It seems every time Matt and I go on vacation, we wind up looking at real estate and thinking, “I could live (or own vacation property) here.” That cute cabin in the Smoky Mountains. The condo on Condado Beach in Puerto Rico. The shore properties in Charleston. The mosquito farm in Necedah, WI (okay, we bought that without staying there first and we all know how that turned out).

But this time, we actually bought it – or more accurately, became leaseholders in a co-op in New Mexico.

As we were heading this way from San Antonio, Matt remarked that it would be really nice to have a place to just plunk down for 3 or 4 months in the winter, because it’s pretty hard to find winter sites on the fly in New Mexico and especially Arizona, and we’re sticking as closely as we can to our plan not to see snow for a while.

Briefly, the SKP Ranch is one of about a dozen co-ops on the western part of the US, under the aegis of the Escapee RV Club (Escapee = SKP, or Skips in the vernacular). This particular co-op, about halfway between Carlsbad and Artesia, NM has 120 RV sites with sewer, water and 50-amp electrical hookups. Any leaseholder can open their site to the rental pool when they’re off doing their thing elsewhere – the rentals are available to all members of the Escapee group.

When we arrived, a cowboy dinner bell was rung, and many members came out to greet us with hugs and handshakes. Being true Midwesterners, we warmly welcomed the greetings, while inwardly thinking “WTF is happening here?! Who are these people? What do they want from us?”

Turns out, they just wanted to welcome us to this laid-back and friendly community. Weird.

I should mention that Escapees, founded in the mid-80s, tends to skew toward the upper end of the age demographic, and that a new sub-group has formed for fulltime RVers who are still working on the road (Xscapers) and who tend to be younger. We’re heading to the Xscaper convergence in Lake Havasu City, AZ in January to meet up with an old Asheron’s Call friend that we haven’t seen since we all camped together at Bong Rec Center in 2001.

Thus, Matt is finally able to realize his lifelong dream of being a young fogey, because we have “purchased” site 19, which is currently an empty slate. We intend to install a casita (somewhere between a shed and a tiny house, not available to renters) and do some landscaping, which generally consists of arranging rocks just so. I’ll still probably bungle it.

The purchase arrangements are a base price for the site (currently $7500.00), plus whatever improvements have been done to it. When an owner decides to sell, they’ll get back everything they put into it other than the annual maintenance fee, which is around $1000/year and supports the RO system (the water is freaking GREAT here, seriously) and other general operations.

It will be nice to have a place to take a break from the road, and to welcome visitors, without upending our plans to see the country for the next few years.