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….

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

I guess they think RVing full time is pretty cool too…and even a little bit like home.

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 covered most of it but we had to pay some money anyway, which really stunk!

So my Mom and Dad recommend if you go RVing full time, make sure you get insurance for your RV.

So RVing is lots of fun for sure, and I really like it a lot, so much I may actually like it more than being at home at times. But if you are thinking about going cross country in an RV, its important for you to know that there are bad things that happen too.

Please try to make the best of these problems and just deal with them as best as you can.

Please Share this with your friends on Facebook – there is a button on the left of this post you can do that with. Your friends may want to know about what bad stuff can happen when RVing full time too!

If you share this post with them, then they will know too!

If you want to go RVing full time in the big rig, you gotta know your mission and your time frame!

So, you want to go full time RVing?

In our first post in this series we discussed the importance of being flexible and your mindset for living in an RV full time.

So here we get to the next important step in the process of planning your full time RV trip, mission and time frame.

What’s Your RVing Mission?

It may seem kind of obvious, but without this you’re going to wander around aimlessly as you try to plan your full time RV trip. You full time RV mission could be any number of things, but the most important thing in this step is to figure out what you want to accomplish with your family.

So what do you really want to see? Some ideas to answer this question include:

• National Parks in every state?

• Baseball fields across the US?

• Historical sites?

• Amusement parks?

• Antique shows?

• Museums?

• Natural wonders?

• Craft Fairs?

• Your 72 cousins spread across the country?

• The 4^th grade curriculum of the western movement?

• All of the restaurants that you’ve seen featured on “ Diners, Drive-ins and Dives”?

It could be any of these goals (or more) or a combination of them all. Whatever it is, start there.

Map It Out

Start by creating a list of your “must  see’s” and plot them on a map.  Now, for each member of your family this could mean a different  genre.

If your husband is a history buff (like mine), historical sites and battlefields were top priority to him, as were the baseball fields; you know that he had to get his MLB fix too!

For me, the history was ever so important:  I just HAD to see Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house, the Henry Ford Museum, and Abe Lincoln’s house too.

For our family, we tried to build much of the trip around the kid’s school curriculum that way we could tie lessons plans into real life exposure.

Get Some Travel Books

This is a good point to get some travel books on both full time RVing and travel in the US and Canada. You may stumble upon some other areas of interest to add to your itinerary.

Some of our favorites:

• 1,000 Places to See Before You Die

• Life: Heaven on Earth: 100 Places to See in Your Lifetime

• Frommer’s Exploring America by RV

• Off the Beaten Path: A Travel Guide to More Than 1000 Scenic and Interesting Places Still Uncrowded and Inviting

• Live Your Road Trip Dream: Travel for a Year for the Cost of Staying Home

• Road Trip America: A State-By-State Tour Guide to Offbeat Destinations

Whatever it is for your family, start there and then you can connect the dots to develop your route.

After you have done this then its time to figure out your time frame…

Determine Your Time Frame

What is the duration of your trip?  Is it a summer?  A year?  Decide how long you have and how much time you want to allocate to each general area of the trip.  For example one month in the Northeast, go for a full year cross country or by September you want to be in Seattle.

Write it down and decide how long you’ll be away.

• Decide how long you want to stay at each spot 

Do you like to set up, do a quickie of the area, see the sites and get out within a couple of days?  Or do you like to unpack, call it home for a week or two and enjoy the surroundings as a local?

• RV driving considerations

Its very important to take into account the amount of driving that you want to do in between destinations.  We knew that we never wanted more than a 6 or 7 hour driving day.  Others don’t mind a 12 hour day behind the wheel if it gets them to the next location.

• Events to plan around?

Also are there any events that you have to get to be a certain time?  For example, we want to be at Uncle Lou’s family reunion in Nebraska by July 4^th or we want to see the Rose Bowl parade in January in California?

Or maybe you want to plan a trip home for a “visit” in the middle of your trip.

For us, we planned a trip home for November and December.  As a family, having never been away from home for this duration of time, we wanted a scheduled-in time to go home and see our family and friends.  The holidays seemed the perfect time to go home for a visit, catch up, regroup, and avoid the winter roads.

