Author: Andrew

As of today we have officially left Florida and are on our way to Texas and beyond. Florida has been amazing for us to begin our fulltiming adventure. The kids got to meet and play with tons of other Fulltime Families kids. While the rest of the country was freezing in that crazy winter storm we were literally swimming outside in the pool in 80 something degree weather. We went hiking in State Parks, we toured a Citrus Grove in the world’s largest monster truck (got to love FL!), we scratched our Star Wars and Harry Potter itches at Disney World and Universal Studios, and we hung out with some old friends and made a bunch of new ones.

Where to from here? Well, the short term answer is Texas with a 10 day layover along the way in New Orleans where we will meet some family and eat way too many beignets. after apending 4-6 weeks in Texas we will head northwest to Denver, then Yellowstone and Glacier. That is about as far out as we have really planned at this point.

Today we arrived at our first Army Corp of Engineers Park. To say it is awesome would be an understatement! And for only about $20 a night to boot.

I’ve gotten a few questions about traveling. We move slow. I only want to drive about a max of 300 to 350 miles per day (and prefer to keep it about 250 if I can). I’ve booked campgrounds where we want to stay for a bit so we aren’t driving day after day either. So far, it is working for us. Pulling that behemoth down the road amazingly taxing mentally and parking is always fun. I did back in to our campsite perfectly on the first try today. #humblebrag.

Tonight marks the end of the first of two weeks at Thousand trails Orlando (TTO). I thought it appropriate to look back on our first several weeks both for posterity and for a bit of a post mortem. I would add for anyone trying to plan or recall your RV travel itinerary that RVTripWizard is the single greatest thing on the internet in this regard. But, I’ll leave the details of that for another post.

We spent our last few nights in Wilmington at the Ogden KOA as most of our essentials had migrated to the fifth wheel. So it was scramble all day to pack or throw away our final remaining possessions and then return to the camper in the evening to try and figure out where to store all the (way too much!) stuff that we kept. It was exhausting to say the least.

On January 11 we brought in the slides and headed to Orlando with reservations for a two night layover in Savannah. We stayed at the beautiful Creekfire Motor Ranch. It was cold and rainy the entire time we were there but the pool was heated and the facilities looked awesome through our rain soaked windows. We took the two nights in Savannah to (Andrew) rest after the washboard that is I95 South through South Carolina, (Summer) work, (Summer and Andrew) organize the camper and provision the fridge and freezer, and (kids) play video games and whine about there being a heated pool while it rained buckets.

We left Savannah on the 13th and arrived in Orlando for a 6 night stay at the Orlando Southwest KOA while waiting to get into TTO. It is your standard KOA with passable playground and pool where you are stacked together pretty tight.

We fit. Barely.

The cell service was passable at best. We did work and school and swam in the heated pool. But we finally had a chance to sit still with nowhere to go and to start to really figure out how we were going to live in this thing. With (free!) dumpsters nearby we threw out and replaced and organized our way into something towards functional. There’s still a basket of “we need this stuff but I have no earthly idea where to put it” that needs attention. And let’s not start on toys. But we are getting there.

Entering TTO on January 19th was a whole new ballgame. We were lucky enough to land in B Loop with tons of other Fulltime Families with tons of kids. Needless to say, ours are in heaven. The rear of our Fifth Wheel looks out over an almost football field-sized opening surrounded by campers full of kids. It has been great for them. The Fulltime Families group here is awesome and I’ll do a whole post on them at some point. But, we’ve finally been able to settle in and actually figure out how we are going to live.

The natural ebb and flow of your day to day life kind of develops over the years and even if you move or change jobs there’s still the constant of you living in a sticks and bricks home somewhere. A home where you don’t have to figure out how to keep the coffee maker on the counter while you roll down the road (it stays all on it’s own!) and where you don’t have to dump black tanks (if you don’t know, use your imagination) and worry about how much all your stuff weighs (too much!). That change takes a while to get used to but we are getting there. Being able to sit still for a week now has been nice. And knowing we have another week in front of us to slow down for a while is nice too. Tonight I sat outside and watched my first Carolina Basketball of the month while sipping a drink. It was 71 and clear with an almost full moon overhead. I can get used to that.

It’s hard to even write this right now, but our launch date is going to be postponed a while. We found out today that we have to go into a 14 day quarantine because a close contact tested positive.

