One Year Review of our Full-Time RV Travels
Goodness gracious! It’s been a YEAR since we set out on the road full-time in our little 24ft Winnebago View. WHAT?! It’s been a wild ride and a big crash course on everything. I honestly don’t know how to sum up this past year or pick out what constitutes a “highlight,” but here’s my attempt. (Full of photos from my phone…so not the highest quality. But sometimes it’s about getting the moment not having the best quality.) :)
Well, we started out from the home we lived in near Portland, Oregon after a short night of sleep and only a vague direction in mind in our newly almost fully renovated RV. We actually stopped at Fred Meyer for fuel and stayed for a bit while figuring out what to do, haha. Then we had the most magical late night drive down to Northern California through winding roads lined by tall evergreens with snow covered bows on either side of us. It was a good start to a wild trip.
Our RV may have been pretty much fully renovated as we took off from Oregon, but we didn’t have time to organize or fully pair down everything when our deadline for taking off arrived. Our RV was STUFFED and there wasn’t much room to move around. As we traveled, we actually donated more things in each state until Oklahoma. Every time we’re back at my parents’ house I still take more things out of the RV, haha. We also ran into problems with our bike carrier. We started out with a car trunk rack, then that started scratching the car! Yikes! No go with that. Which meant we had to store our bikes INSIDE the RV any time we traveled until we found something that worked. UGH! We tried a split hitch with a hitch-attaching rack second. That didn’t even make it out of the gate to be tried because a ball bearing broke right away! We tried that style again only to be faced with the same issue. No more. Then our fourth attempt was finally a ladder mount that has been going strong for most of the year. We were hesitant to try this till so many other options failed us because we wanted to be able to access our solar panels via the ladder. We didn’t want to have to remove the bikes every time we needed to access the solar panels, but we’ve learned we really don’t have to access the solar all that much. Annnnd, my laziness has taught me that I can totally scramble up the side of the ladder without removing the bikes, haha.
The past year has been a huge crash course on not only living on the road full-time and boondocking, but even about RVs themselves since we didn’t have much experience with them (if at all). We knew nothing. I was scared to drive the RV at first, but now do it quite often. We learned about how to get water, how to find where to boondock, how to sparingly use our precious electricity, how to properly connect the solar panels (the shop accidentally swapped the positive and negative wires, OOPS!) and the inverter, how to find a new church almost every single week, how to keep condensation to a minimum, and on and on.
We visited 23 states, 7 National Parks, and 14 National Monuments, Lakeshores, Historical Sites, Preserves, etc. Google told me we traveled the equivalent of 80% of the way around the equator! We paid a grand total of $148.16 on places to stay all year, but that amount includes our National Parks pass and our Washington State Parks pass which not only granted us access to so many amazing places but are also the required permits for boondocking on BLM land and National Forests or in Washington State Parks respectively. So out of that amount, we really only paid $38.16 for 1 night at an RV park, which we stayed at in order to become South Dakota residents. I’m not sure how much we spent on fuel and upkeep this past year; it was significantly more than what we spent on places to stay, but significantly less than rent. We did park overnight at 11 casinos where Ty went in and did the free play and often made about $10 each time. So…that’s cool, haha.
We broke down on our way through the mountains from Joshua Tree National Park to Phoenix, Arizona. We had to be towed something like 75 miles there. Thank goodness for such kind friends there who let us crash with them! (Thank you, again, Eddie and Jenny!) We did not, however, have a good experience at the Mercedes dealership in Phoenix. They treated us terribly, while Lexus always treated us like royalty. So if you’re trying to decide between the two, go with Lexus…
We bought a botanical garden reciprocal membership that we used all around the country. I have really enjoyed seeing what each region highlights.
We took our most vertical and challenging hike to the top of the Superstition Mountains. It was SO much fun and I fell in love with agave plants at the other-worldly top. This hike is now always one of the first things we think of when people ask us our favorite part of our travels so far.
We toured Western Washington, walking so very many miles of beaches hoping to find the perfect spot where we’d like to settle down. Nothing quite stood out so we’re still on the hunt, although if we had a few million dollars we’d probably set up at least a rental spot in Seabrook, WA. It somehow reminded us of Stars Hollow if it were a coastal town and very wealthy, haha. SO nice.
When we made it to the NW part of Washington, the rainy season began and we discovered a leak in our roof above the shower, couldn’t get our humidity down, and couldn’t dry out. Our experience up there was incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly stressful. It’s fixed now! Yay!
We really loved Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and especially that we made it at the right time of year to see all the wild horses and bison with their young! A herd of about 30 wild horses made a magnificent show as we drove out of the park when they galloped around us as we were stopped on the road so as to not hit them. It was an incredible experience!
We had to escape the early snow and cold that hit us out West, and we did so by going to Chicago, haha. It’s not warmer, but we winterized the pipes and visited family and friends over the holidays. Living in our RV is more of a fair-weather life, the extremes of the rain and humidity we encountered in Washington, the 100 degree heat we encountered in California, and the snow and freezing temperatures that hit us early in the season while we were in Utah are not what this was made for. Those extremes are beautiful and we’ll likely go back to many places so we can experience those things more later in life.
There is so much more that happened this year—we saw many wonderful and generous friends all over the country and went on many, many hikes—but there’s no way to share it all in one post. I don’t think there’s really a way to fully cover what this first year was like, other than we’re excited to keep going. Soon we’ll be off to explore the Southeastern portion of our beautiful country. I’m a little nervous that it’s not so boondocking friendly, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out as we have everything else up to this point, haha. Here’s to one year of life on the road. Cheers!
