That Time I Traveled the Country in an RV
And why I didn't talk about it much
It was almost like a dare. My wife and I had recently gotten married, and we were feeling cramped in our 800-square-foot one bedroom apartment. For some reason the rental listings we were seeing weren’t very appealing, and so jokingly one of us (and I honestly don’t remember which one) said, “Hey what if we just bought an RV and drove around the country for a year?”
Before we set out, one of our biggest goals was to document everything. We filmed a few videos before we left talking to camera about our feelings and expectations for the trip. I thought that regularly sharing videos and content was going to be a big part of the adventure. After all, pics or it didn’t happen, right? Well for a number of reasons the trip didn’t go quite the way we expected and I simply didn’t film very much video… or write about our experiences much. I did take a lot of photos, but at the time my focus was either on pattern photos or my wife’s instagram. I didn’t actually act like a documentarian capturing the trip itself.
My bad.
Imposter syndrome? Modesty blindness? Laziness? I think we got it in our heads that other people did it better or more interestingly and that we had nothing new to add to the RV conversation. Money was a big issue on our trip. Because of that we didn’t go to as many places or do as many interesting activities as we had planned. We thought it wasn’t interesting to see us do normal stuff but in an RV.
It was just our life
The First Night
AKA The Worst Way To Start A Road Trip
One of the biggest reasons (if not the biggest) that we lost motivation to share with everyone was that on the very first day of our year-long adventure, on of our two dogs was hit and killed by a car. It was a devistatingly bad experience that made us question even going on the trip in the first place, and it took us a solid two weeks of crying alone together before we could even start to enjoy the trip. It’s hard to talk about how excited you are to go to Mardi Gras when you have to go get your dog cremated. That event overshadowed us for a while and I’m not sure the energy ever quite recovered.
The result was that the trip became more real. I was there. I got more out of each moment. Who was this for after all? It was for us and our own life experience, and we didn’t need it to be some spectacle thrown in our internet friends’ faces. If capturing everything was going to take something away from our real-life experience, why do it? And so we didn’t, really.
