We Decided to Live on the Road

Before we dive into what full time road travel is like, Brad and I wanted to shed some light on our decision to live on the road full time and our transition to tiny living. So often we see the end result which looks absolutely beautiful and filtered of all the decisions and chaos that got you to this point.

 

And chaos might be the perfect word to describe this situation...But lets rewind a few months. Some people thought we came about this spontaneous and wild decision overnight when actually its been a thought for quite awhile. It started officially after our honeymoon in September 2018. We spent 3 weeks driving from California back to Pennsylvania and fell in love with the simplicity and ever-changing scenery that comes with road travel. The idea of having the country at our fingertips more often than just a weekend or yearly vacation attracted us to the thought of transitioning to this lifestyle full time. 

 

Soon after our honeymoon, I (Jenn) went with a friend to an RV show and started entertaining the thought of living in a camper. But there aren’t just campers anymore! There are pods and vans and fifth wheels and airstreams and truck campers and the list could go on and on...It was exciting and Brad and I let the idea marinate for awhile before deciding we would go for this dream in 2-5 years. We put it out in the universe and for a few months we longed to be on the road and kept reassuring ourselves it would happen when the time was right.

 

Fast forward to April 2019 when my company announced they were closing the rehab facility I worked at full time and everyone would be laid off. Obviously I felt the way most people would: shear panic. Also a punch in the gut and a lot of stress. So much stress that I made myself the sickest I had been in 5 years. But like anything, once the dust settles you see a little more clearly and have a choice to continue to wallow or turn this wasted energy into something meaningful.

 

The next few weeks were spent job hunting in Pittsburgh and discussing if we could really make living on the road happen. We quietly visited RV shows and dealers resulting in many unscuccessful and defeating days. At one point we were 30 minutes into a drive to Virginia to buy a van before we realized it wasn’t going to be the right fit for our family and we turned around…phew! We quickly learned that our truck, which is sentimental and was going to be utilized in this journey no matter what, could only pull a certain weight which elimintated lots of trailers and truck campers that slide on top of the truck cab. In a desperate attempt to find ANYTHING I called our final dealership and was pleased when a nice guy named Sonnie answered the phone and told us he had 15+ options that our particular truck could haul. We scheduled a visit and a few weeks later settled on our 179 R-Pod which happened to be the very last pod they had on site for a few months.

 

 

After the purchase we went into a robotic mode of selling 80% of our items to save money for travel and began the remodel project to make the R-Pod fit our little family best. We determined a time frame and basically had two and a half months to get it together in order to have time on the road without financial pressure. We spent our days (and nights) downsizing and cleaning out our apartment, answering messages on Facebook to sell items, coordinating pickup times, packing and remodeling.

 

 

 

There’s so much thought that goes into this type of road travel that would randomly fill our brains and create moments of panic. How would we get our mail? Well we found a mail forwarding service, Escapees, that scans our mail daily into Texas and will even open it for us if needed. What about the dogs and their shots/vet visits? Our amazing new vet is updated on all the requirements across the USA and made sure our dogs had all shots needed for any type of boarding or outbreak happening throughout the country. They also set us up with natural anxiety chews and proper paperwork if we were ever in a bind. And money, we need money! In the midst of this entire transition I worked really hard to find a recruiter that would help me transition to become a travel speech therapist. I had to get licensed in a few other states (warm ones for now so we are toasty when winter comes) so I can work 13 week assignments at a time that will allow us to travel in between. All of this and more definitely kept us busy and frazzled for a few months.

 

The hardest part of the transition came about 10 days before we left. The good-byes. Part of us wished we could do the good ol’ Irish Good-bye and quietly hit the road, but we would have regretted that immensely. We love our people too much to do that but it was definitely a time where we (mostly I) questioned everything we were doing the most. There was guilt and fear and sadness, but also a lot of excitement as well. We felt just as much support during that time as we did when we got married which was an amazing feeling. We pushed through all of those tinges of fear or question and arrived to an extremely happy place. It’s hard to say good-bye for any length of time but we know our decision to hit the road was deep inside our souls and something we would regret if we never tried. While it’s not always easy with time zones, schedules and cell service, we have been working hard to keep in touch with everyone in some way via phone calls, sharing photos on social media, post cards and hopefully more often now, this blog.

 

 

It’s officially Day 25 on the road and we feel more settled than ever. We change camp about every 3-7 days but are finally in a routine where we can make any site our home. Sometimes we hit frustrating patches where we can’t find a shower or a grocery store is many, many miles away. Sometimes we forget to buy things or something breaks and we have to problem solve to fix it “for now”. But all in all this experience is irreplaceable. We love it and are genuinely happy. My grandma told me on the phone the other day she could hear a change in my voice and can see a difference in our smiles in photographs. I hope that’s the case because that means what we chose to do is truly for us. 

 

I’ll leave this post with a quote from the original sculptor of the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, Korczak Ziolkowski: “Never Forget Your Dreams”. We sure didnt.