Lots of things to consider when planning an RV trip full time.

Comment below and tell us what you think. Or at the very least please “Share” this article on Facebook or Twitter by pressing the button on the left!

In this series, we will be sharing some guidelines so that you can envision, plan and then implement your own full time RVing trip.

But before we get to the RV full time guidelines, here is the most crucial rule:

Be flexible…it’s for your own good!

At every turn in your full time RV adventure, you will have obstacles, but the key is to be flexible and roll with the punches.

How we started turning our full time RV dream into reality is by using one big map and over the dinner table, and methodically planning a geographically wishful route from the east coast to the west coast and back again. This was just the first step of course, but an important one to get the creative juices flowing.

We then looked at RVing books and all sorts of Internet resources to the places within the United States and Canada that we wanted to go to.

If there is one single book you MUST get to help you with this part of your full time RV planning it’s Road Trip USA: Cross-Country Adventures on America’s Two-Lane Highways, an absolute must read!

We then gave the kids colored pencils and allowed them to gleefully color the map to where they wanted to go. It looked fantastic! We then propped the map on the mantle and admired it every day.

This rough map then became our very own full time RVing “vision board”.  It was a great idea…a rough draft…but we knew it needed to be refined.

We then started the real planning…and the entire route changed for the first of MANY times.

So this comes to our second full time RVing rule:

Be prepared to make changes! 

Your full time RVing route can and will be “tweaked”; which in turn may change the next destination. So just be flexible (remember “the most crucial rule?”)

Once your route is “set in stone” and you embark on your journey, certain points of interest may change again.

(In fact we just changed our route to South Dakota and North Dakota today as of this writing in order to see our good friend and honorary Hell’s Angel, Dale Gorman).

Apart from Hell’s Angels and other such distractions, there are all sorts of reasons that may change your route and itinerary and the biggest one of them is Mother Nature.

Mother Nature is a significant force to reckon with.  For us, it was re-routing much of our trip around the flooded mid-west.  We had no choice, National Park Campgrounds that we had booked months in advance literally closed due to flooding, so we had to sit down, look at a map and figure out “where to next?”.

If you set off knowing in your head that plans may change then this isn’t monumental, it is just a dip in the road, like many other things that may occur while RVing full time.  However, if you can’t handle bending the route a tad, this may feel catastrophic for you.

Telling yourself that plans could change will prepare you for when they do, so now you can start planning it out.

Here is the first in our RVing full time guidelines:

Step #1: Yes, you can RV full time!

For us, the full time RV trip began as an “imagine if we could ever….” kind of  free association. We sat around the dinner table, with US road maps and site books, and talked about things like:

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could…”

“Wouldn’t  it be so cool for the family to have this experience together…”

“I want to cherish this time while the kids are young, and plan it while they are excited about hitting the road…”

“I’d love to give my family the opportunity to really see the country…”

“I think that it would be a tremendous learning experience for my kids…”

“Wouldn’t it be refreshing to do something different; to break away from our everyday routines and spice things up…”

So free associate.

Then, tally up all your answers and then really think about what you want to do and what you want to accomplish.

Keep The Full Time RV Payoff in Mind

Each family has their own “pay off” for hitting the full time RV road. For us, it was a mixture of fabulous “pay offs”. We also decided that the timing was ripe for the pickin’, and we made it our mission.

If a full time RV trip is something that you and your family decide to embark on, our first advice is to talk about  the ways that it will and can happen, and shut out all of the talk in your head (and your well-intentioned acquaintances) about how it “can’t” happen.

Shut out these negative emotions:

“We could probably never afford it and my boss wouldn’t let me work from the road”

“We can only go if the baby was just a little older”

“Our family of 5 would probably feel so trapped in a tin can all summer”

“How would I ever home school? – I’m not a teacher”

“I could never do it, I don’t even know where to start!”

Stop all the negative self-talk. Then take road blocks one by one, and come up with some solutions on how you can make it work.

And then DECIDE to get on the road full time RVing. Our next step will cover your RV full time Mission and Time Frame.

Tell us what you think? What is holding you back from RVing full time? Add a comment below, we would love to know what you think.

