RVing Full Time | 4 Essentials When Booking An RV Campsite

December 4th, 2011 Ralph
rving full time

Before you hit the road and go rving to cool places like Chicago, its good to folow our 4 tips on how to pick a good RV campsite first!

So you’ve decided to go rving full time and you’ve already decided on your RV itinerary.

Your next step is to now start booking your RV campsites.

So get out the pen and paper or bookmark this post for later use because we’re going to give you 4 things you must know when picking out your RV campsites when full time RVing.

1. Know Your RV Specs

It seems kind of obvious, but you do need to know the dimensions of your RV. In our case its a 37 foot Chapparal Fifth Wheel. This means a lot of RV campsites are way too small for us; a good thing to know before calling around or looking online. Making sure the RV campsite will fit your RV is always a good thing.

Make sure you Read more »

How to Stay Connected When RVing Full Time

November 28th, 2011 Ralph

rving full time staying connectedWhen we are talking with people about RVing full time, a question that comes up very frequently is how we stay connected when we’re in all these crazy, out-of-the way places.

If you’re RVing full time around New York City, then chances are you wouldn’t have a lot of connectivity issues.

But when you’re rving in places like Hungry Horse, Montana, these are spots not exactly known for their spectacular 4G cell service….

So because of that we have multiple backups to make sure we stay connected and are able to work even in the most remote locations.

RVing Full Time and Staying Connected

Unless you’re independently wealthy (we unfortunately are not), you have to figure out a way to pay the bills while you’re out on the road RVing full time. A few years ago, after getting The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris from Jen for our 9th wedding anniversary, I was inspired to start an online business with the ultimate goal of leading the “location independent lifestyle”…which is perfect for RVing full time.

Since we both work from home with our respective businesses, full time RVing was a perfect way for us to see the country, educate our kids, fulfill our travel dreams while continuing to work at the same time.

But when you work from the road, chances are pretty good that you have to stay connected to the Internet. As they say in the online world: no connection, no business.

Although it is an awesome device, the iPhone 4 will only will take your so far. There are going to be plenty of times when you’ll Read more »

The Most Important RVing Full Time Tip

November 7th, 2011 Jen

rving rigRVing full time does require a bit of pre-planning.

If you’re RVing with kids, it requires ALOT of planning. After all, you can’t just “show up” at Yellowstone National Park on the fourth of July weekend and expect for them to have a full hookup RV site for you ready and waiting for you.

So as much as RVing full time is all about spontaneity, getting away from the “structured life” , and “location independence”…when push comes to shove, you’ll need to do some research, planning and preparation.

The Most Important RVing Full Time Tip

The most important thing when RVing, aside from making sure you have enough gas to get to your destination, is far and away the choices you make for RV parks.

And the best way to make sure the RV parks you are thinking if staying at are not complete dumps, we recommend checking RV park reviews on the Internet prior to booking.

Another great way to get information on RV parks is to ask your friends and have them make recommendations as well.

You can also go to RV forums and ask questions on these RVing sites as well. Campers love sharing their wealth of information! If they enjoyed a campground, then Read more »

The Best RVing Picture Ever

October 24th, 2011 Ralph

We’ve been RVing full time for nearly three months now. So at this point, we feel like the RV is like a second home for us.

At least this is the way me and Jen feel.

I’m never quite sure what the kids thought about living in an RV full time because sometimes they tell us they miss home, they miss their friends, they miss being at school.

So I wasn’t so sure about how they really felt about RVing full time until I stumbled on this picture in a big pile of stuff….

the best rv picture ever

We weren't so sure if our kids thought the RV was home...until we found this drawing

I guess they Read more »

RVing Full Time | How to Buy an RV When You Have No Clue

October 19th, 2011 Ralph
rving

If only picking an RV was as easy as picking your horse...

April 2011.

Full time RV family…almost ready to pull the trigger.

Palms…sweating.

Checkbook…present but still in its fuscia-colored, pocketbook holster.

Dad…feeling like he’s gonna hurl.

Mom..supremely confident.

Kids…somewhere in the RV showroom hurting each other.

There we were, standing on the precipice of the largest rolling tin-can homestead decision of our lives…

How to Buy an RV if You’ve Never Gone RVing

Did I tell you we have never really RV’ed before? But there we were in the RV showroom about to put a big wad of cash (actually just a big check with zeros at the end of it) down for a brand new Chapparal 330 FBH Fifth Wheel..

We went RVing once up to Maine in a “Class B” rental RV.

It’s called “Class B” because that is what it actually is. Have you ever seen a “B” movie? It’s kind of the same thing.

We really hated it. Too small, too bouncy, too cramped. We were miserable.

Well, actually Jen and I were miserable…the kids thought it was like a big playhouse on wheels.

Having said all that, deciding to RVing full time is a curious way to see the country, especially if you Read more »

“Looks Like We Made It” To California RVing Full Time!

October 11th, 2011 Ralph
barry manilow rv man

He wasn't singin' about a city when he wrote this classic schmaltz...but this full time RV guy is.

I keep singing that Barry Manilow song over and over in my head…

“Looks like we made it,
Left each other on the way,
To another love…”

For a guy whose  idea of soft rock is Metallica’s Black Album, this is quite a departure, needless to say…

My usual songs that wake me up in the morning are more along the lines of Alice in Chains, Van Halen, Staind and most recently thanks to my axe man buddy, Rich Sossone…Ozzy Ozbourne.

