Thoughts, Observations, and Musings from Two Years on the Road

Two years ago this week, we raised our jacks for the first time and headed for Hershey, Pennsylvania on our maiden voyage.  At the time, we had no idea if we would love this project or regret every choice that had brought us to that point.  We had done our research, planned, saved, and planned some more. But we did not, and could not, know whether we were making a terrible mistake.

Two years later we can confidently say we made the right choice. And one of the things we’re most proud of is, with minimal exception, there have been few surprises along the way. All our research and planning truly paid off. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had rough days; days that were draining, frustrating, or that left us with our heads in our hands. As I’ve said before, just because you’re “living the dream” doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen. Life is life and you still gotta deal with it.

On balance, however, we have no regrets, and there hasn’t been a single time we’ve said “we wish we never left.” The truth is, this has been the best experience of our lives and we consider every day we’re able to travel a gift for which we are endlessly grateful.

Anyway, two years in, we’ve figured some things out, noticed some things, and learned a whole lot about ourselves and our country. Many of these items are things I want to write about more substantially, but that sounds like a lot of work. Luckily, it is a scientifically proven fact that blog readers love lists, so, here you go….

In no particular order, 100 thoughts from two years on the road:

1. No factor has a greater impact on how we feel about a place than the weather we encounter while there. It is rare that we love a place where we had bad weather or really dislike a place where we had good weather.
2. Timing is everything. Both good, and bad.
3. No matter how much time we spend in a locale, we almost always want more. I can think of only a handful of places that we felt “ready to leave” when it was time to go.
4. The staff at a campground makes all the difference. Friendliness, or a lack thereof, at check-in makes a huge impression. Many of our favorite campgrounds have been otherwise completely forgettable places where the employees were just super nice.
5. People in campgrounds tend to be pretty friendly. It’s one of those places where most people are happy to be where they are.
6. Older people make the best neighbors. The older the better. They’re nice, they’re quiet, they’re neat, and they go to bed early.

7. On a related note, we think these 55+ campgrounds are seriously missing out. They would totally love us if they would just let us in.
8. It’s easy to chat with other RVers because we all have so much in common, but also plenty of differences. We’ve never once had a hard time making conversation with people doing what we’re doing.
9. I wonder how people traveled before the advent of Google maps, RV specific GPS, Yelp, Tripadvisor, weather apps, emergency alerts, etc. People were just flying blind all the time.
10. Yeah, yeah, I know. “Rub some dirt in it…” Whatever.
11. The flip side is all this technology has made it easy for thousands of yahoos like us to travel, and the sudden ubiquity of said yahoos is exacting a hefty price on a lot of people and places.
12. People who own Airstream trailers always refer to their rigs by their brand name. One does not “live in an RV.” One “lives in an Airstream.” One is not “an RVer.” One is “an Airstreamer.” From what I can gather, based entirely on my assumptions, the purchase of an Airstream contractually obligates the buyer to refer to his purchase only by its brand name. I’m not sure what happens if they fail, but I assume, given the consistency of owners’ compliance, it’s pretty bad.
13. My current goal in life is to convince one of our Airstreamer friends to just start referring to their Airstream as a “travel trailer” or “RV” in front of other Airstreamers.  I just want to know what happens. Will the offending owner be banished? Will there be an intervention? Will they be reported to the Airstream Corporation who will respond by sending in a hovercraft to whisk the offending owner’s Airstream off like a dead tribute in the Hunger Games???
14. Yes, I should probably work on coming up with bigger “life goals”….
15. Speaking of companies with a cult-like following, since becoming a fulltime RVer I have seen more glamour shots of Jeeps than any other object. Holy crap, people love their Jeeps.
16. If anyone ever figures out how to safely pull an Airstream with a Jeep, Instagram will melt.
17. And yes, I AM just jealous of all our friends with these super cool and capable set-ups. We live in a beige on beige bread box that looks like it was painted by someone having a seizure and our Xterra does “0 to 60 at some point, but not necessarily… and don’t be alarmed if some springs pop off on the way.”
18. We’ve met the BEST people because of this blog.
19. A lot of campgrounds, and a lot of jurisdictions in general, don’t offer recycling. We’ve gone so far as to drive around with bags of recycling in our car for days at a time hoping to find an appropriate facility, but that invites bugs, so, sometimes, our perfectly recyclable waste ends up in a landfill. Which is disheartening.