This is me and Eli in our old baseball uniforms before we went RVing full time

One of the things my Mom and Dad really wanted when we first started RVing full time is some kind of checklist that listed all the steps you need to do when you set up your RV at the RV campsite.

We went online and we couldn’t find a good RV setup checklist anywhere!

So Eli and I decided to make one of our own. We made this checklist for anyone who is RVing for the first time, wants to RV full time or is just thinking about RVing full time.

It will let you know that although we are not RV experts, anyone can set up an RV, so don’t be afraid of RVing full time. It’s not that hard.

In fact, if we can do it then you can do it too!

Keep in mind that this checklist is for our RV which is a Chaparral fifth wheel RV and your setup might be a little bit different.

Even so, when you first arrive at the RV park, most of the steps will be pretty much the same.

So here goes!

1. Park the RV

• This might seem kind of obvious, but you should park the RV so that the electric, water and sewer hookups are on the same side as their hookups. Its kind of like pulling up to fill the diesel tank and making sure the gas cap is on the right side!

2. Level the RV

• Go inside your RV and take out your level and measure how level the RV is.  If the RV is level then proceed to step 3.

• If it is not level, then get some 2×10 lumber cut to about 12 inches long and place them behind the wheels on the side of the RV that is lower than the other.

• Then just back up the RV so it lands on the 2x10s. It helps to have a spotter next to the wheels with a walkie talkie.

• If you don’t have a walkie talkie, then yelling works too! Just be careful of this if its late at night because RV people go to bed earlier than kids…

• If needed, add and adjust the 2x10s until the RV is level.

You can also get some RV Leveling Blocks, lots of people in the RV parks have these and they say they work really well too.

3.  Chock the RV Wheels

• Put something in front of and behind the RV wheels that can keep the 5th wheel from moving. We recommend the Camco RV Super Wheel Chock because they work so well.

• Blocks of wood and bricks work too, but you really don’t want to worry about the RV moving so get some good chocks because they don’t cost much.

4. Put Down the Front Stabilizers

• First loosen the JT Strongarms Short Jack Stabilizer on your stabilizers. I talked bout how good JT Strongarms are in one of my first videos.

• Then place extra 2×10 pieces cut at 12 inches directly under the stabilizers and extend the stabilizers half way.

• Next pull and drop the RV stabilizer feet over the 2×10 blocks, replace the pins then press the extend button until the RV starts to lift off the back of the truck hitch slightly.

• Watch for a sliver of light between the RV hitch and the RV itself. Then tighten the JT Strongarms Short Jack Stabilizer* and make sure everything is stable and secure.

*We really recommend JT Strongarms Short Jack Stabilizer because when we RV’d for the first time without them, the RV felt like it was swimming and rocking. My brother and I move fast and the RV would move around making me and my Dad seasick.

After Majors RV installed the JT Strongarms for us, its been smooth sailing!

5. Put Down the Rear Stabilizers

• Like the front stabilizers, put down the back stabilizers until they nearly reach the ground. Place extra 2x10s under the feet and then fully extend the stabilizers.

• The more 2x10s you use under the rear stabilizers, the more stable and less rocky the RV will be. Sometimes I put seven or eight of them under the feet to make it really tight. If you do this in combination with the JT Strongarms Short Jack Stabilizer, your RV will be as rock solid as home!

• Once the feet are all the way down, tighten up the JT Strongarms until the whole stabilizer assembly is secure.

6. Detach the Truck from the RV

• Make sure you see daylight between the hitch on the truck and the hitch plate on your fifth wheel RV, then pull out hitch pin.

• Here’s a BIG tip: If the pin is stuck, shift the truck into Neutral. This lessens the pressure on the hitch pin so you can release it way more easily. Dad started doing this after some guy came up to him in Pennsylvania on our first RVing trip. He saw my Dad sweating and pulling on the pin until he was blue in the face. This friendly guy put Dad out of his misery. It was funny!

• Once the pin is released, unhook your electrical line as well as the emergency brake stop.

7. Hook Up the Electric

• Withdraw the electric cord from the electric hole. If the electric cable does not reach you should have 30-Amp RV Extension Cord as a backup. It really stinks to park your RV and the cord won’t reach the outlet!

