A-Z Guide to full-time RV Living: Anatomy of a Dream

Welcome to the first post in a 26 part series on how to live on the road and travel full-time!

Since living on the road doesn’t happen overnight, I thought I’d kick off this series with a post about dreams. Over the years Mark & I have had the good fortune of turning not just one, but a few of our dreams in to reality.  And we’ve started to discover patterns in the path that we take to get from “I’m not sure we could ever do that” to “Holy crap we’re doing it!”.

If living on the road full-time feels like a seed of a dream in the back of your mind that you haven’t yet pursued, may the following path of dream to reality inspire you to dig a little deeper in to what might be possible…

It all starts with curiosity.  

Before a dream is ever a dream you have to get curious about something.  Whether you heard about it from a friend, you read it in a book, saw it on TV, or stumbled upon it while scrolling social media, a dream starts as a seed that is planted without you even realizing it.  But all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to know more and more about this thing that maybe a month ago you didn’t even know existed.  

I didn’t know people lived, worked, and traveled on the road full-time until we bought our truck camper in 2012.  I thought it was a privilege solely for retirees.  Once I discovered this, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.

From curiosity to full-blown obsession.

Certain curiosities have the power to permeate our consciousness and turn in to full-blown obsessions. Before we know it we’re seeking it out like a drug, daydreaming about it, and quietly asking ourselves endless questions.  It might feel scary to say out loud that you yourself want to do said thing but the thought is percolating.  

This is about the time I discovered Bumfuzzle, a couple traveling the world full-time and writing about it regularly on their blog.  I was drawn in like a moth to a flame and couldn’t read every post on their website fast enough.  Reading about the unconventional way in which they traveled (sailing around the world, driving from Alaska to Argentina, and more incredible adventures) got me thinking about travel in an entirely new context.  That exposure, to a different approach to travel, felt like it opened up a world of possibilities I never knew existed.

Thinking outside the box.

This is where things get interesting.  For us, the curiosity phase is all about being a spectator.  We’re on the outside looking in on someone else doing something that fascinates us or lights us up…but deep down we’re skeptical (or downright convinced) that we, ourselves, could never do that thing.  But if you’re a deeply curious person, you’ll keep asking questions, keep analyzing the thing from every angle, dissecting how other people are doing it.  If you keep that flame of curiosity lit, you’ll eventually find that there’s no one way to do anything.  And that with some creativity and determination, you might be able to mold this obsession in to a dream of your own that could actually work.

We used to think living on the road full-time was out of the question for us because we had to be in Colorado for work.  We started with month long, then two month long trips over the winter until we realized we could likely get away with being gone 6 months out of the year and that the other 6 months could be spent at RV parks in Colorado.  And that’s when we stopped being spectators and realized we might be able to make this dream happen after-all.  (We’ve since molded our career around our lifestyle even more but that was the start of making our business work with our dream of living on the road.)

A dream is born.  

Eventually all the answers to the questions you’ve been asking yourself start turning in to puzzle pieces that begin to form a picture.  That picture is now a dream.  It’s something you thought impossible that overtime has begun to feel attainable (maybe still just out of reach but not quite as far-fetched as you once thought).  While it may still make you squirm just a bit, you’re ready to say out loud “I want to…” and when you do you feel something inside you shift.  Whether anyone is listening or not, you’ve just breathed life in to that dream.  And if you want that dream to one day become your reality, it’s time to get to work.

The work.

Research, planning, budgeting, organizing.  There’s a lot to be done, and depending on the scope of your dream, could require some time and patience.  As for the dream of living on the road full-time, the work looks a little something like this (I’ll expand on some of these steps in future posts)…

• Decide on a rig.  Do you want a van, a motorhome, a trailer? Maybe you already own something, if not you’ll need to start here.
• Outfit your rig for full-time living.  Are you going to camp off-grid on public lands or at RV parks with utility hook-ups?  This will help you determine some of your rig’s needs.
• Downsize your life.  Living on the road full-time likely means you’ll be existing in far less square footage than ever before.  You’ll need to decide what’s going with you, what you’re going to store (if anything), and what you’re going to sell, donate, and throw away.  Get started now as this process can be time-consuming.
• If you own a home, decide if you’d like to sell it or rent it out and begin the process.
• Prepare your job for full-time travel.  Will you need a reliable internet connection?  Will you need to plan your travel schedule around your work schedule?  Start brainstorming your needs and potential challenges so that you can begin preparing and getting ahead of those challenges.

