Month: October 2020

After only three months of full-time RVing, we have learned some stuff!  Some of it we learned the hard way, some of it, just by observation and experience.  Some of it matters a lot, and some are just little anecdotes that we’ve figured out along the way.  Here is a list, in no particular order.

1. Don’t go too fast or too far in one day.  The guideline that I have read about is “The Rule Of Three’s”:  1.  Don’t drive more than 300 miles in a day; 2.  Don’t travel after 3:00 pm;  and 3.  Stay at each destination at least three days.  We have broken that rule a few times, and we usually end up reminding ourselves that we really should follow “The Rule Of Three’s”.  Once we were RVing full-time, we re-learned that lesson the hard way when we drove too far, and arrived as it was getting dark (long after 3:00 pm) and planned a quick overnight stay before heading on down the road again the next morning.  Doing so caused us to be tired, hungry and anxious to get our camp set up for the night.  The end result:  Camper Slide-out – 1; brand new Apple Macbook – 0.  That sucker was crumpled like a piece of corrugated sheet metal.  Ugh.  Time to buy a new Macbook, slow down, and live by “The Rule of Three’s”.

2. Our Cat Loves RVing!….(and our dogs don’t do too badly either).  We had a small menagerie of pets in the years leading up to full-time RVing.  We thought that due to the advanced age of some of our pets and soon-to-be adulting children who might take a few pets with them, that we would end up with only one or two dogs on our trip, which wasn’t too bad considering that at the time we married and combined our households into one, we had three dogs, four cats a parakeet and even a passing additional cat and guinea pig!  By the time we launched full-time RVing a little more than five years later, we were left with two dogs and one cat.  We REALLY HAD NOT PLANNED TO TRAVEL WITH A CAT.  REALLY.  So it really was a pleasant happenstance to discover that Stencil the cat really is a great camper.  It took about four “travel days” for her to quiet down in the truck – she clearly did not enjoy the travel part of camping at first.  But once we returned her to the camper, she LOVED it!  The ever-changing window views, the fresh air through the windows, even the ability to move from one end of our camper to the other with very little “floor travel”, Stencil quickly became our best furry camper!

3. FT RVing is NOT vacation!  Accept this fact early, because there is a big difference between vacationing in an RV and living in an RV.  When on vacation, it has been our personal experience that diet and exercise sort of get a “pass”.  That is NOT true when you LIVE in an RV.  You cannot act like you are on a perpetual vacation.  Lots of things in an RV are different (and better) than a “regular” life in a sticks and bricks home.  But diet and exercise cannot be two of them.  You must continue to put some miles under your feet…and you have to eat like it is NOT vacation!  Trust me.  Three months in, and we are just beginning to realize that the dryer did not shrink our clothes that much!

4. Cleaning is quicker, but must happen more often!  This one is simple, but still nice to realize and live first-hand.  Get a great vacuum (Shark Rocket), use some nice essential oils and diffusers (especially if you have pets), and embrace simple cleaning techniques (vinegar and baking soda are clutch!).  Life is simpler, cleaner and less overwhelming (especially if you RV with only grown adults!)!

5. Sometimes it is okay to take a shot of whiskey at 10 AM – Consider this real RVing scenario:  Take a little hike.  A bug flies into your mouth.  Spit.  Cough.  Swallow.  Complete your hike, with visions of the wriggling bug in your digestive system.  Take a shot of whiskey – just to MAKE SURE that the unfortunate bug is fully neutralized.  Yep, it was 10 AM and my dear husband joined me in my whiskey cleanse with a toast and a smile.  It did the trick and readied us for our next hike in the beautiful outdoors.  Perhaps next time I will keep my mouth shut a little bit more!

6. Your dogs may need time to adjust to tiny house living – It may take some training, some secret spying or some new dog teaching tools to be certain your dog is behaving well in your absence.  We moved from a home on 1.22 acres in a rural area, to a home that generally sits in a close-knit campground with regularly changing surroundings.  Our first month our dogs got a “ticket” from the campground, giving us a friendly reminder that they were misbehaving while we had left to do laundry.  We worked to change the behaviors and just when we were beginning to think we might have the problem licked (close the windows, play the radio, pull the shades and have the dog “vibrate-collar” ready as we pull up to the camper in case our arrival causes them to misbehave).  Nope.  A kind dog-loving neighbor in month three let us know that Calvin-the-separation-anxiety-dog was whining miserably because he missed us so much when we left for a dinner double date.  We have upped our game now, with ultrasonic training boxes and no-bark collars that emit a tone and vibrate automatically.  We will figure it out – it will just take some time.