• Next, open up the electric box, make sure that the breaker switch is in the off position then hook up the electrical cord.

• Lastly, flip the breaker switch to the on position.

8. Slide Out the Slideouts 

• This is easy! Just press the switches in each room for each slideout and the slideout will go out.

9. Let Mom In!

• Open the door for her and let her into the RV. She will be happy!

10. Hook Up the Water

• Pull out the water hose and screw it into the water input valve on the RV.

• Put the water levers in the “on” or “town water” position.

• Then turn on the water from the RV campsite.

11. Hook Up the Sewer

• Attach your RV Sewer Hose Kit with Swivel Fittings to the gray water tank output drain. Then attach to the campsite sewer drain.

12. Roll out the Awning ( if needed)

• Press the awning button until the awning is all the way out. Then grab one side of the awning and pull it down roughly 6 inches lower than the other side of the awning*.

• Tighten the screws on the awning post until its tight. Then tighten the awning screws on the other side so both sides are secure.

*We recommend you do this so that when it rains, the rainwater will drain off the awning and not gather on the awning itself. This prevents rainwater from splitting the awning!

13. Lay Down the RV Patio Mat

• To keep dirt and bugs and stuff put of the RV, put down a big carpet, artificial turf or what we recommend is the RV Patio Mat like the one we have. It folds up and is good to do whittling on too.

• Place this on the ground right outside the RV and spread it out in front of the RV door.

14. Put Up the Antenna

• Go inside the RV and crank up the TV antennae so you can get watch Phineas and Ferb while RVing full time!

15. Get Organized

• Organize and put away any stuff hat fell off shelves and drawers while you were RVing.

• Pick up all your dirty clothes on your bedroom floor and put them in the hamper (in our full time RV the hamper is under the bathroom sink through a cool secret trap door). If you do this without being asked, Mom and Dad will be so happy!

Oh yes, one more thing: when you are full time RVing, don’t be afraid to ask for help when you’re in the RV park. RV people are very friendly and love to help you – so ask them for help.

And that is how you set up your RV at the campground when RVing full time cross country!

Tell us what you think? Was this step by step guide helpful? My brother Eli and I would really like to know what you think so please put in a comment below.

And sometimes, very important things break in the middle of nowhere.

Yesterday, I bent both of our RV trailer hitch rails trying to back into a tight spot at our RV park. I was trying to loosen the RV hitch from the “tow” position into the “maneuver” position and the darn thing bent in the bed of the truck.

The RV trailer hitch is the very important piece of equipment used to tow the 5th wheel RV. If it’s broken, you aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

And if the rails are bent (even lightly like in the picture), you can’t risk it and start driving with it.

Does it need to be said that if you are RVing full time across the country with a wife and two kids, you don’t want the 5th wheel RV to fall of the back of the pickup truck?

We have a Reese Sliding Hitch, and needless to say (see the image above), we don’t recommend you buy that one…

We do recommend the Husky RV Sliding Hitch instead.

Unlike the Reese Sliding Hitch, the Husky RV Hitch has more support on the RV hitch rails because they are actually bolted onto the frame of the truck. And since its so stable, you’re less likely to bend one.

The Reese rails are bolted to the bed of the truck.

I’m no technical RVing genius, but that doesn’t seem like a good thing when you’re hauling 6 tons.

When we bought our truck, we got the hitch as an add on from the dealership (another place we don’t recommend – but shall remain nameless) and they got us the cheaper hitch.

What are the chances of a car dealership doing that?

$537.99 and a picturesque ride into the Wisconsin countryside later, we had our RV hitch rails fixed out in Wisconsin at Mound View RV in Belmont, Wisconsin.

Thank God that RV dealerships in the Midwest are almost as common as cornfields.

So if you’re considering RVing full time, plan for things going wrong and plan for everything not going exactly as you planned it – even if you planned it as well as you could.

Things always go wrong, especially if you are total full time RVing novices like us.

But just get back up, figure out how to solve your issue and get it done. Even if it costs you some money to get it done right, you shouldn’t skimp or cut corners when you’re hauling a 6 ton RV behemoth.