20. You should never assume anything about a destination.
21. Yes, even Ohio.
22. It could be even worse than you thought it would be
23. Mother Nature is the boss. And she is a badass.
24. Every time we’ve had a major disaster, we’ve had friends or family nearby who’ve saved the day for us. It’s a heartening yet sobering realization. Heartening, because we realize how lucky we are to have good people in our lives; sobering because we can imagine how bad things would have been had the situation been different.
25. Trip planning always takes a lot longer than expected. Probably because I’m easily distracted and end up spending hours looking at “Stars! They’re Just Like Us!” compilations on Us Magazine.
26. A lot of RV related websites look like they haven’t been updated since 1997.
27. Speaking of which, a lot of campgrounds still require that you pay by cash or check, and some even handle reservations on paper, which is a heartwarming reminder of yesteryear… right up until the point they lose your reservation and you have no email confirmation to hand them. That’s when the charm wears off.
28. When you live an alternative lifestyle, you have the same conversation about where you’re from and what you’re doing over and over and over and over. And over. And over.
29. On occasion I’ve tried shortening the explanation, but it never works.
30. Grocery store discount cards are great – until you realize you need to carry 20 of them.
31. Costco is, hands down, the best store in the country.
32. When you live on the road, you’re always lost. Every trip away from home is an adventure – or a giant hassle – depending on your attitude that day.
33. It probably takes us 30% longer to complete an average weekly grocery store trip since we never know where anything is.

34. There are noticeable differences in the way people drive in certain places. Connecticut drivers are jerks. San Antonio drivers are crazy. We’ve concluded that Idaho drivers are unaware of the practice where a driver waits for traffic to clear before turning onto a road. Idahoans just go and everyone else slams on their brakes.
35. You can burn yourself out on any kind of food. Except tacos. Tacos are always awesome.
36. Once you get used to doing things during the week, running errands on the weekends becomes super annoying.
37. Right now, there are a whole bunch of people sitting in offices dreaming of stabbing me in the forehead.
38. Spring break is terrible.
39. There is a constant pull between wanting to book things in advance and leaving gaps in our calendar to see how things come together. Planning almost always wins out, but every so often, we wing it. So far, so good, but we still find it stressful to not know where we’ll be in a week.
40. The best decision I made was writing this blog. Between the things we would have forgotten about, the places we never would have known about, and the people we never would have met, this blog has been a fantastic travel hobby.
41. Writing a blog is a balancing act – on the one hand, you want to share a lot to give people a reason to connect with you. On the other hand, if you’re naturally private people which we are (true story), it sometimes feels like you’ve got a ghost writer at the keyboard.

42. Blog readers love negative stories. My articles involving catastrophes, disasters, and screw ups, get way more clicks than the ones where everything is awesome. I’m not saying y’all are negative or anything, but….yeah. Y’all are negative.
43. You can drive 100 miles in any direction and the clientele and ‘feel’ of a grocery store will be completely different.
44. There are some towns that are just weird. The people are weird. The vibe is weird. Everything is weird.
45. The current record for “number of people shopping in a Walmart on a Wednesday night wearing head-to-toe camouflage” is eight, and it was in in the Florida panhandle.
46. New RV warranties oftentimes aren’t worth much for fulltimers. Given how difficult it can be to get an appointment at an authorized facility, and given that we need access to our homes (ie: we can’t just drop it off and pick it up a week later when it’s ready), it’s frequently easier to just fix stuff ourselves.
47. Being handy, or being married to someone who’s handy, is almost a requirement of living in a home on wheels.
48. Adjusting to a much smaller space was not a big deal at all.
49. There is nothing we tossed or stored that we miss
50. Which is good because I have no idea where half our stuff is – we divided a bunch of boxes between family and friends and I have no idea what stuff ended up where. Writing a list probably would have been a good idea.
51. I used to LOVE severe weather – blizzards, thunderstorms, etc. Now? Not so much.

