Over the course of our relationship, Jon and I have traveled a lot. Jon is a bit of a homebody, but I have a constant need to travel. Perhaps it is the high stress of my current occupation as a criminal defense attorney that drives my need to get away almost constantly. Jon, on the other hand, is content to stay home and enjoy the peace and quiet of life. Because of our dynamic, we have often joked about buying a RV and just saying “screw it” and living a life on the road.
As our kids grew older and we both realized that we no longer needed a big house in a “good” school zone and a neighborhood full of our children’s friends we began to think about downsizing. Little did I know how much of a downsize we were in for. In May 2023, we took a trip to North Carolina to visit friends and family. Our friends lived right down the road from an RV dealership and on a whim we decided to pull in and see what the RV market looked like. Jon had a lot of experience with RVs, but I had never camped a day in my life. I liked the idea of living a nomadic life, but I wasn’t completely sold on living in an RV. After seeing the inside of the RVs on the lot, I began to actually picture us living in one. Three days later we drove down to my brother’s house and the whole way down we talked about what our life would look like if we decided to ditch the sticks and bricks to go mobile. By the time we reached his house, I think we had both made up our minds to go for it.
About 2 weeks after we returned from our trip, I was on YouTube and Google scouring for information about full-time RV living. I had all kinds of anxiety about our decision to chase the nomad lifestyle dream. What kind of budget did we need? How big of a rig did should we get? What about the kids? How do we make money living on the road? We were both clueless when we first started this journey. Hopefully our pain in jumping into this lifestyle can help you. We hope to be able to impart our wisdom to others so that transitioning to gypsy life isn’t as anxiety inducing as it was for us.