So when we went to Springfield, Illinois, we found ourselves only an hour away from Busch Stadium, the home of the St. Louis Cardinals and the home of the greatest player in major league baseball not to have been found cheating with steroids or hGH…Albert Pujols.

If you don’t know who he is, Albert Pujols is an incredibly phenomenal baseball talent. Just check out some of his stats (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• 9× All-Star (2001, 2003–2010)
• World Series champion (2006)
• 3× NL MVP (2005, 2008, 2009)
• 2× NL Hank Aaron Award (2003, 2009)
• 6× Silver Slugger Award (2001, 2003–2004, 2008–2010)
• 2× Gold Glove Award (2006, 2010)
• 2001 NL Rookie of the Year
• 6× NL Player of the Month Award
• 5x NL Player of the Week Award
• 2004 NLCS MVP
• 2008 Roberto Clemente Award
• 2003 NL Batting champion
• 2009–2010 NL home run champion
• 2010 NL RBI champion

If he stays clean, he’ll most certainly be a first ballot Hall of Famer when his career is over. Let’s hope that will be the case, because both (not just my baseball loving son) are totally enamored with him…as am I. Kinda like me and Tom Brady…a little man-crush, quite possibly.

The point is that we went in our RV full time to St. Louis almost exclusively to see him play.

Sure we saw other sites like the St. Louis Arch:

We went to the top of the Arch which was very cool. The museum below the Arch however was not so great. It smelled funny and the kids were bored…in fact it was really kind of sad how the place was so dilapidated.

Through all that though, the movie on Lewis and Clark was awesome and for that movie alone, it’s worth the trip to go see it.

But I digress…back to Albert Pujols.

Suffice to say, he did not disappoint this full time RV family one bit.

If he can propel my son Eli (the non-sports fan) to go this crazy after hitting a home run that helped to win the game against the D-Backs in a walkoff, then he MUST be the greatest baseball player that ever lived!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPEeAXkT-Ao[/youtube]

Just awesome.

It sorta felt (despite the unbearable 100-plus degree heat) that we were truly in the presence of greatness that night in St. Louis. And although we as a full time RV family, could take or leave the city itself (although the people were very nice in my opinion), we would love to take Albert Pujols back with us to Boston.

Wouldn’t he look great as a Red Sox DH when Big Papi’s run is over?

After all, he is a free agent soon…just somehow keep him away from the Yankees.

Tell us what you think below by posting a comment below.

So many RV blogs talk about how great it is to spend “quality time” with family, reconnect with your kids and be at one with the great outdoors.

This all makes living in an RV full time sound like its so easy, its so much fun…so…completely unrealistic.

Let’s not kid ourselves, four people living in less than 300 square feet of space are gonna tick each other off.

You just can’t help that.

So don’t believe the polyanna bloggers.

Its not like that, I can assure you.

Here’s the reality:

• Sometimes your kids steal Mom’s iphone, video each other – all when Mom is on a business call and Dad is too busy emailing on his iphone and completely not paying attention when he should be…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN2EAky6ULU[/youtube]

• Sometimes you spend too much time texting, IMing, checking stats and emailing on your iPhone and completely ignoring everyone in your family…(I would NEVER do this!)

• Sometimes when draining the “black water” (that’s the really gross one) at 7:30 in the morning the old crappy sewer hose leaks, explodes and 3 gallons of fresh, warm black water (we’re trying to keep this a family blog after all) shoots all over your shorts…

(thankfully, no video on this one…)

• Or how about when absolutely everyone in the RV completely gets on your nerves solely for the fact that they are simply breathing the same air that you are…

• Or how about when the kids get up at 6 am and run across the RV, making you think you’re actually in that dream you’re having about the San Francisco earthquake of 1908…

• Or maybe when the spaghetti on the gas range takes 2 hours to cook when you are so hungry you could eat your arm…
• Or perhaps when your annoyingly chatty RV neighbor with quadruple pierced ears and more tattoos than Dennis Rodman can’t stop talking about why its OK to dump your grey water into a ditch he made that just so happems to flows into the resevoir next to the RV park…

• Or when you have absolutely no time to yourself and long for the days with a nice, non-moving, private house where you can easily slip away and actually get some work done………………oh, did I say that?

But aside from all that stuff, RVing full time is great. If you can deal with all the minor issues.

