As a part of reflecting on one year of this full time RV lifestyle, we’re writing about our biggest surprises, challenges, highlights, and tips. This post is all about our biggest challenges. You can check out our biggest surprises here.
If there’s one thing we can’t emphasize enough, it’s that we’re incredibly grateful and appreciative of the opportunity to live and work while full-time RVing. We know that we’re in the minority, and that most people don’t have the resources, time, lifestyle, employment situation, or even the desire to get out of the familiar and hit the road.
That said, we also frequently hear that we’re “living the dream.” Most of the time, we would absolutely agree with that. But this lifestyle is not without its challenges; some are just a part of everyday life that come with you, and some that are unique to a nomadic lifestyle. In the spirit of keeping it real and sharing the good and the bad, here are some of our biggest challenges from our first year living in an RV.
Kriste’s Top 3 RV Lifestyle Challenges
- Feeling isolated. By far the most challenging thing for me has been missing friends and family back home and feeling isolated at times. Full-time RVing is still pretty uncommon, and especially for working-aged people. We therefore have struggled to make friends while staying at campgrounds. Most people are there on vacation, or retired, or with their own group for the weekend. Even if we do make friends, sometimes they’re gone the next day before we’ve had a chance to really connect or to say goodbye. I’m an extrovert and miss in-person connection. Most of my work is on my computer, so there are times when I’ve gone days without talking to anyone other than Noah, which can put a strain on our relationship.
It’s not all bad though. We had a lot of time with friends and family this summer when we drove back to New England, and my parents visited us over Christmas. We’ll see them again in a few weeks in Arizona. We’ve also been able to visit friends and family all over the country that we otherwise haven’t seen in years along our travels. These times have been some of the most fulfilling, including some surprise run-ins with friends that we didn’t even know were in the same place at the same time.
We haven’t quite figured out the best way to stay connected with friends and family just yet, but we’re trying to stay in better touch than when we first left, including through emails, texts, and video chats. We’re also trying to make more of an effort to meet people while traveling. We’re getting a sign to put out at each campground (so we look more approachable), and a recent friend we met suggested a book called Nice Bike that’s all about making connections (thanks Jeff!). My bottomline takeaway from this particular challenge is that places may be beautiful, but it’s the people you share life with that makes it rich. - Comparing my career path with others. Somewhat related to the challenge of feeling lonely sometimes, is a struggle with feeling a bit lost professionally. This entire lifestyle is possible because we are both able to work remotely. Even with many more people working from home or remotely, it’s still a more non-traditional career path. This more entrepreneurial lifestyle was never something I anticipated living when growing up and while in school. It may be a “the grass is greener situation,” but I enjoy working in a more traditional physical office with a collaborative environment surrounded by co-workers.
Living and working from an RV, while a blessing to be able to travel and explore, has caused me to question whether this is the best path for my professional development. I’m particularly guilty of comparing myself to my peers, and where they are in their careers. While I know that “comparison is the thief of joy,” it’s something I’ve always struggled with, and that has continued even with this exciting lifestyle change.
I’m grateful to my family for speaking with me on many occasions this past year to help me gain perspective, and to be more patient. For now, I’m trying to embrace that no path is linear, and that this incredibly unique adventure is just a part of my own career path, wherever that may eventually lead. Noah has been very supportive, as a good boss should be, and is always making sure that I feel that I have whatever tools and training I need to succeed. He is even willing to put our trip on pause should I need to for any professional opportunities. - Everyday tasks are more difficult. I didn’t really think about it while coming up with my three challenges, but they’re actually all pretty intertwined. My third challenge also has to do with the fact that life on the road is so different from living in one place. Full-time RVing makes it very challenging to establish routines. We typically spend a week or two in one place, although sometimes we move even more quickly due to campground availability. We try to work traditional Monday – Friday days and hours, but it’s not always possible.
On top of that, every week we pack up and roll our house somewhere new, where we have to learn the lay of the land all over again. We have to find a new grocery store, a new gym, and figure out if we can do laundry at the campground or have to find a laundromat. And, probably most challenging for me, the consistency of hot showers with good pressure is never guaranteed. In fact, the shower situation has been a big pain point for me. All of this to say, that for me, as a creature of habit as many of us are, I’ve had to learn to be more flexible. If that’s what it takes to travel the country and have countless incredible experiences, well I guess I can suck it up and learn to go with the flow more.
Noah’s Top 3 RV Lifestyle Challenges
Noah shared his thoughts with me while we drove from New Mexico to Arizona, and I’ve summarized his thoughts below.
- Planning is a constant battle. Living in an RV full-time requires an ongoing struggle to plan both the big picture and all the details. Because we work regular hours, we try to only move on the weekends, and we need to know well in advance that we’ll be staying somewhere that has good internet connection. If not, it needs to be close to a town with cafes and wifi. The connectivity issue is a challenge in and of itself. We’re still trying to solve that problem, and going to share in a separate post what we’ve figured out (it is getting better).
