7 Reasons Why We Sold Everything to Travel in an RV Full Time
My husband Mitch and I decided to sell our second car, put our house on the market, and get rid of most of our stuff so that we could travel to state and national parks across the United States with our two kids, Lee and Josie, and our two cats, Bug and Froot Loop.
We had talked about making the leap for a couple years, but it never felt like a landing we could stick. When it came up in conversation, we mostly just laughed it off and kept on dreaming.
That all changed in September of 2021.
Eventually, all the reasons why we wanted to make the move far outweighed the doubts we’d had about whether or not we could make it work. We decided to go for it. Here are seven of the reasons why:
1. Because We Can Relatively Easily
We are very fortunate (and privileged) to be in a position where it was relatively easy for us to choose this lifestyle for our family.
Many circumstances came together that made it pretty simple for us to sell our home and hit the road full-time, including:
- My employer, Gather Voices, is open to remote work and believes in the power of offering flexibility to their employees
- The pandemic impacted the economy, driving up the profit we were able to make on the sale of our second car and our home
- Mitch is already a stay-at-home dad, with a mechanical skillset that will make it easier for us to maintain our travel trailer and towing vehicle
- We have been educating our kids at home since before the pandemic began, so there were no hard goodbyes with classmates or teachers
- Our families and friends are incredibly supportive and offered up their homes as temporary living spaces for us during the transition
I don’t tell y’all this to make anyone feel like they cannot choose this lifestyle if it’s something they really want.
I know from personal experience that there is transformational power in human persistence, faith in oneself, and a supportive community. I believe in you.
At the same time, it is important to me to start by recognizing that, due to the priorities we’ve collectively chosen as a society, making this lifestyle change can be very tricky for many people who would find fulfillment in it.
I think that’s a shame.
2. Because This Lifestyle is Aligned to Our Values
Mitch and I were very different people when we purchased our home in North Carolina, back in 2018. We didn’t have the same values that we have today and that fact is reflected in the house we chose.
In the Chicago suburbs, we’d always felt as though we were bursting at the seams in our two-bedroom townhouse. With an infant, a toddler, and all the gear we thought they needed back then, our main priority was a house that was going to be big enough for all of us and all of our stuff.
And that’s exactly what we got: a house with four bedrooms, a bonus room dedicated to the kids’ toys, and a generous basement. It was suddenly so easy to store all of the stuff we had never had room for before. And, it was suddenly so much easier to fill it up with even more stuff.
It wasn’t a problem at first. The house was everything we had always thought we ever wanted!
Until it wasn’t.
We quickly realized that what we loved most about our home had absolutely nothing to do with the inside.
We planted our first garden one month after we moved in. We began raising a backyard flock of chickens shortly thereafter. We stopped using the air conditioner so we could live with the seasons.
We fell in love with all of the natural beauty that our new homelands had to offer.
It didn’t take long for us to begin to resent all that excess stuff inside the house, because it kept us from doing more of the things we loved most: hiking, gardening, exploring, camping, wildcrafting, being in nature…
Every few months, we’d declutter and donate just enough stuff to take a little bit of the pressure off. But, stuff has a way of catching up with you, even when you no longer want it.
And the fact that our lifestyle was no longer in line with the things we’d come to value became impossible to ignore when we were home all day, every day during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We simply had to change it. The time had come.
3. So We Can Have More Quality Time as a Family
Have you ever felt like you could scroll forever down your to-do list and never find the end of it? I have.
When the office I worked in closed for quarantine and I began working remotely full-time, I thought that I would have more time to spend with my family.
But in reality, after those first few weeks of the pandemic cooled off, I settled into a rhythm of reallocating the time I used to spend commuting to getting a head start on emails in the morning and wrapping up that one last project in the evening.
And, when I wasn’t putting in more hours at work, being at home all day reminded me of all the home improvement projects we still hadn’t gotten around to tackling. And, I could feel the kids’ disorganized, messy, overwhelming toys (despite Mitch’s best efforts) staring at me through the door of my home office.
Yes, I should have established firmer boundaries. Yes, I should have paid more attention to the memes that encouraged me to leave the mess and enjoy my children making memories.
And yes, I don’t blame myself for any of that for even one minute because that’s easier said than done.
The expectations and social pressures on working moms, in particular, are unhealthy, unrealistic, and unrelenting. I’d had about enough.
And, Mitch had too. He’d spend whole days trying to control the chaos, while also trying to educate and entertain two young, wild and free kids (also known as unrelenting balls of energy). He’d clear stuff out of the garage, only to find it back more aggressively than ever in just a few months.
Where did it keep coming from? We still don’t know. But there it was, compelling us to spend our Saturdays organizing our stuff, instead of taking the kids on another hike, spending another afternoon playing in a creek, or catching another sunset.
Not anymore.
4. So Our Kids Can See the Places They are Learning About
We made the decision to educate our kids at home for so many reasons. I could write an entire piece about that and I’m sure someday I will.
For today, I will just say this: we wanted to give our kids the chance to explore their own interests and learn at their own pace for as long as we could.
We chose Blossom & Root, a nature-based, secular curriculum that’s described in the homeschooling community as “gentle.” What does that mean? It means that the learning is mostly led by the child’s interests and doesn’t take more than an hour or two a day.