After all, when you’re back in “the real world” you have all kinds of stuff you gotta deal with too, right?

Just don’t believe everything you read on RVing, because we’ll give you the straight scoop here – the good, the bad and the downright ugly…

Tell us what you think and comment below!

Are you ready to go RVing full time yet?

RVing full time

But what I like most is the food.

My mom and I really like to talk about what kinds of main dishes we want to order when we go to nice restaurants.

When we went to Elements in Pittsburgh, I let her pick for and I loved the meal.

However, when we went to Heaven on Seven in Chicago to celebrate our friend Dalia’s birthday (Karen’s Mom),  I was way over on the other side of the table, so I went my own way.

Me and everyone at Heaven on Seven Restaurant - look at all the hot sauces!

Heaven on Seven is a Louisiana-style restaurant which has hundreds of hot sauces all put together on a wall!

There are tons of hot sauces to choose from and my favorite one is  smoked tabasco hot sauce.

Lunch

The food that I had at Heaven on Seven was called ” Southern Fried Chicken”. It is fried chicken with mashed potatoes, vegetables, and creamy lemony gravy.

The gravy was the best I’ve ever tasted! Yuuummmmm!

Me devouring my Southern Fried Chicken with savory lemony gravy!

The gumbo was pretty terrific too……

I approve of the Gumbo too!

Dessert

What I had for dessert was a pie, but it was no ordinary pie. It was a peanut butter chocolate pie and that was one of the best desserts I have ever tasted.

The second time we went there we ordered the dessert sampler and that had 9 kinds of desserts on it! I tasted my first pecan pie and loved it, but I still think the peanut butter chocolate pie is the best.

The dessert tray at Heaven on Seven (peanut butter pie is on the upper right by the way)

Heaven on Seven is such a good restaurant! It is SO good that I begged to go there again! And we did!

Eating dinner at Heaven on Seven the second time we went!

We went there twice during our time in Chicago. I would recommend this restaurant to anyone who visits Chicago, even if you’re not living in an RV full time like we are!

My favorite restaurant is Heaven on Seven!

That is my review on Heaven on Seven!

Write a comment below and tell me what you think. What was YOUR best meal ever?

It was tough to get used to the tiny living quarters, the bathroom smaller than a telephone booth, long drives on boring interstates, figuring out how the cable TV works at every campground, oh-so much fun black water drainings, extremely chatty “RV” neighbors, missing friends and family back at home….

But despite all that after the first week or so, we started to realize how well RVing fit our lifestyles, how comfortable it actually is and how the small space actually improves your life and how liberating the travel really is.

But by far, the best part of living in an RV full time is the complete and utter freedom from “the scheduled life”.

If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about.

Its the constant running to baseball practice, lacrosse practice, swimming lessons, chess club, drum lessons, various family events, endless birthday parties, play dates and every other activity that takes up the majority of a suburban family’s routine schedule.

It’s exhausting…(and I didn’t even do most of it in our family)!

Although all of those things are great and are fun to do, when you’re RVing, you are totally free from that lifestyle and you are free to live life “unscheduled”.

When you are RVing full time, you go where you want to go and at whatever pace that pleases you. Not that we don’t have a schedule, because we do.

In fact, you have to have RV park reservations with two kids in the heart of the summer time. This is because RV parks fill up fast and you have to reserve in advance or you’ll be shut out.

Sure, there are tons of RV bloggers that talk about how living in an RV you are your own boss, there’s no reliance on hotels, airports, restaurant reservations and being “at one” with the great outdoors.

Don’t be fooled by any of that. The best reason of all is freedom from the scheduled life.

Freedom and “location independence” is what drove both of us to build lives that would support a full time RV lifestyle for a year…or longer. After I read The 4-Hour Workweek three years ago, it was all over for me. I knew I had to do it. And author Tim Ferris doesn’t have kids so he never even talked about this kind of independence and freedom.

But for me there’s no other freedom that tops it. Maybe at some point in our odyssey I’ll miss all that scheduling, all the parties, all the activities but for now I am not. It’s a fabulous break and for me its the top reason to consider RVing full time.

Tell us what you think and comment below. What are the things you most want in life?