Happily traveling together fulltime for 20 months and counting
“And you’re still married?”
It’s by far the most common reaction we get after telling people we’ve been traveling together for nearly two years. More interesting, apparently, than our favorite destination or even how we’re able to travel for so long is how we’ve refrained from murdering each other.
The frequency of this question reveals a lot about the state of our relationships; which is also where the answers begin.
In youth, the world is wide open. Life is about trying new things, pushing boundaries, discovering limits, and exploring a planet that is ripe with possibility. As time passes we surround ourselves increasingly with comforts and lose interest in discovery. Our propensity for boldness atrophies. Our longing to see around the next corner gradually succumbs to fear of the unknown. Our world shrinks.
It doesn’t have to.
Within the last couple of weeks we’ve received enough questions about our RV, and how we chose it, that an entire post on the subject seems warranted. We haven’t spoken a lot about the nuts and bolts of RVing in the past, so this is a topic that is probably a bit overdue.
When we first decided to live in an RV fulltime it was something we knew absolutely nothing about. To be honest, we couldn’t tell a Class A from a 5th wheel from a cow. We had never owned so much as a pop-up trailer. Heck, we had never even spent a night in a camper of any kind. It took us about two months of hard research to go from zero to confident RV owners. This is how we decided on our specific rig:
There is no avoiding it. If you want to hit the road fulltime you have to learn to travel light. If you dream of backpacking around the globe, plan on carrying no more than 40 liters (1.4 cubic feet) of gear; basically just enough to hold a couple changes of clothes. Even with a large RV, space is limited.
Prior to moving in to a 300-square-foot motor home, we made do with a 1,000-square-foot apartment. For over a decade we lived without the benefit of a basement or an attic. Our total storage space amounted to three small closets. We always considered our lifestyle pretty minimalist. Somehow we still managed to accumulate four times more stuff than we could take with us.
Nearly everything we owned had to go.
You want to travel the world. You love your pets. What do you do?
Reconciling your dream life with the real-world constraints of your existing life is no small challenge. Few of those challenges are harder than incorporating the needs of pets into your travel plans.
It’s probably because of how much we struggled with this issue that reading the blog post Letting Go: What about the Pets? made me so sad. In fairness to the good folks at Meet, Plan, Go, I think they simply buried the lead. The article really does have good, useful, information, which is typical of their work. To get to the best stuff, though, you need to read past the title and the first three testimonials of people who gave away their pets to pursue a life on the road.
Everywhere Once 