Roaming Free In An RV

Cannot believe it’s been four years since we started our RV trip. It seems like yesterday we made this crazy decision to live in an RV fulltime, giving it a year to see how was like it. 1,460 days, 85,000 miles, and 34 states later, we would say that this lifestyle suits us.

This past year has been filled with seeing lots of friends and family and working on RV projects we have been putting off. We were in Grand Teton National Park visiting our friends last year at this time when we made the decision to stay and work, which brought us back to Grand Teton this May. After we left Grand Teton last September, we took a week to travel to Mesa, Arizona, where we spent the winter. We explored around Arizona a bit, going to Tucson and Sedona along with going on hikes and traveling to Chicago. We left Arizona in May, taking two weeks to make our way to Grand Teton, where we are now. We took two weeks off before the busy season hit in the Tetons to go to Chicago, Longboat Key and Hilton Head to visit family. We have been lucky enough to see friends we hadn’t seen in 10 years and family we hadn’t seen in 2 years.

We started the new year with getting little things we needed for the RV, like wheel covers and more organizers which lead to a mass cleaning and re-organizing of the RV. We had been talking about getting new furniture for the kitchen/living room and one day we just decided to post items on multiple buy, sell, trade Facebook groups and right away people responded. Within a week, we sold the kitchen table, two couches and replaced them all with furniture from Ikea and Walmart. We didn’t want to spend any extra money getting the new furniture so the money we got selling is what we spent. We are happy with the results and we need to compete a couple more projects, like getting a new headboard, stick and peel title stickers for the kitchen and printing travel photos before we are all set.

Where we traveled: We started off the second half of the summer in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and at the end of September took a week to travel down to Mesa, Arizona for the winter, where we stayed at our favorite campground on our favorite street. We stopped in Provo and Vegas on our way down. We then traveled back up to Grand Teton in May, stopping in Vegas, St George, Provo and Pocatello.

Our top activities:

Both:

*Seriously, everything we have done at Grand Teton has been the best: horseback riding, boat tours, seeing the wolf den, hiking and the wildlife sightings.

Jen:

*Surprising my Mom in Vegas

*Seeing all the snow on the Superstition Mountains in Arizona in January

*Seeing the wolf den at Grand Teton

*Going to Sedona and Mount Charleston

*Grand Prismatic and Artist Point in Yellowstone

*Taking photos of the Grand Teton range

Brad:

*Meeting new friends and seeing old friends from Michigan

*Wolf den in Grand Teton

*Being by the water daily and getting out on the water as much as possible

RV/truck fixes and maintenance:

*Normal RV maintenance of the slides, checking the brakes, tires and roof cleaning. Added to that we replaced some roof tape.

*Normal hitch maintenance.

*The truck had normal maintenance of an oil change, fuel filters and air filter change.

*Replaced RV and truck batteries

*We replaced the not so great shower head with a much better version.

*The rubber stripping on one slide melted so that was replaced.

*Our bedroom headboard that we have tried reattaching to the wall was just throw nout due to us not be able to fix it and we just got tired of it falling on us all the time.

*In April we noticed some water pooling by the cabinet by the front door and discovered a water leak. Luckily, we caught it early so there was no water damage and the fix was easy: one of the water hoses under the RV was leaking so we cut it and reattached it.

*Upon getting to Grand Teton in May, we had a broken drawer and pantry shelf. All we easily fixed with new screws and brackets.

*After getting back from the IL/FL/SC trip in June we noticed a large crack n the truck’s windshield, that still needs to be replaced.

Where we are now: Wyoming at Grand Teton National Park.

Future plans: Um, can we get back to this one? We have a couple ideas for the winter but we have no concrete plans yet so stay tuned! We will continue to have this blog and will keep posting videos on YouTube.