52. Youtube is a life saver for how-to videos
53. Living in a normal house, you take a lot of things for granted – where to ship Amazon packages, not having windshield wipers on your picture window, having insulation that actually, you know, insulates.
54. Stainless steel appliances look great except for when they’re covered in fingerprints, which is pretty much all the time.
55. I don’t get divided kitchen sinks. I want one giant sink. Why do all RVs have divided sinks? And why am I the only one who rails against this injustice??
56. When things go wrong, it will be on a Friday afternoon. If you’ve really pissed off God, it’ll be Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend
57. One of the things that often comes up in online discussions about fulltime travel is safety. Over the last two years, we’ve experienced only one situation where we were a little weirded out by someone’s behavior at an overnight stop. When you consider it, one out of 730 nights is pretty good. We had concerns a lot more often when we lived near D.C.
58. We don’t mind having to work to get level in a pretty state park. In an overpriced commercial park, we get pretty incensed by it.
59. All things considered, RV’s – at least ours – work incredibly well given how complex they are and how much abuse they take just driving down the road.
60. There’s an inverse relationship between privacy and seclusion of campsites vs. convenience. You’re in the woods, but you’re on a slope. You’re on a beautiful lake, but it’ll take you 35 minutes to get to a grocery store…
61. When we find exceptions to this rule, we want to stay forever
62. There are a significant number of places in the west named “Butte.” I giggle every time.
63. You should always have a list when you’re packing up and moving. You will forget something and only realize it when it comes crashing down an hour into the drive. Hopefully it won’t be the knives that hang on your wall.
64. People buy million dollar rigs, but they still have to handle their own poop tanks. If I’m gonna spend a million dollars on an RV, it better come with a “poop tank manager.”
65. Also, the insides of the million dollar rigs always look like an over-the-top Vegas hotel room.
66. On a related note, Winnebago is the first big manufacturer we’ve seen break the beige/swirl mold and build a motorhome with a sleek, modern, interior that looks really nice. Of course, the $400,000+ price tag might scare some folks off, but hopefully this is the beginning of a new design focus for manufacturers.

67. If either of our unlimited data plans ever disappear, I will ugly cry.
68. RV travel can be really expensive.
69. There’s a difference between “living in an RV” and “traveling in an RV.” People need to be realistic about what their dream is and what their budget can actually pay for. In other words, there are folks online who will claim “you can travel all over the country in a motorhome for $1,000 per month!” Those people are full of shit.
70. There is huge freedom in getting a small RV.
71. There is huge comfort in getting a large RV.
72. Freedom in travel is inversely proportional to comfort in travel. ie: If you have a small Class C or a van, you can go anywhere and have complete freedom, but you sacrifice many creature comforts. Big rig owners can live in complete luxury, but there are a lot of places they simply can’t go. We can see the value in both options.
73. Full time travel is all about inconsistency. Inconsistency in campgrounds, grocery stores, medical and veterinary care, salons, mechanics, social life. Most times it’s all “part of the adventure!” but there are times the constant uncertainty can wear you down.
74. We’ve stayed at hundreds of campgrounds since we started traveling, but only one was so depressing that I actually pulled our window shades down in the middle of the afternoon (to be fair, it was also raining and super gloomy). Anyway, that campground happened to be a roadside stop in the great state of New Jersey. Way to live up to expectations, Jersey.
75. There is a certain amount of snobbery among some RVers – Diesel owners who look down on gas owners, motorhome owners who look down on towables, big rig owners who look down on vanlifers, etc. I don’t think it’s widespread, but we’ve heard enough comments to know it exists, which is unfortunate.
76. Speaking of vanlifers, we have been on the road for two years and I have seen exactly zero super hot girls wearing bikinis cooking bacon and eggs while standing on top of their vans performing tree pose at sunrise. And yet, according to Instagram, that’s just what happens on a Tuesday.
77. Older people like to blog. Younger people like to vlog.
78. Supply and demand work the same in the travel world as it does everywhere else.  We are all experiencing the effects of more and more RVers on the road in the form of higher prices and policies that are less consumer-friendly.
79. If we were smart, we’d all zip it about RVing already before we end up pricing ourselves right out of the market.
80. But I, for one, am not smart and, therefore, I will not be silent!!!
81. We are amazed by how few people we see building offline businesses that cater to this exploding market. Lots of people are trying to figure out how to make money on the road, but we rarely see RVers advertising mobile RV or appliance repair services, mobile dog walking/grooming, wash and wax services, etc. We would have paid for many of these services at one time or another, yet, they are oftentimes hard to find.
82. The one thing I had at home that I don’t have now that I truly miss is a kitchen sink disposal.
83. The sine qua non of this project is health insurance which means we are living with a lot of uncertainty these days.
84. An Airstreamer could post a picture of a Bengal tiger leaping over a zebra who was performing multivariate calculus on an iPad and it would get less “likes” than a picture of their Airstream sitting in a asphalt parking lot next to a chain link fence. Seriously. It’s weird.
85. We have a bunch of friends who have Airstreams. Or, we did before I posted this. I guess I’m about to find out how good their sense of humor is. #unsubscribe
86. The more people we meet who do this in retirement, the more I believe Tom Petty had it right: “I don’t know, but I’ve been told / you never slow down, you never grow old.”
87. The more we travel, the harder it is to figure out where we’re going to land.

