A new beginning.

As a lot of people have experienced, the last couple of years has been life changing. We've taken a step back, thinking more about how quickly things can change and about how we're not getting any younger. And how we don't want to work until we are unable to do the things we want to do.

So we're edging our way to retirement.

As soon as we started realizing that retirement was a possibility, we started thinking about what we'd do if we didn't owe most of our week to someone else. We knew that answer was travel and spend more time with the people we care about. We started missing traveling and creating memories through experiences immediately when Covid started. But we also hated leaving our dogs at a kennel when we traveled - even more so after being locked down with them over the last couple of years. We miss those two goofs horribly when we travel.

How to solve the "she's touching me!" grumbles.

That's where the van idea was born, and for the last 2 years, that's been about all we've talked about, dreamed of, and planned for. While it wasn't our intention to just talk about building out a campervan for 2 years, the universe (and Ford Manufacturing) gave us these 2 years to do just that. Turns out, buying a cargo van isn't all that easy any more.

We placed our order in late November, 2021 for a 2022 Ford Transit 350 Cargo van with extended length, high roof, AWD and various other options. I don't know if anyone is interested, but I'll post what we did and didn't choose as options, and why, in a later post.

We were aware that buying a new vehicle had been complicated by Covid and the supply chain issues that followed. We were talking with people who had ordered in 2020 and hadn't received their van yet and we were seeing no movement on our ordered van.

By July '22, it was obvious that our order would be cancelled and we'd be expected to resubmit an order for the 2023 model - which also came with a 10%+ price increase. Thanks to pushback from all of those who were being cancelled and a few people in the business, Ford did finally concede that they would extend a private offer to reorders that would cover most of the price increase. So, we placed a new order for a 2023 Transit in Aug '22.

To make a long story shor...well, not as long,* we had better luck this time. A couple of weeks after resubmitting our order, we received a build date for the last week of October. This date got pushed further out about 6 times until we finally got to the last push back date - January 9 - with no notice of our date being pushed again. While on a much needed vacation, we got notice that our ordered van had moved into production.

Holy cow. This is really going to happen.

Email from Ford, photo not our van.

*Anyone who knows me knows I'm very rarely on the shortest path between the beginning and the end of a story - you've been warned.