Evolution of a Dream

How do you go from deciding you want to become a fulltimer to hitting the road in two-and-a-half years?

Well, to be honest, we did not expect to start fulltiming so quickly.

In the spring of 2003, we decided we wanted to be full-time RVers, but then we had to figure out how to make it happen. My first estimates on how long it would take us to start traveling put our departure date in May or June of 2008. This factored in paying off our debts, selling our house and belongings, buying our RV and quitting our jobs - roughly in that order. (Hardly anything happened in that order, but it all got done.)

For the first year, we mainly focused on paying off our debts. We had purchased a home the year before and had been renovating it ever since. Most of our debts stemmed from the purchase of the house, our cars, school loans and the ever-present credit card debt. We both had good-paying jobs, so we focused on spending less and paying more on what we owed, especially the high-interest stuff.

Around that same time, I was getting very frustrated with my job. In the fall of 2003, I applied for a position at another university. This was a big step for me because I am a very loyal person, and I did not want to leave Penn State. Even though I did not take the other job, the interview process was a good focus. It made me think – do I really want to keep doing this for another four years? So in part to keep our goal in sight and in part to speed things along, I started to research RVing a little more seriously.

We knew we wanted to travel full time in an RV, but that was about all we knew. Neither of us had much experience with RVs. My last camping trip in an RV was when I was six. Sue had never been in one at all. So our first question was what type of RV to get.

In the early part of 2004, we started researching where most people with boring desk jobs start: by Googleing and surfing the internet. This research told us what kinds of rigs were out there and what the pluses and minuses were to each kind. There were a lot of dealerships with pretty pictures, but the best sites I found were parts of RV.net, including the Open Roads Forum and classifieds ads on that site, and RV.org, home of the RV Consumers Group. The consumers group sells detailed ratings on almost all RVs made, and we purchased the CD-ROMs that had ratings for both the motor homes and trailers because we were still unsure what type of RV would work best for us.

For some hands-on learning, we took a trip that spring to one of the local dealerships, Lerch RV in Milroy, PA. These folks were great, taking us out on the lot and showing us thirty different models and walking us through their strengths and weaknesses. They even said we could come back some weekend and just spend a few hours in the RVs to see how comfortable they were. We thought that was very cool, even though we didn’t take them up on that offer.

Now that we knew some of the details, we started to think about what we would need on the road. Several books helped us with this including Complete Guide to Full-Time RVing by Bill and Jan Moeller and Support Your RV Lifestyle! by Jamie Hall. The Moeller’s book is one we both read cover to cover several times. We found we got different things from it at different times during the process.

At this point, in the spring of 2004, we were leaning towards a Class A (one of the RVs that looks like a bus) that we would use to tow one of our cars and a motorcycle behind. But to be sure this is what made sense for us, we made plans to go to an RV show at the beginning of the summer in Harrisburg, PA.

Meanwhile, life was moving along. One day when I had a rough time at work, I started to crunch the numbers. What would it really take to get us out of there?

Using the books we had and information on the internet, I worked out a rudimentary budget that showed we could travel comfortably if we made around $24,000 each year. To live on that amount of money means we have to make some sacrifices, like no medical insurance and no retirement fund (actually, Sue still has her 401K in tact, but if things get rough, we’ll cash that in). But we were willing to forgo those safety nets. Just keep in mind, what income is comfortable for us might not be for you, so this number is not a hard-and-fast rule.

In our research, we had learned about working on the road (workamping) and the opportunities for people to do seasonal work. There are many places you can work for a few months that provide an RV spot as part of your compensation. These jobs vary from managing campgrounds to working in retail stores to doing maintenance work at amusement parks. This doesn’t even factor in consulting work or getting jobs through temp agencies. Of course, compensation varies from no money to nice salaries depending on what you are doing and how long you will be there. If you are thinking of becoming a workamper, it is a good idea to keep in mind what you have done in your previous careers. Any skills you have can be put to use as you travel. Reading the workamping want ads, I figured that we could definitely make what we needed each month.

