Retire and write a best-seller?
I take heart from the excellent adventures of empty-nesters

Paula Brook
Vancouver Sun


Saturday, April 19, 2003

Get thin, write some books about it, sublet your house, buy an RV, tour the continent flogging your books, help others get thin, make a bundle, sell the RV, move back into your house, take a long hot bath.

Could I do that?

This is my first instalment in an occasional series on the excellent adventures of empty-nesters, inspired by generous e-mail response to a recent column in which I described how my husband and I are trying to find our feet on the shifting paradigms inside our suddenly large, spookily quiet house. I'm going to call my new series "Could I Do That?" I'm hoping it will be instructive, and maybe even lead to a self-help book hubby and I could peddle while exploring uncharted marital territory in a land yacht. Or not.

Patricia and Harv Haakonson's excellent adventure was a 10-month, 24,000-km mid-life passage that she describes, with a slight rolling of the eyes, as "a testament to the strength of this relationship." I caught up with the Victoria

She's a 53-year-old retired public servant with well-honed speaking skills and a way with a saucepan. He's a 62-year-old semi-retired occupational physician who likes to write, take pictures and run marathons. Four years ago they weighed 80 pounds more, between them. She dropped from a size 12 to an 8 by adopting what she calls "a Canadian approach to moderate low-carb eating," which translates into Dr. Atkins plus common sense, hold the bacon. He followed suit and dropped two chins and about 30 minutes off his marathon time.

Hardest part: four years, no bagels (1 bagel = 39 grams of carbohydrates = more than half Patricia's daily carb limit = not worth it). Could I do that? Some quick math of my own: one bagel each morning for past 30 years = 427,050 grams of carbohydrates = maybe I should.

In 2001, Patricia gathered 150 of her favourite recipes into the self-published Easy Low Carb Cooking, followed a year later by a lifestyle manual called Easy Low Carb Living with menu plans and success strategies from her, plus medical backstory and an exhaustive carb counter from Harv. (Details on Web site, www.lowcarbliving.ca)

They had sold 2,000 cookbooks before they left, which they thought was pretty good, considering they knew nothing about the publishing business beyond walking into the local Chapters and saying, "Hi, we're the Haakonsons, would you like to sell our books?"

They knew even less about RV driving before putting $125,000 down on the 34-foot Class A "Embassy by Triple E" that would ferry them on their self-directed North American book tour. The beast came with a 30-square-foot hydraulic "slide" unit that extended the living/eating area into a home-office on wheels, plus more hook-ups than you get on a good Saturday night at Au Bar.

It also came with a Manhattan phonebook-sized operating manual they avoided opening until several months later when, driving through Rhode Island, Pat glanced at the rear-view monitor and saw their tow dolly snap and their Saturn Aurora take off at 100 km/h the wrong way down the I-95 toward Providence. They were waylaid for several hours at a Dunkin' Donuts, but they did not succumb.

The RV was Harv's idea, she tells me. He has always wanted to take off in one. So has my husband. Her friends reacted the way mine would: "I just can't quite see Patricia in a motor home."

She's a self-professed fussbudget who likes to have everything "just so," which can be a problem in an RV, or an asset. Check out her meticulous cupboards and food pantry, everything stashed in little plastic baskets so as not to go flying on a too-fast turn.

Speaking of which, Harv has come under steady fire from his backseat driver, who thinks he goes too fast. It's one thing to speed in a car, she complains. Quite another in a lowrise residential complex. She has spent too much of this drive vacillating between angry and dizzy.

"If we're going to continue to do this it would be really important for Patricia to learn to drive," says Harv.

That's a big if. "For me, a vacation is not having to cook or do laundry or clean house. Here you're carrying your house around on your back," she says. And it's a tiny one. She can barely turn around in the galley, never mind cook for friends -- a favourite pastime, back home.

She can't shower for more than five minutes before draining the hot-water tank. When she wants a long shower she uses the public washrooms, but takes her own bath mat. (I could do that.)

There have been high points, such as visiting relatives across Canada and the U.S., including Harv's four grown children from a previous marriage who all live in Alberta with their families. In Calgary, they spent two weeks parked outside a relative's house on a quiet street, hooked up by a mass of extension cords. The neighbours didn't seem to mind. Gotta love those Calgarians -- especially if you've just spent two dust-eating weeks in an Edmonton RV park-cum-dirt-farm. That was rock bottom: no grass, no trees, nothing between you and the next RV inhabited by beer-chugging, ATV-riding Osbourne wannabes.

But back to the high points, such as figuring out how to sell books on the fly. It was a book tour, after all. And a remarkably successful one, more than covering the couple's travel and living costs. They hired publicists in the major cities and blanketed the media, staging TV breakfasts and bookstore signings and generally riding the crest of the low-carb tidal wave. Orders and reorders came so quickly they had to pitch in and help their Vancouver distributor get the books out.

By the time they reached Winnipeg they were selling 80-plus books a day. Chapters/Indigo started ordering nationally -- in the thousands. At one point they had 2,000 books crammed into the RV's baggage compartments.

"Harv and I were just about run ragged," says Patricia. "We were doing interviews and signings all day and packaging books for shipment at night. It was, like, when do we start having fun?"

Answer: after the hot bath, when she looks back. More than 13,000 books sold, a continent under their belts, marriage still intact, and the way paved for Easy Low Carb Volume 3 -- to be published and distributed by the pros, while the Haakonsons get back to the serious business of retiring.

I think I could do that, minus the RV, plus some bagels.

http://www.canada.com/vancouver/van...91-805CE9D3AB67