will accumulate experiences!
The old RV was too small to move into so I began the search for a bigger rig. All too quickly I found the perfect one... a 2016 Newmar Ventana Model 4041 with only 12000 miles. The only problem was that it was located in Oregon!
Let the adventures begin...