rv life

So what do we do, anyway?

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One of the biggest questions we asked ourselves in the planning stages of full-time RVing was “how will we pay the bills?” We aren’t going to go into details of dollars and cents (there are tons of great posts out there about that, and despite blogging about our life, we’re actually fairly private people), but we’ll certainly give you a good overview of what we’re doing and how we got here. We did not have a house to sell when we decided to do this. We didn’t even have an abundance of possessions to downsize, because we’d already done that when we made a big move from Michigan to California about 10 years ago, following a fairly traumatic layoff. We are lower-middle class Gen Xers who have experienced poverty and housing insecurity a few times during our lives. We have shared one car for the last 7 years, and haven’t …

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10 of Our Favorite RV Gadgets

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The more we do this and live this life, the more we learn. We learn, our needs change, technology changes, and new cool things come out all the time. We don’t buy the latest and greatest, and we prefer to live simply, so maybe this list is a bit lower-tech than you’re expecting. But here are 10 of our current favorite RV doodads, in no particular order: 1. Happy Campers RV Holding Tank Treatment This stuff is amazing. It has no smell or added perfumes, it’s a simple powder that deodorizes holding tanks. We use this in our black tank, but we also add it to the gray tanks on occasion, if we notice any kind of odor. It works within a few hours, and lasts a long time. Now that we have a healthy colony of bacteria taking care of our black tank, we only ever notice a smell …

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Our First Work Camping Experience (Might Be Our Last)

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Our first work camping gig didn’t go quite like we expected, but does anything go as expected during a pandemic? We could write a novel about our experience, but we’ll just share some highlights. First, a disclaimer: this is our personal experience, and our personal opinions. We are not speaking as representatives of Kamp Klamath, its owners, managers, or other workers. This is specifically our experience as temporary volunteer campers at this campground during the summer of 2020. This isn’t a review of the campground itself, or a discussion of the kind of experience a guest can expect to have. This post is only a personal account of our first work camping gig on our personal blog about our full-time RV life. This opportunity at Kamp Klamath in Klamath, California came at the perfect time: David was struggling with the altitude of Questa, New Mexico and we knew we needed …

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Where has the time gone?

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It’s been a busy 3 months since our last post. All things considered (hashtag 2020), we are doing well and hanging in there. We have many updates to make! Since we left Austin, Texas in June, we’ve been to New Mexico and Northern California. We’re still in NorCal right now, in the middle of fire season and a pandemic. Jen survived the extended tax season (and is now going into extension season), and since RVing is one of the safest ways to travel and vacation right now because of the pandemic, David has been extremely busy repairing RVs. For the last 2 months, we were at our very first work camping gig (stay tuned for a blog post about that), where we had lousy cell service and no internet access. Now that we’re back in civilization with cell service, we plan on doing a lot of updating and catching up. …

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When RV Life Meets Quarantine Life

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Like most of you, we’ve been isolating ourselves from most of the world in order to help “flatten the curve” and avoid getting or giving COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus). To be honest, we’ve kind of lost track of time and how long this has been going on. I was buried deep in the blur that is tax season when the pandemic hit the U.S., and while I work remotely, most of my coworkers work out of physical offices in Massachusetts. Since we’re already set up for remote work, most everyone was able to limit or eliminate their in-office hours, and clients were able to work with us digitally. We thought we’d be pushing hard to make the April 15 deadline, but once the deadline became July 15, things have become a whirlwind. David has been working hard as a mobile RV technician, and had been so busy that he had …

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