Armed with this information, I made a pitch to Sue that we move up our plans by two years. To her credit, she didn’t laugh out loud, but said we should think about it further. This is a dangerous thing to say to me, because I do think about things a lot, but Sue rightly didn’t want us rushing into it and finding out that we couldn’t make it work. So my thinking got me wondering about what kind of work I would like to do on the road.

For ten years I had been in academic fundraising – asking people for money to support their schools. This was a fun career because I got to travel and meet a lot of different people, but academia can be a difficult environment if you don’t work well in a bureaucracy. I had been a good fundraiser because I always believed in what I was raising money for. But the last few years were starting to chip away at my belief, and my work was suffering.

So I needed a change. I liked working with people, and wanted to have something a little more hands-on. But it was when I kept seeing how many resorts and campgrounds had Massage Therapists on staff that I hit upon this as a potential career. My experience with massage to this point was mainly through my stepmother, who was a therapist, and being one of those people who is always giving others back rubs (not in the creepy way). I did more research on that industry and found that we had a great school right there in town.

While I was chewing that over, we went to the Great American RV show in June in Harrisburg, PA. It was fun to see all the different makes and models of RVs in one place. We went to a few seminars and learned about traveling with pets and workamping resources. We also talked with what felt like hundreds of different sales people all telling us theirs was the best unit to buy.

We came away from the show thinking that we would like a Class A diesel pusher. We were leaning this way because we did not want our pets to have to travel in the trailer while we moved around, and we figured we could keep my wife’s VW Bug as our toad (a towed car).

After the show, I interviewed at the massage school in town and decided that is what I wanted to do. Fortunately, Sue is extremely supportive and agreed to me quitting my job at the end of the year and using my retirement money to fund my education.

In August, we decided to put our house up for sale. We also mentioned this to one of our friends who said he was interested in the place if we ever wanted to sell. He turned out to be very interested, and over the next few months he made us an offer we were happy with. We even lucked into a place to live the following year when another friend told us she was going overseas and was looking for someone to sublet her house.

So the end of 2004 found me unemployed and getting ready to go into a 1260-hour massage therapy program, us selling our house and moving into a new place, and us being that much closer to realizing our dream. We were supposed to sublet the house until the end of the year, and then we would look for an apartment for six more months, making our planned departure date in June of 2006.

We had used our move as a reason to get rid of a lot of our stuff. Over the years, things just accumulate, and it was hard to toss so many things. In a series of garage sales, we sold a lot of our knick-knacks . We transferred all our music onto our computer so we could get rid of the CDs. Clothes were easier to parcel down through a few big donations to Goodwill. The hardest thing for both of us was selling all of our books. We were both book-o-phials and every room in our house had at least one bookcase filled to the brim. But over the next year, we sold or donated almost all of them. And once you do trim down on your possessions, you find you don’t really miss them all that much.

The spring of 2005 was very busy. I was studying and working at the school. Sue was working for AccuWeather, but wasn’t very happy. And we continued to plan for getting out of town in a year. During our planning, we came to terms with the fact that we could not afford the type of Class A we wanted. Instead of settling for a lesser unit, we decided to go with a quality 5^th wheel and diesel pick-up truck instead.

Once that decision was made, we went back to the books and the web for more research. We decided on getting either a Dodge or a Chevy because of their superior towing capacity and the reviews other fulltimers gave them. A good resource to find that kind of information is “Trailer Life” magazine’s annual towing guide. We started window shopping for trucks, and in March we were made an offer we could not refuse on a 2005 Dodge Ram 3500. So we traded in our two cars for one big, honkin’ truck.

While I was going to school, I started my own massage therapy business and had a few steady customers. Also that summer, an unexpected windfall came our way in the form of me doing consulting work. The money from that job and my massage work allowed us to make some technological upgrades that we were putting off . We purchased cell phones and a very good laptop computer. It also gave us enough of a nest egg, along with money from the sale of our house, to start shopping for our RV in earnest.

