One Month of Full-Time RV Travels // Adventure Elopement Photographer

Hi everyone! If you've been following me for a while, you'll have noticed that things are a bit different around here and on social media. I'm not just photographing portraits and weddings, but have put in a ton of hard work to renovate an RV and take off with my husband and dog as full-time travelers! Yup, people do that! I'll start to share some of the renovation experiences and our travels here alongside my amazing clients that I get the honor of photographing.

I wrote something up about how things are going at the one month mark of being on the road. Then I promptly lost it… Well, I just found it again (only two weeks late, haha). Enjoy!

It's actually been a month—a crazy month—since we set out on the road. We traveled from the Portland, Oregon area down through the entire state of California and over to Arizona where we have landed for now. We've been in Arizona about two-and-a-half weeks, and we're starting to get the itch to move on from Phoenix. We've been boondocking (basically not hooking up to electricity and water or staying at paid campsites) the entire adventure so far, and that doesn't look like it will change any time soon now that we've figured out our solar power. It has been pretty interesting, especially getting to meet all of our temporary neighbors along the way. Occasionally they are in tents out on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, but most people are in RVs of some sort—from motor homes, to trailers, to converted school buses (skoolies).

Looking back over this past month filled with many hiccups along the way—such as engine issues forcing us to get towed to a repair shop, another repair visit for new brake pads and rotors, accidentally damaging our bikes, an emergency vet visit for our dog, and torrential monsoon rains keeping us from all of our overnight campsite options—it might sound like we've had so many bad things happen that we'd probably hate this life. I asked Ty, my husband, the other day what he thought of our life over the past month, and it looks like we're both still excited for it all and in for what's ahead. Our dog, Shiloh, wishes she could visit more than I let her with the horses that often come through our current campsite, but otherwise she seems to be a fan of adventuring and still gets excited when the keys jingle. Oh, she's not a fan of the cholla (pronounced choy-ya), a desert cactus, though! Those are evil! haha. That doesn't stop her from sniffing them, though. Sigh, I guess she'll never learn.

Something I have noticed over this past month is that my parents have unknowingly been preparing me for RV life for ages. They took our family on road trips across the country every year as we were growing up and instilled in me a love for adventuring through this amazing country. They also gave my sisters and me gifts throughout the years for emergency situations where you don't have power. Well, all these gadgets are kinda fun to use when we want to be conservative with our power or prioritize it elsewhere. We're not so conservative with our power anymore, though, now that we've figured out our solar system. (The shop that installed them accidentally switched the positive and negative wires so we weren't getting power. Oops!) Let me tell you, solar power is just as awesome as you thought. I mean, power generated from the sun. Come on! So cool! I go ahead and work on my computer, or plug things in to charge during the daylight when we have power input from the sun and we have barely needed to use our generator this entire time. Well, we used it during the crazy rains. And when I say crazy rains, I mean it! Ty loves rain, he always has, but the monsoons we experienced have made that love waver.

Toward the end of this month, we're finally getting things to a livable point where things aren't absolutely everywhere. Imagine moving into a new house and unpacking, but now picture it in a 24ft RV... Our time crunch for renovating and getting out of the house we lived at in Oregon made it so we got some things moved in, but everything else just got put inside to be dealt with at a later date. That later date kept getting later and later as more of those "hiccups" I mentioned earlier happened. That mess created such a brain fog. It's amazing how the physical things in our lives effect us mentally. I'm looking forward to seeing how/if there's more of a change effected from moving from a large house to a small RV.

So, month one of full-time RV travels is in the books. I'd say we sure got the big crash course we were expecting and, while we haven't figured it all out yet, it's still been awesome. I love seeing new scenery and finding new hikes, especially by changing plans and pulling over last minute when we see something new to try out. I know there's a lot more craziness in store for sure, but if this past month has been any indication then I think it's doable. ;)