RV Living

The year 2020 brought with it an exodus of people choosing to leave work (or were put out of work) to head out and venture across America in an RV. The RV Industry saw blockbuster sales for 2 years strong. They are now leveling off to 2019 levels. With this exodus we became familiar with the concept of full time living on the road out of an RV. A new concept to us. Initially, we found our way into what many call “Van Life”. This entails taking a van, be that traditional full size van, a Sprinter Style Van or even a mini van, converting it into a livable space and venturing into the unknown to see the world.

At that moment in time, we owned a 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan and I spent a few months one summer working on retrofitting it to make it livable. I watched a number of Youtube videos and subscribed to van life channels. In September of 2020, Joelle and I hit the road for what would be a planned 8 week excursion west.

This first trip had me hooked. I took another, even longer trip in the very late spring of 2021 as well as the late fall of 2021 and began looking for our next step in life.

Enter the RV. We initially thought we could purchase a small tear drop style camper trailer and we would travel the country living out of it’s confine. Given we would be traveling with our dog Watson, we, after months of modifications, realized there would be no way to comfortably do so. I sold this modified trailer camper and we then bought our first official RV; a Winnebago Micro Minnie 2108DS FLX series camper. This began a summer long series of modifications adding to this RV to make it more adept at serving our Off Grid and Boondock camping desires. We still, for the time, travel and use this particular Travel Trailer style camper, but have already deduced we are going to have to upgrade in size.

Living out of an RV Full time as we are doing is totally different than heading out for a week long camping trip a few times per year. We learn more and more each week.

We prefer Boondocking and Dispersed camping (off grid style) most of the time. These are methods of camping that take us into vast and remote wildernesses where we live fully self contained within the unit, allowing Solar to provide our total power needs. This, of course is totally different than, say, traditional camping with full hook ups inside managed and organized campgrounds.

We have, however, met plenty of full time RV lifers who spend their entire year jumping from organized campground to campground. For some, this works. But for us, we prefer the wilderness. With my photography, getting out and closer to the wilderness helps me to get photographs that I long to use and display for everyone to see.

On our site, you will find plenty of articles I have written totally about living on the road out of an RV. I outline the various obstacles and challenges we face as well as share the total fun we have while out here. I hope you find it helpful and useful to you.