Budd and Merrily Nash came to explore Sequim tightly, yet comfortably packed into their Smart car, which normally rides behind their semi-truck that has now pulled their traveling home across the country since 2011.

After driving throughout Sequim and having been informed of the city’s need for additional park hosts, the Nashes decided that Sequim was a good fit for the winter.

Following their retirement, the couple has been traveling from coast to coast together and staying in any given place for any given amount of time with a purpose to eventually find a more permanent place to live out their lives together.

Thus far, the Nashes have traveled from Florida through North Carolina, Illinois, South Dakota, over the Rocky Mountains, through the Sierra Nevada and to the Pacific Coast.

Budd:

“We’ve seen such fabulous things and we’re to that point where what you’ve seen and what you know kind of fades because you stay pretty much in the moment.

I’d said the biggest thing is probably that old cliche ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ It all starts here and tomorrow it will all start there. It is too easy to get wrapped up in what you’re owed or feel like you’ve missed, and then you can’t live in the moment. We’ve had big goals like we wanted to go to Glacier National Park, but couldn’t do that because of the park sequester and the timing was off.

So we took a complete right angle from what we were doing or trying to do and we went from Helena, Mont., to Nevada and she (Merrily) went to work for Amazon for three months.”

Merrily:

“Amazon has this program and will hire people who travel with their RVs and such during their peak holiday season. There are three locations around the U.S. that have this program and one was in Fernley, Nev. We knew that Amazon offered this, but it’s all about being in the right place at the right time – just like this opportunity here in Sequim. So I said, well heck, there’s no reason in going to Glacier National Park now, and so we went to Nevada and I worked for Amazon. It turned out to be some of the most difficult work physically I had ever done. It’s 10 hours a day, six days a week on your feet. We had seen the ad and thought that might be fun, but it was grueling.”

Budd:

“So after that our goal was Port Orford, Ore., because it seemed like a survivable place in the wintertime. But given where we were, we decided to spend Christmas at Lake Tahoe. So we spent a week there and then decided we would head toward Arcata, Calif., and make our way up the coast to Port Orford.

On our way we swung through Redding and Redding is not a destination … Redding is on the way to other destinations, but we ended up staying there a few months and it was great the whole time.”

Merrily:

“I think the best thing about this whole thing is the freedom. We’ve been places where two days was long enough and then other places that we didn’t know we were going to like so much, but we have the flexibility to stay as long as we want. The only downside to all this is all our children are back east and now we have a grandson on the way.”

Budd:

“Eventually from Redding we went over to Arcada, Calif., and then worked our way up the coast and found some interesting places along the way that we hadn’t planned to. We stayed in Astoria, Ore., for about three weeks and loved it there and when we were thinking of coming up here and from my research, Sequim seemed like it would be a better fit than Port Angeles or Port Townsend because of the weather, the economy and the population is mostly retired people on fixed incomes, so economically it would be more stable.

“Then this (park host position) opportunity came up and it was like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now, we’ll probably be here until about May.

Our plan from here, though I haven’t really laid it out yet, is we want to go up into British Columbia a little bit and then over to Glacier National Park – we still want to go to Glacier! But we’ll hit it from this side instead.”

Everyone has a story and now they have a place to tell it. Verbatim is a first-person column that introduces you to your neighbors as they relate in their own words some of the difficult, humorous, moving or just plain fun moments in their lives. It’s all part of the Gazette’s commitment as your community newspaper. If you have a story for Verbatim, contact editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.