full-time rving

Moving Day Checklists for RVers

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We love our moving day checklists. There are so many different parts of moving day when you’re moving an RV, that it’s too easy to forget something minor that becomes a major hassle later. We double- and triple-check anything safety related (like hitching the trailer to the truck) with or without a list, but rushing to pack up the RV could mean getting to your destination with a gallon (or more) of water on the floor, the contents of your cupboards all over your floor, or just stinky because you forgot to take the trash out before you closed everything up up and traveled 300 miles on a 90-degree day. We use iPhone’s built-in Notes app, and have 3 shared checklists, so when one of us checks off a task, it updates the other’s list. There are other apps out there that work in similar ways, and this isn’t ideal …

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Thanksgiving History

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This Thanksgiving we are thankful we are not sleeping on the side of I-95 in near-freezing temperatures (and that’s a blog post for another day). And in honor of Thanksgiving, we’d like to take some time to talk a little about the real history of Thanksgiving that many of us never learned in school. Content warning: this post contains descriptions of violence and racism. It is presented in a way that we hope will be educational, but understand not everyone is in a place where they can safely read this material. We also mean no offense and any errors, omissions, or misspoken words are due to our own ignorance and welcome corrections by Native, indigenous, and non-white readers. Thank you. We recognize and respect that Thanksgiving has become a holiday where we celebrate the abundance and gratitude for the things we have in our lives. We’re certainly grateful and thankful …

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RV life with cats: cattifying your RV for maximum feline happiness

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A black and gray cat, sitting on his low back with his belly and big feet facing the camera, looking off to the side.
What people think we do all day when we tell them we’re full-time RVers.

Before we moved into our RV, we spent about 3 months cattifying it so our four-legged family members would have an easier time adjusting to living in a tiny home. They’d always had larger apartments (and most recently, a 3 bedroom house), where they used more of the space than we humans did. They had shelves and many cat condos to climb, and we were going from about 1500 square feet to about 250 square feet (give or take).

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Installing a Laundry Chute in Our RV

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Where do we hide our dirty laundry? With limited space, we needed a place to store it until laundry day. Our rig has a pass-through storage compartment under the front of the trailer, which is under the bedroom closet.

Rather than keeping a hamper for dirty clothes alongside the clean clothes in the closet, I decided to make a laundry chute.

the front of an RV with an arrow pointing to the storage door on the bottom side, and the words "pass-thru storage."

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Gluten-Free Travel

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Finding gluten-free food on the road can be tough. This is not a post about finding gluten-free restaurants, or about all the magical gluten-free dining experiences a traveler with celiac disease might find if only they were brave enough or bold enough. I am a super sensitive celiac. I am more sensitive than the average celiac, and it takes me longer to bounce back than many of my celiac peers. Once, I was glutened so badly by a careless restaurant that it took me over a year to feel “normal” again. Consequently, we don’t eat out much. So this is a post about where to find gluten-free groceries while traveling. Even before RV life, when we traveled, we brought a suitcase for our clothes and a suitcase for our food. (The food suitcase was usually bigger.) RV travel has made eating on the road MUCH easier and simpler, but there’s …

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Grocery delivery while RVing?

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With food allergies and severe celiac disease, we don’t go to restaurants very often. Going out to eat requires a great deal of preliminary research and phone calls to restaurant managers, and even then it’s a gamble whether or not a business is going to be “gluten-free enough” for someone like me. Getting contaminated by a careless restaurant can cause me a health setback that will require weeks or even months of recovery. To play it safe, we cook at home almost exclusively, and have a great time doing it. One of the greatest things about taking our kitchen on the road is that we always have our favorite gadgets and snacks, and we know they will always be safe and clean. We think our Keystone Laredo 335MK has an enormous kitchen, with more fridge and counter space than my first apartment. It’s actually enjoyable to cook in it! Consequently, …

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The RV Archives

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There’s such a wealth of information about RVing and long-term camping online. We are constantly researching. To my fellow RVers, I encourage you to do what you can to keep your sites online, even after you lose interest in blogging, quit RVing, or switch to posting solely on YouTube or other “siloed” service. (A siloed service is one which can only be used or accessed through a specific app or other limiting factor, like Facebook, Twitter, and yes, even YouTube, where posts can vanish at the whims of the services’ owners.) Many sites fade away. There are still some decades-old gems out there though. One of my favorites is Two Penny Travels’s computer setup from 1999. As I write this post from a 4-pound laptop tethered to a smartphone hotspot (at speeds of 45mbps up and 23mbps down), I think about Sam and Alice (of Two Penny Travels) and the …

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