Easily the most asked question we get on the road is, “How did you make this decision?” After making the initial yes-we-want-to-do-it decision, there were roughly five million other things to figure out. Ok, not quite, but close. The biggest decisions we had to make were:

What do we do with our house?
What type of RV do we want?
How will we handle school?
How will we work on the road?

First things first, the house. Part of what brought us to the decision that now was the time for this crazy adventure was the fact that we had already been feeling like our house wasn’t our long term home. We really did love the house and did a TON of work to make it our own, but we craved less house and more land/privacy/space. Sooo….we sold the house (vs. renting, which lots of people in our shoes choose to do). We lucked out and sold at the right time to make a good profit. Do I now lose sleep around what we will do when we are ready to settle down again and housing and interest rates are super high? You betcha.

It really was beautiful…just imagine when things were actually in bloom! :)

Next, the most overwhelming decision. When it comes to families that travel/live full time in their RV, A LOT of them have fifth wheel rvs. These often have the most space and feel most like a (tiny) home. They can easily have two bedrooms, or a bunkroom, additional bathrooms, lots of interior storage, residential size appliances, etc. BUT, the catch is that you need a big ole’ dually to tow it because it attaches into the truck bed, and that truck is both expensive and offers limited seating. As a family of six, this made the fifth wheel option a tough one as we most likely would have had to bring along a second vehicle to fit all the small humans in our crew. I see fifth wheels in all the campgrounds and just dream about the space (and the “high” ceilings), but this option wasn’t a good one for us logistically or financially.

“Travel trailers” is a pretty broad description for a wide range of RVs. They are generally on the smaller side (but I have seen some that are 40+ ft!) They are towed behind a truck without the big contraption you need for a fifth wheel, but you still need a truck with significant towing capacity and then still have the same seating limitations. AND….going through the mountains with this set up is not for the faint of heart. Ultimately, this was never really an option we considered.

Next would be the class C motorhome. These are the ones that look like a pick up truck on the front but have a motorhome back. They can be small-ish or quite large (the big ones are called Super C’s and most are diesel), but the ones large enough for our family are also quite expensive so that was pretty limiting for us. We were really looking to purchase something we could pay cash for and not have payments hanging over our head. So, this quickly got knocked off the list.

Brendan and I always comment that when we’re retired and traveling we’ll have a sweet little class C like this one.

Onto the class B. This is basically a camper van. I think it goes without saying that with a family of six, this was never a contender. But, we have seen some really cool ones on our travels and love to check them out. Brendan is always really interested in the ones that are fully off grid (and usually look very military-esque.)

Lastly, the class A motorhome. This is the one that basically looks like a big bus. They can be gas (less expensive) or diesel, and they vary immensely in price. A diesel can tow more weight but can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were planning to renovate so we didn’t want to spend that much AND then tear it all up. BUT, without a diesel, we were looking at having to drive the Yukon seperately because a gas motorhome is limited to 5,000lbs and the Yukon weighs a lot more than that. SO….we’d be splitting up on travel days and gassing and servicing two engines all the time. Ultimately, the class A is what we chose and really, it was the best option for us. Check out my RV Reno post to see what we did to make it work for our family of six.

An actual picture of our class A.
jk jk jk, but this IS a class A.

School. The second most asked question we get is around schooling and what that looks like for us. Long story short, we homeschool using a curriculum we were familiar with as we had used it during the pandemic. The girls like it 80% of the time which is probably in line with their feelings when they were in public school. We may not homeschool forever but for now it works great for our family, and we love all the additional experiential learning the girls get along with the standard curriculum stuff.

It’s funny how much people feel like they can comment on school and your parenting choices (no different from any other aspect of parenting, I suppose). And it’s for sure almost always one extreme or the other. “Oh, well, they’ll go back to ‘normal’ school someday, right?” Or, “Good for you, schools just aren’t what they used to be.”

How will we work on the road? Easy peasy; we work remotely! Our first call when making the initial decision was to the president of Brendan’s company to be sure the company would support this change in “address” for him. She was so sweet and supportive right from the start, “Amazing! Of course!” Brendan works in software engineering so it’s pretty easy for him to work remotely (although he has since left that company and moved on to other things. Nothing “happened,” it was just time for a change!) I work part time doing marketing and communications for a small business and it’s perfect.

We do spend lots of time dreaming about what life will look like when we settle back down into a traditional sticks and bricks home. But for now, the stars have aligned and we are absolutely loving living OUR dream.

So you wanna travel full time in your RV?

NOLA Love

The Zion of My Dreams