We read together. We do science experiments. We do arts, crafts, and journaling. We look at beautiful paintings. We talk about history and our ancestors. We learn about and observe nature. We cook together. We even do math worksheets! Mostly, we just play.
Think about it: when you want to learn about someone, somewhere, or something, what do you do? If you can, you experience it firsthand.
You go on the field trip. You practice the new skill. You visit the museum. You explore that country and listen to their language. You taste that dish. You listen to your elders talk about what it was like to live in their time.
I majored in English in college. Trust me, I understand how powerful written words are.
I understand that they offer a window to the world and expand kids’ imagination. I understand that it is perfectly possible to learn about things without having experienced them first-hand.
But, when Lee and I were recreating the setting of Pecos Bill’s tall tale as part of a Language Arts project, I can’t say I didn’t realize how much fun it would be to be able to recreate the landscapes described in the book after observing them live and in color.
I know that the people who make a living giving guided tours in Washington, D.C. can explain the work that goes on there with a richness that it would be difficult (if not impossible) for Mitch and I to completely replicate on our own.
5. So We Can Get to Know Mother Nature Even Better
Before we moved to North Carolina, I remember how envious I was of one of my friends, who was telling me about what a relaxing time she’d had sitting quietly in nature with her bare feet on the ground.
I could see her connection with nature was something special. But I didn’t understand it.
When I put my bare feet on the ground back then, one of three things would happen:
- I’d get cold.
- I’d get bored.
- I’d scream when a bug crawled by.
To say that I had no connection with Mother Nature before we left the suburbs of Chicago would be an understatement.
I had family members and friends in the suburbs who tended gardens and enjoyed outdoor activities, so I know it wasn’t a culture flaw of my hometown or the region I grew up in. I just hadn’t been able to connect.
That all changed for me when we moved to the foothills of North Carolina. That mountain range is a special place, and even living on the piedmont moved me.
Lee and Josie grew from babies into big kids playing under the oak, holly and maple trees in our yard. They ran barefoot day and night, never mind our best efforts, bee stings, and slugs. They made clay and stained all their clothes with it. They howled at the moon.
They connected.
At first, I thought our connection was to the garden we tended year-round. We put our hearts and souls into that soil, transforming half of the three quarters of an acre we lived on from grass lawn to edible gardens during our three years there.
But as we hiked those mountains, breathed in that ocean air, dipped our toes in those creeks, and met those plants and animals, I realized it was never just about that garden.
Yes, as much as we nurtured that soil, she nurtured us tenfold. She taught us about the generosity, compassion, and even ferocity of Mother Nature in a way I’m not sure I, personally, could have learned any other way. She showed us what real love is.
And I’m so excited to see how much deeper that love goes as we get to know Mother Nature in all of her forms, from the mountains of Colorado, to the grasslands of Wyoming to the coasts of California to the temperate rainforest in Washington state.
6. So We Can Experience New Ways of Living and Being
When you live somewhere for a long time, you begin to the see the way that you and your neighbors live as simply: “the way.”
Mother Earth teaches me that there is no one way. There are so many different ways to live and be in our world. And they are all beautiful.
I am excited to teach our kids about the diverse group of humans who live in the same country as we do (and if I have my way, we’ll convince Mitch to go beyond the United States, too — the man is more afraid of flying than I am!).
We don’t all think the same way. We don’t all look the same. We don’t all share the same customs. We have so much to learn from each other.
We don’t all face the same obstacles. We aren’t all oppressed. We haven’t all benefitted from the way things have always been. We all share our humanity in common.
And beyond humanity: our Mother Nature is home to all kinds of life: plants, animal, and fungi. The moon, the wind, the stars, the water, the planets, the fire, the earth.
There are so many ways of being here. I can’t wait to experience them all, together as a family.
7. So We Have Space and Time to Discover What’s Next
Mitch and I have been talking about building a yurt to live in for a couple years. Yes, we do want to live in a beautiful, canvas tent, surrounded by nature, thanks for asking!
In fact, we started building a tiny 9-foot yurt for practice, but never got around to putting the canvas on. We ultimately sold it to a couple who planned to finish the project out.
Either way, we had fun.
Maintaining a four-bedroom house and a 2,000 square foot garden while working full-time and educating your kids at home is a recipe for overwhelm.
I’m under no illusion that living out of a travel trailer full-time will be easy breezy, but I do believe that it will give us space and mental bandwidth that maintaining the house and all our stuff never did.
And with fewer financial pressures (I’ll do a post about budgeting on the road once we live it for a few months!), we’ll be able to accelerate saving for a home that is more in line with our values.
Next time, we’ll buy a lot more land and a lot less house.
Ultimately, what it all boils down to for our family is that we were not living in a way that reflected the truth of who we are and the values we had developed.
I firmly believe that when you live in misalignment like that, you can’t maintain it for long. It eats at you until you are practically forced to rearrange things.
Before you go: we want to hear from you!
Have you been considering traveling full-time, but haven’t committed yet? Tell us your reasons why.
Think this lifestyle could never be for you? Remember: I know there are so many unique ways to live and be in this world. Tell me your reasons why not.
And, to keep up with our journey, follow me and our publication here on Medium and give us a follow on Facebook and Instagram, where you can look back at the gardening journey that brought us to this cross-country adventure. We’ll document our travels on these channels moving forward.
