Whoa, Has It Really Been A Year Already?!

We are happy to announce that today marks our one year “TRAVEL-VERSARY” (cue the fireworks)!! Wow, how time flies! We can remember, quite vividly, all of the emotions we felt as we sat in the driveway looking at each other before taking off in our new (to us) home on wheels!  Had we planned enough? Are we totally nuts? How do we know we are making the right decision?  All of that, thrown in with a heavy dose of exhilaration and joy completes the palate of emotions we experienced.  Not sure why the exact moment of making our dream a reality inflicted the second guessing but we were as ready as we were ever going to be! The good news is: we are still here!

Two yard sales, countless Craigslist ads, multiple “test” weekends with the RV and hundreds of hours of planning had led us to the moment that would change our lives forever. We left our home in Clermont, Florida and spent our first night boondocking in a Walmart parking lot in Lake City, FL as we began to make our way to Campbellsville, Kentucky for my job with Amazon Camperforce. As you can tell, we really spared no expense on our first night as fulltimers!

As we look back on the last year, we have so many thoughts coming to mind! One of the first being, “Wow, can’t believe it’s been a year already!”  For real though, where did the time go? The next thought is, “Ohhhh the places we have been!”  We have covered 15 states and thousands of miles thus far in our journey and we are already keeping a list of places that we would love to go back to…..ahem, Northern Michigan, San Antonio and Austin, just to name a few! We can honestly say that, for the most part, this lifestyle has been everything we thought it would be. Traveling, meeting new people, exploring new places…those were our goals with living in an RV! Check, check and check!  We feel truly lucky to be able to travel all the time. There is a certain satisfaction to working from home full time and getting to travel wherever we want to, when we want to! Travel days are still a little nerve wracking for us, but that seems to be a small trade off. Does anyone else feel the need to decompress after a few hours (or days) on the road?!

So, where have we gone exactly??  Well, a good chunk of our first year was spent in Campbellsville, Kentucky for my Amazon gig (Sept 21-Dec 22) and another chunk was spent down in Central Florida (Dec-Mar) to close out the winter.  After that, it gets kinda crazy!  We left Florida and set off to explore Texas (McKinney, Lake Conroe, Medina Lake, Austin and Dallas) for most of April and then meandered our way east, stopping in Mississippi (to visit Ryan’s alma mater, Ole Miss), Tennessee (outside of Memphis) and North Carolina (Winston-Salem area).  After North Carolina, it was time to make our way to Michigan for the summer! The only regret we have about our stay in Northern Michigan (Beulah, Frankfort, St. Ignace) is that we wished it would have been longer!  It is absolutely beautiful there and we will definitely be heading back at some point! We had as close to perfect weather as anyone could hope for which really made the trip extra enjoyable.

It’s  funny, on one hand, we have learned SO much and on the other hand, we still have SO much left to learn. One thing we learned VERY quickly when starting this lifestyle is that…things go wrong daily! In the beginning, when something would go wrong or break, we would throw our hands up, ask why us and assume we were the only ones that had to deal with daily repairs.  I will take a moment here to give a TON of credit to Ryan! He has really become an amazing handy-man and has acquired quite the collection of tools these days! YouTube, Google, Amazon and he have really developed into quite the wolf pack! There is no task he will not attempt to take on himself. We’ve stayed up countless nights working on repairs, taken apart our toilet (MULTIPLE times), removed our washer/dryer (which is NOT a small feat), replaced the battery bank, nursed our refrigerator back to health several times, repaired water leaks…the list could really go on and on!  We don’t feel nearly as overwhelmed when we find something that needs repaired/replaced these days.  It just comes with the territory!

Overall, we feel like we have already accomplished what we set out to do when we left that driveway one year ago. We want to live with intention and we definitely want to continue exploring! So a quick recap: we want more of this life! It has really been an amazing year and we are even more excited for what we have planned for the future! What’s up next for us? We are tackling the Sugar Beet Harvest in Ada, Minnesota in October and look out for our big venture West in 2017!

We look forward to more adventures, more beautiful backyards and more scenic sunsets!  We hope to see you on the road!  Safe travels to you and until next time!

Cheers!

Kim, Ryan and Jet