How it all started…
Just like many full time RVer’s, our story started in 2020 and with watching too much YouTube! Well kind of…I (Stephanie) always said that my retirement plan was to live full time in an RV and travel but that was just a far off dream for the future. I didn’t believe that there would ever be a way to leave the day to day work life and travel. Well that was until we were all stuck at home during quarantine and looking for something to watch on TV. I’m not sure who we found first or how we stumbled upon them, but we started watching full time RVer’s like Grand Adventure and Keep Your Daydream and before we knew it became our obsession, and we devoured every video about full-time travel we could find.
Still thinking that this was all a pipe dream, I would talk about it all the time in random conversations with friends and family just jokingly saying we are going to do it; someday. Until one March afternoon when we were off-roading in the CanAm with our friends Randee & Paul visiting us from San Diego, and I said to her, “we’re going to just sell everything and travel full time” and Jeff said, “yep, that’s what we’re gonna do”. And right then and there the decision was made. I wasted no time in figuring out how we were going to make this happen. But not without repeatedly asking Jeff if he was serious about wanting to do this. I was so happy and excited I could barely stand it. I didn’t have any doubt that this was going to be the best decision of our lives!!!
There’s a lot to fill in the middle here, but here’s the short of it…We moved to Arizona from California in April 2019 to start new and then bought property to build our dream house in January 2020. We designed that dream house and found a builder and were ready to break ground…and then the developer/HOA shot our plans down and basically told us we could not build any of what we wanted to on our property. So we started to hunt for a new piece of land to build on, but by this time there was a pandemic happening (March of 2020) and the prices of land were skyrocketing along with the prices of building materials. I got fired from my job I had been at for a month. Jeff’s dad got diagnosed with Cancer, and a few short months later passed away. This was a huge wake up call for both of us. His Dad had worked his whole life and never got a chancee to retire and enjoy retirement life. We didn’t want to be in the same boat. Jeff was working an ungodly amount of hours at his job during the pandemic and the stress was off the charts. So we basically decided that we needed a change in a big way from the direction we were going, and Jeff and I both realized that life is short, we have an opportunity to start new and do something amazing, so let’s go for it!
Making the decision to start full time RV life was the easy part. There was so much that had to be done. The list was long, and overwhelming. Most importantly Jeff needed to find a new job so he was able to work remote, and I needed to also be able to work my job remotely. Jeff called up an old friend about the possibilty of working for him and his engineering firm remotely. Jeff’s first job at 16 was at an engineering firm doing drafting and CADD design, so he was going back to his roots. I met with my boss and proposed the idea of working remotely and she was so kind and supportive and totally on board with the idea. So that set the wheels in full motion. Next step was a big one…get rid of all our stuff! Holy wow, did we have a lot of STUFF! We kept cracking up thinking about the George Carlin skit about “stuff”. If you’ve never seen it you can watch it here: “STUFF” We sold a lot of our big items on Facebook marketplace, Craigslist or to friends and family. We planned for a garage sale. We told our landlord we would not be renewing our lease. We started shopping for a new RV. Started telling all our friends and family about our crazy plan and then started planning our route for the first year.
All in all it took us just under a year to make this crazy idea into reality. The decision was made in March, we left Arizona to go live in our RV in California in December, and we hit the road full time in February of 2021! And as the story goes the rest is now history.
* The photos below are from the weekend we were adventuring with our friends Randee & Paul. We spent a snowy day in Sedona one day, and the next we were riding side x sides from Mayer to New River in the warm sunshine.