7. Alone time is still important but takes some planning to achieve – When retired, my mother and father would travel for about six months of the year in their RV.  Mom told me that the secret to creating some alone time for her was to tell Dad that she needed to go shopping for some “unmentionables”.  Like magic, Dad lost all interest in tagging along with her and she had the afternoon to herself.  In my RVing life, my husband and I joked about how our trip might end up being only six weeks long if we couldn’t adjust to so much life togetherness in a tiny space.  I am a person that values, enjoys and really needs some regular solitude.  Now that we live together in 350 square feet of space, I do still get my alone time, but it just happens differently than at any other time in my life.  It used to be that kids would leave for school and my husband would leave for work.  Viola’, alone time just happened five days a week!  Now I have to discipline myself for early morning walks to start my day off right.  I have also discovered that I really enjoy using a meditation app on my phone to create peaceful harmony in my headspace.  Reading creates a sense of time alone as well, and FT RVing has allowed me to really dig into leisure reading like I haven’t been able to enjoy since summertime when I was a nerdy middle schooler!  Now, when my husband goes to play a round of golf, the day is a nice treat for me as well because I have a block of hours all to myself!  I might just use the time to watch a chick-flick or decide to balance the check-book.  But it is only me, myself and I for that time to be recharged and ready to miss him all over again!

8. A surprising number of campgrounds do not supply fire rings or picnic tables – As a kid, I only cared if there was a playground or swimming pool at a campground, so perhaps I just didn’t take notice of how many campgrounds provide no picnic table or fire ring.  Out of the ten campgrounds we have stayed in for our first three months of FT RVing, four of them allow campfires, but provide no ring.  One of those campgrounds allowed a simple ground fire, but the other three required we provide a fire pit raised off the ground.  So we have now purchased a Solo Stove Bonfire and stand, which is pricier than the portable firepits you may be more familiar with, but is high quality, takes up a smaller footprint (19.5” diameter) and is made of heavy duty stainless steel.  There is a double wall exterior which helps to create a secondary combustion and virtually smoke-free fire!  We love it!  The picnic table shortage that we encountered is not as much of a problem for the two of us, but it may be very important for larger families.  We already have two portable tables and several chairs that meet our needs.

9. Most campgrounds do not recycle – Perhaps this lesson is more of an east coast thing, but it is so disappointing to see so little support for recycling.  Only ONE campground out of ten has supported any recycling – and they did a poor job of it at that.  They had a couple of recycling dumpsters at one location in the park that were poorly marked and gave campers no guidance to get it right (what is recyclable in that location?). They did not indicate to us that recycling was even an option when we checked in. Regular garbage dumpsters were distributed around the park at different locations, so most campers never even saw the recycling dumpsters and simply threw everything in the garbage.  I recognize that recycling costs businesses money, but I would bet that more campers than not are accustomed to recycling some of their waste in their non-camping lives and would prefer to do so while camping as well. Recycling just seems to be a natural fit with camping, doesn’t it?  It has been difficult to feel “okay” with throwing out glass, plastic, paper, aluminum and steel like it was the 1970s when recycling just wasn’t a thing in our world.  It just feels wrong to me.  I hope that this is a FT RVing experience that does not hold up as we criss-cross the country.

SAVOR every moment – Loosen up, slow down, and savor the simple things.  Our FT RVing life won’t last forever.  Traveling North America is not something we plan to do forever.  So now is the time to really savor what we are experiencing in our traveling lives.  I am simply terrible at this.  It has taken me every bit of these first three months to simply be OKAY with sleeping in a little longer just because I can.  I have to remind myself to be OKAY with putting off a chore another day so I can sit by the lake and read for a while.  This is a life lesson for me that I have always known and always worked to balance in my busy life, but by launching our travels this year, it has been a great reminder for me.  This is OUR TIME, these are OUR TRAVELS, and life will still have challenges and TRIBULATIONS.  So my biggest lesson learned is to work every day to SAVOR.  EVERY.  MOMENT. 

Safe travels, and enjoy the living and learning as you go!