88. Every area of the country is subject to some sort of extreme weather that makes living there unappealing. Humidity and hurricanes on the east coast, freezing cold winters in the north, heat and tornadoes in the south, wildfires in the west. Southern California has some of the best weather, but… earthquakes.
89. There are many areas in the United States that are completely homogenous. After having spent 20+ years in an incredibly diverse metropolitan area, it is weird when we realize we haven’t seen a person who doesn’t look exactly like us in weeks or even months.
90. If we had to pick somewhere to settle down right this minute, it would be San Diego. While we love the beauty and peace of the wilderness, at the end of the day, we are always going to be happiest in or around cities. And, if we’re going to have to deal with the downsides of city life in terms of more expense, less space, and higher stress, then we want to be somewhere where it’s sunny and beautiful.
91. The contents of our home seems to “explode” every time we stay in one place for more than a day. The nice thing is, it’s easy to clean it all up. But even a small mess is a BIG mess when you live in a tiny space.
92. While staying in the desert too long was a mistake, not having to deal with mosquitoes, gnats, flies, or ticks for those months was priceless.
93. Speaking of which, mosquitoes are almost enough for me to get over my phobia of spiders. Almost.
94. There’s an interesting argument among travel enthusiasts about the value of NOT sharing their finds on the internet. The minute pictures start appearing on popular sites, formerly unknown places are oftentimes overwhelmed by visitors, and the damage to the fragile environment can be devastating. On the one hand, we agree with this idea because we’ve seen what can happen to these over-visited places. On the other hand, we ourselves have frequently benefited from people sharing their finds online. It’s a typical tragedy of the commons problem without an easy solution.
95. There are a fair number of vegan RVers so we see a significant amount of their stuff online. All of which has made me conclude that I could be vegetarian, but not vegan. (Because: cheese. And butter. And eggs. And milk. Basically, I just really like breakfast food.)
96. Instagram is great but it was even better when it was chronological. Facebook is helpful for staying connected with friends and organizations but irritating if you use a ‘page’ rather than your personal account for a blog. Youtube can be a lifesaver, but you often have to wade through a ton of garbage to find what you’re looking for. I don’t get Pinterest.
97. There are an inordinate number of businesses in this country that intentionally misspell their names – oftentimes substituting a K for a C. “Kountry Kitchens,” Kravings Kafe,” Klassy Kuts,” “Happy Kamper” Why’s everyone gotta hate on the “C”?
98. A lot of campgrounds are built near train tracks which totally makes sense because the land is cheap…which totally makes sense because no one wants to sleep next to train tracks.
99. 86.4% of RV parks that call themselves “resorts” are not.
100. Seriously Airstream friends, we’re still friends, right?  Look…

It’s an Airstream Hat Trick! Even I find myself compelled to photograph such glory when it’s laid out before me!! #dontbemad

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So, what do you think of this list? Agree? Disagree? What did I miss? Most importantly, is anyone ever going to stand up for Ohio’s honor???

Next week: Yellowstone. For real this time.