But since we arrived in San Francisco after RVing full time across the U.S. coast to coast for the past four months, I can’t get that song out of my head…

And I also can’t help but thinking about the last four months on the road as the most influential four months of my life.

And now that we’ve made it to California, I can’t stop thinking about the two opposite ends of this country and how I love them both almost equally.

The Full Time RVing Goal Realized?

I always thought of the end goal of our full time RV trip as “making it” to California and San Francisco specifically…hence the silly Manilow song rattling around in my head all week long.

We did make it to California.

Holy crap! We did actually make it to California!

And we did it Read more »

The Bad Things When Full Time RVing

October 9th, 2011 Eli Sorenti-Burns
rving full time in south dakota

Most of the time you have a lot of fun RVing full time (like here in South Dakota), but sometimes there are bad things too

If you are RVing full time cross country, you may want to think about some bad things, but some of these problems are fixed by money. I will tell you here what those bad things are about living in an RV full time.

1. Hitting Stuff in Your Full Time RV

Some times, if you are not careful, you can smash up the RV. In our case, we crashed into a gas tank.

That happened to us in Billings, Montana. My Dad was going forward and the rear of it smashed the gas tank. Then we had to pay the man who owned the store and gas station. That was no fun.

2. RVing Full Time Can Be Expensive

Lots of times, if you are not careful, money can be a problem, especially when paying for gas. Some times gas costs over $150 to fill up the gas tank and you use gas a lot!

Our truck uses diesel and that is even more expensive.

Campgrounds can cost a lot too. Some cost 50 dollars + a day. So if you are full time RVing, save your money!

3. Stuff Breaks in an RV

If something breaks in your RV that is a problem. One time our awning broke in a wind storm in Wisconsin, so we got another person to fix it but it cost money. It cost over five hundred dollars to fix it.

Our insurance Read more »

Full Time Rving and Me

October 7th, 2011 Jen
full time rv adventures

This whitewater trip down the Snake River was just one of the memories that will always last with our children

“We all have a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”.

-Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

There are two things I have always wanted to do in my life along with having a happy family life and a solid career in the satellite business.

I have always yearned to travel, uninterrupted across the world with a backpack (and no reservations) and I have always wanted to do a full time RVing trip across the United States.

Truth be told, it was our family friend, Mrs. Chapin who first inspired me to do the full time Rving trip.

My Inspiration to RV Full Time

In the mid 1970’s Mrs Chapin took a pop-up trailer and drove with her two boys, twelve and fourteen, across the northern US  to reach Seattle to visit her cousins. They were gone almost the entire summer.

Mr. Chapin flew out to Seattle to meet them and drive home with them. It was a trip they would never forget and apparently I never did either.

The Chapins had two children and I am the eighth child from a family of nine. There was no way we could not travel as a family in that way. In fact, I can’t imagine a camper that would fit us all or imagine my self-employed parents ever able to leave their business concerns for more than two days.

I always marveled at the Chapin’s freedom, the interesting sights they saw and what they learned about our country.

RVing Full Time and Me

For years, I yearned to see what ‘purple mountains majesty’ really meant and what the heck was a ‘fruited plan?’  I longed see cowboys, railroads, the land of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the rivers of Mark Twain..all things we have seen on this full time RV trip.

I read incessantly, mostly children’s biographies, carried encyclopedias to the dinner table and was bascially a pest to my older siblings and parents in my quest to know about everything.

Knowing my thirst for travel, Read more »

How To Make Friends While Full Time RVing

October 3rd, 2011 Eli Sorenti-Burns
rv friends 9

Friends we made RVing full time in Iowa at a museum. It was easy!

Some people think that when you are RVing full time that it’s hard to make friends. We used to think that too, but now we don’t.

As a kid, you may miss your friends at home too. But to solve the problem, all you need to do is just write postcards, e-mail, Skype or call your friends. When you do that, it makes it a lot easier when full time RVing.

So for all those kids who are worried when they go live in an RV full time, that they might be lonely or they may not be able to make friends, me and my brother Alex put this list together to show you that it is actually easy to make friends when RVing full time.

1. Go to Where Other Kids Are

Usually, you can find friends in swimming pools and fun places at the RV parks.

I would recommend KOAs as the funnest campgrounds and best places to meet kids.

They have Read more »

How To Save Money Full Time RVing In The National Parks

September 25th, 2011 Ralph
rving full time in the national parks

One of the "paint pots" in beautiful Yellowstone National Park

Back in September of 2009, one of the things that cinched the deal for us to go full time RVing was watching Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea series on PBS.

Once we saw it, we were hooked. We had to take the plunge and go full time RVing – and the places we had to see were many of the parks highlighted in that series.

Although we joke now that watching that series late night is the surest cure for insomnia known to mankind…it is an awesome series. A bit long in the tooth, but awesome nonetheless.

We loved the Ken Burns series so much it inspired us to go full time RVing.

Apparently, we were not alone. In fact, after that series aired on PBS, the attendance at America’s National Parks, especially the ones that received the majority of exposure in the series Read more »

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