Interview: Life on the Road

This weekend's interview is with Suzy Whitmore. Suzy and her husband, Frank, owned two pizza parlors in the lovely Santa Ynez Valley in California. I heard that they sold the pizza parlors in order to travel around in an RV with some parrots. You can see why I had to find out more....

Why did you guys leave the pizza parlor for life on the road? Was there a specific moment in which you looked at one another and realized that you wanted something else? Or was it more gradual?

It was a little of both. We have always loved to travel and we did so as much as possible while we lived in CA, but with a busy restaurant, you can only go so far. So the more we talked about traveling full-time, the more we planned how to go about actually doing it. Frank researched all sorts of things to do to make money while traveling, and we came across the company that we worked for our first year on the road. So one day, after almost 9 years of the pizza business and two restaurants, we realized that there was no time like the present, and much more to life than a 80+ hour work week.

We had sold one of the restaurants about 2 years earlier and we were just coming out of one of the best years with our original pizza place. We decided that this was a great time to sell with a very appealing restaurant, so we put an ad in the paper. We, of course, had our job all lined up. This way we still made enough money to cover all of our expenses on the road so all of our retirement dollars stay untouched along with the restaurant proceeds until we hit the golden years of life. So after renting out our house, we hit the road with birds in tow (and a little Jeep Wrangler) on May 22, 2005 and have honestly never regretted it.

Can you describe how you spend an average day now?

An average day at work is: Meeting and greeting all of the sponsors and guests coming to the races at the hospitality tent. Since there are three racing days at each NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) event, there are a different group of roughly 75 people that attend our hospitality tent for the day. The hospitality tent is set up right next to the area called "the pits" where they work on the car and take it apart and rebuild it after each round. It is amazing to watch these guys tear the car apart and the guests are all usually quite intrigued.

An average day off work: There are 23 races a year which translates to us working about 25 weeks a year due to rain outs, so the other weeks of the year we are off, and due to the fact that the racing schedule circles the country about 4 times a year we are always in a new place and usually have about a week off in between each race. We either play tourist in the closest city, or find a nice quiet out of the way RV Park to relax and spend some time with our 3 parrots that travel with us.

Where do you see yourself in terms of career in 10 years?

Hmmm, well since neither of us dreamed of having our current job when we started out, I will have to say whereever the road takes us. It's worked out each year that we have been on the road that we have had job offers to do new things each year that have all turned out to be better financially and quite conveniently a little less work, so within 10 years who knows where this will take us. One thing I will say is that we both love it out here and neither of us have any plans on sitting still for too long any time soon. So until we tire of the open road we will stay on it.

You can follow the adventures of Suzy and Frank in the Parrottrek Journal.