We haven’t been Covid crazy or anything but we have tried to be as smart and responsible as possible. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant in months, instead choosing takeout or delivery. Summer’s work provides Instacart (seriously awesome) as a benefit so we haven’t even really gone into stores for grocery shopping, etc. We have skipped the few group events still happening out of an abundance of caution. Basically we have stayed home and kept to ourselves when we possibly could. But apparently, this wasn’t enough.

Ironically, we heard this weekend that one of the full time families we follow caught Covid not while on the road, but from a family member once they came home to visit. Their experience, coupled with ours, is really causing us to rethink our holiday plans this year. Your social distancing is only as effective as your family members’ social distancing. I suspect that there will be a great many new infections over the holidays from family members getting together. Not spending the holidays with your family seems like a pretty drastic step to take to stay safe, but it may be just another thing that 2020 takes from us.

Anyway, hopefully we all come through this testing negative and/or remain asymptomatic. The quarantine has really messed up the last of my work caseload and may delay us pretty significantly. We will work it out, work through it, and keep on heading toward our goal.

Maybe the most frequent question I have been asked since we told the world we were Full Timing was “where are you going first?” And we don’t know.

A big part of that is we don’t know when we will get to leave so we can’t start making reservations. And we will be joining some memberships that don’t really make sense to join until we know when we are leaving. So there are practical reasons why we don’t know yet.

But honestly, I don’t plan on always knowing weeks or months out where we will be. Part of doing this is adding some spontaneity into our life. We have started to throw down pins on a digital map of places we want to see around the country. But the order we do it in and all the little stops along the way isn’t set in stone.

I have no doubt that we will have more structure planned than some do, that’s the wife’s nature. But part of the trip is the trip itself. I’m looking forward to it as much as any single destination outside Alaska.

We want to meet people and caravan with similar families. We want our kids to have a social life and playtime and friends. And we have to be intentional about those things by being intentionally flexible. It will be good for us. 

So no, we aren’t sure about where we are going first. But we know we are going. Soon. And that’s good enough for today anyway. 

I thought I would take a few minutes and jot down for posterity what would cause me to want to sell almost everything I own, shut down my business, and travel around the country with my family in a Fifth Wheel. Maybe I’ll need to look back and read this a few times during the next few months to remind myself. I hope not, but it is definitely a possibility. Some of the people I know have to be wondering what in the hell we are thinking as well. Maybe this will help them understand.

So where to start? The easiest motivation to identify is some amount of Wanderlust. I love seeing new things and experiencing new places. Having spent the vast majority of my life in places that are almost uniformly flat, wet, hot, humid, and full of pine trees, I find the majesty of the Tetons or the haze hanging on the Smokies striking in a way I can’t quite put into words. Alaska still seems to me the Great Frontier. Part of what makes America great and majestic is it’s massive size and scope, both geographically and culturally. I want to experience it for myself and with my wife. I want my children to experience it. I believe we will be changed by it in a meaningful way.

The writings of John Muir have reminded me of the intense call of the wild that when answered helps us re-center ourselves in what has become a wild and crazy world. Anger and hate and distrust and fear perpetuate so easily that sometimes unplugging and returning to nature really can help us find the perspective that is so easily lost.

Don’t get me wrong. We aren’t casting off all creature comforts. We still need the internet for work and school (and Netflix) and mama’s tolerance for temps above about 72 is mighty thin. But learning about erosion in the morning and seeing the Grand Canyon after lunch will be pretty cool.

There’s also more to this decision though. Why do we wait until we are in our 50s or 60s to do those things we have always wanted to do? Why don’t we do them when we are young AND when we are old? What happens if you wait until the kids go to college, or when we retire, or, or, or… and then you have a massive heart attack one day, or another pandemic happens, or the polar ice caps melt, or aliens attack?

I suppose the safe decision is to keep doing the same thing day after day with as much security as one can muster. But I want my kids to see that it is ok to follow a dream. It is ok to decide that you need a change and to make that change. It is ok to follow your heart. It may not be easy or conventional. Your family and friends may not all really understand. But you only have one life to live so you might as well LIVE it.

I know this all sounds like a Jimmy Buffett song. And 385 square feet with a family of four and half of Noah’s ark seems daunting. But if not now, when? There will always be reasons not to do it. But if the reasons to do it are what you lay awake thinking about at night, maybe you should follow your heart. That’s what we are going to do.