Road To Discovery Travelers Find Themselves - And A New Life - On The Road

Admit it: Sometimes when you pull onto I-90, you feel like driving until you run out of gas. Right?

It’s not necessarily that you hate your life. It’s not even that you’re fully convinced things are any better down the road.

But, still, you feel the draw. To head out. To … just … go.

Two separate couples who have done just that recently passed through Spokane. Both ended lives set in one place to begin a new existence on the road.

One couple went in search of America. The other merely went. Both ended up finding themselves.

Ron and Barb Hofmeister hail from Michigan. At 63, Ron is a retired deputy director of Michigan’s department of transportation. He and Barb, 58, have been married for nearly 11 years.

For more than half that time, they have been what is known in the recreational-vehicle world as “fulltimers” - modern nomads who drive their RV from one section of the United States to the other.

They are also authors of a book, “An Alternative Lifestyle: Living and Traveling Full-time in a Recreational Vehicle,” and they publish a bimonthly newsletter called Movin’ On.

The Hofmeisters have made their life their job, and they enjoy both.

“The thing that people don’t realize is the ease of living this way, now with ATMs and voice mail and such,” Barb says. “There’s no reason to be out of touch.”

Their RV is fully self-contained, with a separate bedroom, a 7,000-watt generator, extra holding tanks for fresh water, a shower-bath, television, microwave, refrigerator, freezer and a computer on which they compose their newsletter.

When they stopped in Spokane, they arranged to have two of their grandchildren flown in. After picking the 9-year-olds up at the airport, they traveled for three weeks - touring parts of Glacier National Park - before sending the girls home.

They are part of a growing movement. In 1987, the television news magazine “20-20” did a segment on the RV movement. The report estimated that some 250,000 full-timers were then on the road.

“Now it’s up to nearly a million, according to the last estimates by RV Magazine,” says Barb.

“We say right up front that it’s not for everyone,” adds Ron. “You really have to cut some things away from your life.”

But it fits him and Barb just fine.

“Not too terribly often we’ll be driving down the road and I’ll say to Ron, ‘Stop. I could stay right here for the rest of my life.’ This happened on Route 2 going into Montana about four years ago. And then Ron reminded me how much snow they get.”

She laughs. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

Stopping is exactly the point for Bruce and Julie Madsen. The former residents of Cleveland, Ohio, are relatively new to the road.

“How to live on the road for us is room service,” Julie says.

Yet the Madsens do boast similar backgrounds to the Hofmeisters. Bruce, 51, was a 25-year employee for General Electric while Julie, 48, had a thriving psychological practice.

But both wanted more.

“Sitting in a room with four walls listening to people’s pain, after a while, you just say, ‘I gotta get out of here,”’ says Julie.

Bruce, meanwhile, had been raising his three children from a previous marriage. A single parent for 14 years, he was stifled at work.

“I discovered that I had a better relationship with my computer terminal than I did with some of the people I worked with,” he says. “And that wasn’t enough.”

When the two met three years ago at a potluck dinner, something clicked. They got married at a potluck, and then held a third potluck last summer when they took off.

What they’d decided to do was get beyond the headlines that seemed to cast a sense of gloom over their lives. Natural and man-made disasters weren’t situations they’d had to face in their Shaker Heights home.

“Reality and what I was seeing (in the news) were two different things,” Bruce says. “So we cooked up this scheme to do something different.”

What that entails is traveling around the country, looking for stories of common people, writing them up for whatever market they can crack. A suburban Cleveland newspaper runs a weekly column of their writing, a Midwest tabloid magazine also buys their stories and they run a regular column on the Internet.

Eventually, they plan to write a book titled “Stories From the Heart of America.”

“We left with the theory that there were a lot of good people out there and all we had to do was find them,” Bruce says. “And it wasn’t too hard.”

For example, there’s the 50-yearold Vista volunteer who convinced the Butte, Mont., city council to build a memorial to a group of dead miners. And there’s the teenager whose efforts led to a series of community dinners for the homeless in Billings.

“When we were younger, the spirit of adventure was to be able to make a living,” says Julie. “And now it’s more of a returning to something that was equally as exciting as going away to college. But now it’s going to the world.”

Where the gas gauge never runs low.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by A. Heitner