about us

Ever since I was a young girl, I had wanted an RV.  One day, the neighbors across the street had RVing friends pull up in a Class A RV and park in the street right outside their house where they spent the night.  That evening, as I peaked out our living room curtains, I watched them have cocktail hour in their RV.  It looked so warm, inviting and spacious.  I thought to myself “how cool is that to be able to take your home with you when you travel.”  That was my first introduction to RVs, as no one we knew had one.  That thought tucked itself away in the back of my mind.  Sometimes, as we passed an RV on the road,  that thought would come to the forefront and I would mention to my husband how I had always wanted to travel in a RV. 

Well, life went on as Scott advanced through his Army career and we never found the time to pursue it.  That is, until one birthday I wanted to go somewhere, do something special.  I remembered my RV idea and told my husband that was what I wanted for my birthday…for us to rent an RV and go somewhere, not to a campground full of people…but off in nature by ourselves.  Birthday wishes are hard to deny, so he made it happen by renting a Class C RV from El Monte RV. He went to work finding a place to camp, and it wasn’t long before he discovered the word “boondocking.”  That is what we want to do, we decided, go off grid and away from crowded campgrounds and “boondock” in the wild.   We were living just outside of Washington, DC at the time and he scouted out a likely place that had good reviews, all of which talked about this “hidden location” that was “never already occupied.”  The time came and we loaded the food, the fishing poles, our gear and our Lab “Molly” into our vehicle and headed out to pick up the RV.

Of course, Friday afternoon traffic getting out of DC set us back, as did receiving instructions from El Monte RV on all the systems and how to operate them.  Not worried because we had good directions to the hidden boondocking location, we didn’t fret that it was getting late in the day and darkness would soon be upon us.  An hour or so later, after traversing down a bumpy dirt road, we turned the corner into the boondocking location…and saw it was jammed with other RVs!  We had not researched a backup location and it was getting dark.  We had no other option than to pull into the clearing.  Lucky for us, one friendly guy flagged us down and assisted us in finding a spot to park the RV where we would have privacy and, just as important, we would not interfere with their group.  We come to find out that it was the first weekend of bow season and we had stumbled into a group of deer hunters.  It all worked out, we kept to ourselves and so did they….another guy even gave us some good locations to go fishing.  

I had a wonderful birthday weekend of fishing, campfires, good food, and hanging out with my husband and Molly.  Just a perfect way to spend a birthday, in my opinion.   An added bonus was that my husband was HOOKED!  Before we left the campsite, we knew it wouldn’t be long before we went camping again in some form or fashion. 

Once again, life took over and time for vacation getaways was always in short supply.  Even though we didn’t go RVing again, we spent many, many hours reading everything we could about RVing on the internet.  My email inbox became full of blog posts from different RVers who were already living the dream I wanted to live…and the concept of living “fulltime” in a RV became one of great interest to us.  The Army transferred Scott, after having been in the DC area for 9 years, to spend his last two years in the military in Pennsylvania.  With the idea of eventually hitting the road in a RV fulltime, we took the opportunity to downsize severely and sold most of our furniture on Craigslist and either donated or sold at a garage sale 75% of the things we had accumulated over our marriage.  We moved from a 2700 sq ft two story house with a huge yard in Virginia to a two bedroom apartment over an Asian noodle shop in Pennsylvania.  Scott loved his job and we loved our new pared down lifestyle.  Shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania, Scott found a pop-up camper for sale on Craigslist that was only an hours drive away.  You can read more about the RVs we have had on the page titled “Extras”, but for now please know that we started off with the Rockwood Freedom pop-up and then progressed to an Outback by Keystone travel trailer all in two years.  Oh, and as our Rvs got bigger, our towing vehicles had to get bigger too.  

We were happy catching time in the Outback whenever we could.  Pennsylvania has great state parks.  Scott was busy with the Army, and we both became busy caring for our mothers back in the midwest.  Early April of 2017 saw my mother pass away, followed 13 hours later by Scott’s mother.  We were both where we needed to be, which was with our mothers and an extremely difficult time was made easier by frequent phone calls.  Talking on the phone one night a few days after our mothers’ passed, we thought of all the major life changes that were happening.  Suddenly we found ourselves without needing to be available to help aging parents, and realizing that in three months Scott would retire from the Army.  We both came to the conclusion that an extended RV trip would be just what we needed to figure out what the rest of our lives would look like.  The plan we hatched on that late night phone call swiftly morphed into a much grander idea.  We reviewed our finances and realized that having military health care was a huge benefit of retiring from the military.  If we stuck to our budget we could extend the RV trip out as long as we wanted.  Once again, Craigslist was our friend in helping us shed all but a few pieces of furniture which currently reside in a storage unit back in the midwest.  

So that is the story of how we came to be full time RVers since August 2017.