Seeking support & finding community

Preparing to make a dream happen can be all-consuming and it will likely be the thing you find yourself most wanting to talk about.  You’ll find that the opinions of your family and friends will be all over the board and the skeptics and nay-sayers will likely cause some doubt.  With that, now is the time to seek out like-minded individuals.  Where are the people gathering that are doing the thing you want to do (in real life and online)?  Find them and find ways to connect.  Their knowledge and energy will be the fuel you need when all the work you’re doing really starts to feel like WORK.  

Further, in an act of full-transparency and vulnerability, you may want to blatantly ask your closest friends and family for their unconditional support.  Fear is a dream killer and those that don’t understand your dreams will be the first to hit you with fear-based questions, concerns, and assumptions.  Seek out support thoughtfully so that sharing your dream with others helps you progress, not set you back.

Before going full-time on the road, we would take month-long trips in our truck camper and during those trips meet full-time travelers.  Getting to learn from folks first-hand what it’s like to live on the road and hearing in detail about how they do it so that it works for them, heavily influenced our success.

The leap.

There will come a point during the work phase when it’s time to make the leap in to DOING the thing.  It might be the closing date on your house, an arbitrary date on the calendar that you set for yourself, or simply when you realize there’s not much left to do.  From experience we’ve learned that online research will only get you so far and you can only prepare so much for something you’ve never done before.  At some point you have to just go for it and be okay with learning as you go.  There’s a learning curve with full-time RV living and you can’t learn everything until you’re actually doing it.

In 2017 we put our house on the market knowing we were ready to do something different.  The week before our house closed escrow, realizing we’d want something a little bigger than our truck camper to live in, we bought a Casita trailer.  The day we handed the keys to our house over to the new owners, we pulled out of the driveway having no plan of where we were headed or what was next.  We just knew it was time, and from there we figured it out as we went.  

Staying open-minded.

A dream is a really beautiful and captivating thing.  Dreams have no constraints.  They only exist in our minds and therefore can be whatever we want them to be.  However, when a dream becomes reality it must exist within the constraints of just that…reality.  That’s when the shiny, glamorous side of our dream fades and we come up on challenges and nuances we had no idea we’d have to face.  The key, at this point, is to stay curious, open-minded, and patient.  Your dream may end up morphing in to something entirely different than what you’d initially imagined.  There may be some frustration and discomfort along the way but that’s what’s leading you to the good stuff.  It takes time to learn first-hand what works for you and what doesn’t and to turn all those lessons in to a dream that’s more compatible with reality.

Remember when I said earlier that we realized we could stay in RV parks while we needed to be in Colorado for our 6 months of work?  We tried that, and didn’t love it.  With some additional solar power, a hotspot, and cell boosters, we were able to start camping off-grid in the forest and on BLM land while we work.  We didn’t think that was possible at first but we figured it out as we went.  We’re constantly learning and experimenting and because of it our full-time RV lifestyle keeps getting better with every passing year. 

The caveat.

The caveat about dreams is that they create a future-thinking mindset.  And when you’re constantly thinking about the future, you’re never appreciating what you have right now.  I used to think that once I had the thing I dreamed of I’d be happy, until I realized that that mindset doesn’t switch off when you achieve the dream, it just leaves you wanting more… always and forever, no matter what.  It’s a dangerous mindset that you can easily get stuck in.  So while you’re chasing your goals and dreams, make a practice out of finding appreciation in what you already have.  An attitude of gratitude will sprout enjoyment in every step you take towards your dreams rather than thinking you’ll never find happiness until you’ve achieved them.