As far as big picture planning, the challenge here is actually that our options are really endless. Other than trying to stay in warm(ish) temperatures and where we can get internet, we can go anywhere. That makes it challenging to choose where to go, because there are so many places we’d like to experience, but we can’t do it all, especially at our work-travel pace.
Once we have a general route in mind, the detailed planning can be even more challenging. We’ve found out that camping sites in popular locations can be booked up to a year ahead of time. We hardly know where we’ll be in a few months, let alone a year. Many people who are camping for vacation know where they’ll be and can book that far in advance. That blocks out a lot of weekends at places that we’d like to stay for a week or longer, and then either takes that place off our route, or forces us to move twice in a week, including during on work days. There have been many times when we go to plan, and after three hours we’ve only booked one additional week.
To manage this challenge, we’re trying to book at least three months out, and ideally we’ll get to a point where we have our route planned out six months ahead of us, and keep planning an additional month on a rolling basis. We also started using a number of different RV trip planning apps and websites that we’ll write more about separately. This would all likely be very different if we didn’t have to work, or relied so much on internet connectivity, but that’s just a reality of this digital nomad lifestyle. - Our relationship takes more work. We’ve been together for almost ten years, and married for about five of those years. I’d definitely say that we have a very strong relationship. We have a solid foundation of trust and are pretty good with communication. Our wedding ceremony was really important to me, and I took the lead in making sure it represented us as a couple. We are all about maintaining our independence while being together. This was a lot easier before downsizing from 2000 square feet to 200, and before working together.
When you’re in a house, with two cars, you can easily take some time to yourself and get space away from your partner when needed. That’s a lot more challenging now that we have one vehicle, and no close friends or family to go to when we may need a break from each other. We’ve gone through ups and downs with our relationship living in the RV and the added stress. We’ve always said that if it got too difficult, we come first and would change the lifestyle if it ever put too much of a strain on our relationship.
We’re still trying to find the balance between too much time together, and getting some time apart. Recently, we’ve each started taking a day every week to go into town alone, and that has helped. I’ll work from a cafe and find a yoga class while Kriste stays in the camper and works and has the evening to herself. Overall, this experience has brought us closer together, but it hasn’t been without its challenges. - There’s a lot to learn about RVing. When you first start, you’re called a newbie. It makes sense, because there are a lot of new things to learn. We decided to get what is called a travel trailer, because we didn’t want something too big, and we wanted to be able to tow it with the F-150 truck we purchased. It is still a house on wheels, and that meant learning many new systems, from how to safely tow, to water systems, heating, electric, and many other details that you don’t think about when you’re in a house (like dumping your tanks).
It is a steep learning curve, and is especially stressful starting out. The first time we ever dumped our tanks, I didn’t check to see if the valves were closed and got an unpleasant surprise when hooking up the pipe (fortunately it was just the kitchen water that came out). Even after a year in, we feel like we’re just becoming more comfortable with the systems on board. I’ve also become more confident in fixing things when they go wrong. We haven’t had too many things breakdown, but at the beginning we didn’t know what to do and would have others fix things. For example, our water heater and water pump system weren’t working, and we had these fixed at the dealer when they were still under warranty. We also had a leak in our kitchen sink, which our friend Tim helped me fix.
More recently, I’ve started to do more of the maintenance and am getting more confident. When our propane tank regulator started leaking, I researched how to fix it on YouTube, bought a new part on Amazon, and installed it myself. Last week, we got our third flat tire. I watched the AAA service member put on the spare the first time, and was able to do it myself (with Kriste’s help) this time. Each time something breaks, I’m taking it as a learning opportunity to tackle myself. Right now, I’m working on fixing our broken electric fireplace. This is all great practice for one day when we live on a sailboat. There will be even more moving parts and systems to learn and maintain.
Always working on our relationship, but we’re grateful for it! Learning how to maintain with the RV. Popular campgrounds like in the Keys book up fast. We lucked out at this one on Key Largo. Sometimes you have to let out the frustrations of nomadic life! Fixing our third flat tire.
Hopefully this gives you some idea of the realities of the digital nomad lifestyle. There are many other challenges that we didn’t touch on (towing, anyone?). It’s all worth it to continue traveling and seeing more of this country and learning about ourselves and each other.
What about you? What challenges have brought you out of your comfort zone recently?
hi, it is always a pleasure hearing about your experiences. One certainly doesn’t know what to express when you venture into a new life experience. I am proud of the two of you in how you are dealing with all these challenges. I was happy that we were able to be a part of a social time visiting you at Greg’s in Texas.
My challenging right now is enjoying retirement after 40 years of teaching young children with special needs as well as typical developing children!!!! My challenge seems to be enjoying how I spend my days while answering many texts a day asking me to babysit children, substituting at many public schools, teaching sign language to young children in a day care and also substituting in this day care, I am also being asked by local families to help with their aging parents to help when they want to go away, also visit friends and relatives of my friends who live in assisting living who enjoy my visits and lastly I spend many, many hours working on restoring a little red schoolhouse!!!!!! I enjoy everyday and feel good about everything I do!!!!
Now I am trying to balance my time with working with John on home projects and having time to enjoy our time and visiting family!!!