As we looked for 5^th wheels, the “RV Consumer’s Guide” was a huge resource. It let us narrow our search to certain brands that were built good enough for the long-term use, meaning they would be adequate for fulltiming. Keep in mind that not all RVs are built for year-round use, especially in not-so-great weather, so it’s very important to do the research on what RV you need for the lifestyle you want. We also spent a lot of time comparing floor plans, both on the web and by visiting local dealers. Sue was very firm about the living area being spacious enough for all the animals and us. She didn’t want to feel cramped, and she wanted our pets to have room to run around.

Around this time, we started to develop our web site. This was an interesting experience since neither of us had a lot of web site experience. But Sue’s job came in handy in that regard since she worked with some extremely good programmers who were willing to teach us what we needed to learn. We wanted to have a web site mostly so our family and friends could follow us on our travels. It also gives us a permanent home, even if it is just online.

In July, we found out that our friend whose house we were subletting was thinking of coming back early. This made us rethink our plans. We could either rent an apartment in August or take a leap and plan to start traveling in November of that year. As I mentioned, Sue was not happy in her job and I did not have big plans in town after my school work was done in October, so we could not see much keeping us there. Things just seemed to be clicking for us in such ways as to make it feasible to push up our plans, so we decided to take the leap. The only thing we needed now was an RV.

By the end of July, we knew what kind of RV we wanted - a Sunnybrook Titan. It had the floor plan we wanted and was built with a lot of care put into the guts of the rig. We also knew what price we were willing to pay, so we scoured the internet for a unit that met our needs. During one of Sue’s searches at work, she found exactly what we were looking for...in Maine!

Good Times Unlimited in Farmington, Maine, had a 2004 unit that they had used as a floor model. It had quite a few amenities that we were not planning on, like an electric fireplace, a sliding storage tray underneath and an extra vent in the bedroom, but the price was right, so we gave them a call. After talking with them over the phone, we made an appointment to drive up in early August to check it out.

Sue and our pug, Willoughby, picked me up at school Friday afternoon and we drove overnight from Pennsylvania to Maine. We got to the dealership a couple hours before it opened, and we used that time for a power nap. And even though we were tired, we put the rig through a top-to-bottom inspection using a checklist from the RV Consumer Group. We weren’t happy with a few minor details, but we pointed the flaws out to the folks at the dealership, and they went out of their way to get everything fixed up for us. Negotiations went smoothly, and by two o’clock we were proud owners of an RV.

The dealer gave us a quick lesson in their back lot and on a local road, and then we were on our own. Of course, there were a few problems on that initial drive, including me missing a turn and having to do a thirty-point turn in the middle of the woods, but we managed to pull it to a KOA in Augusta, ME, and had our first overnighter. Even after we got some rest and the sleep deprivation wore off, we were more excited about our new house than we had been about the last one. After all, this house could have a new view out the windows whenever we wanted.

But we had to say goodbye to the rig while we finished up our obligations back in State College. Sue’s parents were good enough to let us park the RV on their land so we could come and use it on the weekends. And before we knew it, I was done with school and Sue was done with work, so we moved our two cats and pug out to the RV and we set off for good.

The past year on the road has been an adventure, but neither of us could imagine going back to a “normal” life. If you have the desire to leave it all behind like us, don’t wait. But a few things to keep in mind are:

• Make sure your partner wants to travel as much as you do. Living in an RV with no other home is not for everyone. If both of you are not 100% certain it’s what you both want to do, it won’t work. We’ve heard the stories.
• Work out a budget and figure out what you will need financially to travel.
• Do your homework. Spend the money to do research on your new home and make sure you get something you feel comfortable with.
• Don’t be afraid to dream big. Sometimes it works out better than you expect.

Sue and Phil Payne are full-time RVers traveling the country with their two cats, Barnum and Bailey, and their two pugs, Willoughby and Xander. After a year on the road, they say they have no regrets about their decision and have yet to find a place where they would consider settling down.