We sold our house
Officially decided to sell our house, pack our things, and live in an RV for 6 (maybe more) months!! We are choosing a life on the road and doing full time RV travel! We’ve been talking about this for several years and after a trial vanlife week (read about that here), we decided to just go for it. If we put it off, we just weren’t sure when we’d end up getting a chance to do this again. We decided against doing this in a van for several reasons. Too small, expensive, potentially months away. We went to a local RV show and decided a travel trailer was going to be the best option for us instead.
bought a truck
We traded in both of our cars and bought a Chevy Silverado 1500. We wanted something spacious and with enough towing capacity for a small RV. Our top choices were Chevy or RAM but we found a Chevy that was at our price point, has a decent towing capacity, is spacious and seats 6 people, and we both love the way it drives.
The hunt for our camper
We spent a good bit of time searching for the best travel trailer for our family. Due to our truck, we were a little limited in what we could tow so we had to keep that in mind when searching. We didn’t want to start with anything too big anyway so it worked for us. Several sales guys at different RV lots mentioned that they would recommend buying the camper before the truck. Makes sense but we had just bought the truck so we weren’t about to go trade it in for something more powerful quite yet.
When looking for pull behinds it is recommended to find the one you want before buying your truck. Once you have the pull behind that is perfect for your family, then go find the truck that can pull it!
We searched all over and didn’t settle for any trailers that didn’t match what we were looking for. We finally found a place online a few hours away from us that had one we wanted to walk through. Side note: when searching for a trailer, go see it in person. Walk all around the floor to make sure there are no soft spots. Lay down on the bed to make sure you fit (talking to all our fellow tall people..). Stand in the shower. We actually ended up not liking that one but they had a similar one on the lot they wanted to show us. It was a little out of our budget but we were able to negotiate and get the price where we wanted it. We left with it the next day and that officially started us on our RV living!
When searching for a trailer: go see it in person. walk all around the floor to make sure there are no soft spots. Lay down on the bed to make sure you fit (talking to all our fellow tall people..) Stand in the shower to get a feel for it.
packing for the rv
Packing was hard. We weren’t just packing for a trip. We were packing up our whole house AND packing for living on the road. Reading lots of blogs and testimonies from full time RVers helped us decide on what to pack. We started by figuring out what we for sure didn’t need and packed all of that into our storage unit. From there we sifted through everything else.
What worked for us was buying 4 clear storage bins from Target and each of us took one bin. We fit in our clothes and a few personal items (books, hats, etc). We also bought a large storage bin for the bed of the truck and that stores all our winter stuff and some hiking stuff. For the kitchen we really narrowed it down to the things we knew we would use the most (based on our every day life). Made sure to grab medications we might need and all the toiletry items for all 4 of us. Thankfully we were still close to our storage unit so as we put things away in the RV, things we changed our mind on or couldn’t find room for we ultimately put back in storage. Everything adds up and it’s important to keep an eye on weight!
Everything adds up so it’s important to keep an eye on weight!
Travel
We stayed at a few campgrounds locally to help get a feel for the RV. My dad was close by and he has experience with pulling a travel trailer and RV driving so we could easily have him come help us with anything. Now comes the planning! We knew we wanted to get to North Dakota to visit family while it was warm (winter in ND was a hard pass for me…) so instead of going south towards Florida or north towards New England, we decided to plan west to Tennessee and start heading north from there. Our biggest hurdle to figure out was routes to take. We wanted to make sure we stayed on RV safe roads. This is when I found the RV Life site. It has been the biggest help in figuring out campgrounds and routes. I have since planned our entire trip using their website!
While Fargo was our ultimate destination on this first leg of the trip, we had lots of stops we wanted to make between NC and ND. We’re trying to mix history and adventure to get a taste for everything. We would like to get to as many National Parks as we can but also hit up historical spots and other fun areas we think the boys would enjoy. (For reference, our boys are 4 and almost 2). We didn’t have a date we needed to get to Fargo so we planned to take our time. Mostly staying 2 or 3 nights depending on how much we found to do in the area. Some people would probably prefer to stay longer but this worked for us. Choosing a life on the road is daunting but so far it has been SO worth it.
Stay tuned! The next post will include our itinerary for leg one of our journey!