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Mike and Kathy Develle embarked on a full-time adventure in crossing the country using a 5th wheel trailer and a diesel truck. It didn't start out this way, but it was a 15 year dream that was made true by the divergence and confluence of several events.

In June 2001, Mike was "retired" from his job as a CIO for a small company in the Seattle area. During the next six months, and not being able to find a job in a dismal job market, we decided to sell the house, store the furniture, buy an RV, and go touring the country for a couple of years.

In the course of preparing to sell the house, we discovered a clot of rot in one of the bathrooms (see pix), a leak in the 45 year old oil fuel tank (more pix), and a number of smaller easier to handle problems. We repaired all the problems, got the house ready to sell, and put it on the market by March 2002.

The housing market in the Seattle area was as dismal as the job market (you think maybe they are related??), but we found a buyer in about three months with the help of our excellent agent, Maury King. While we were negotiating the sale of the house, Mike got diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. That was going to slow down things a bit. We sold the house and bought a 5th wheel trailer and truck anyway, figuring that things would work out and we could actually do this trip. Curing the cancer took four months of chemotherapy, ending in December 2002, and major abdominal surgery in January 2003.

After removing Mike's prostate and forty lymph nodes in that January surgery (by Dr. Paul Lange at the UW Medical Center), we discovered that all of the lymph nodes were benign and we could go on our trip after Mike recovered from the surgery. Well, recovering from surgery when you have a fourteen inch gash in your stomach took until May, one step at a time. That recovery included an unwelcome staph infection and another one week stay in the hospital. Mike is part of a cancer study program at the University of Washington and will be monitored for the rest of his life to see if the chemotherapy actually did any good (statistically).

In May, we vacated the small apartment we had rented and got on our way by June 1. That is the official "start date" of our full time travels.

During Mike's dealing with the cancer, he decided to publish The Prostate Gazette, a newsletter to friends, family and neighbors during his cancer treatment. This was so much fun that he decided to continue the publishing under a new name, The Travel Gazette, to write about our travels. They have been included here in the Travelog section.

Along the way, we discovered that there is a lot of help for RVers on the Internet. Mike especially likes a web site put together by a fellow IBMer: See Ya Down The Road, from which Mike has drawn inspiration and stolen many ideas. Other web sites of interest are listed in the Links page.

We hope you enjoy our web site. Thanks for tuning in. The web site is complete but will never be finished. Keep tuning in.

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