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That Time I Traveled the Country in an RV

And why I didn't talk about it much
Living in an RV full time

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?”

Without hesitation, the other one of us reacted with a “Yeah!” after which there were several ripples of “Wait are you serious?” The next month Lauren went to work researching RVs and trying to figure out what we wanted. Her biggest fear was getting stranded in the middle of nowhere in need of some major repair, so rather than trying to find the cheapest hunk of junk we could, we ended up looking at newer more fully-featured models. Go big or go home. We settled on a 2017 Forest River 351DS – a Class A, 35-foot-long, 12-ton, 6-mpg gas-guzzling, very comfortable home on wheels. It was expensive (which I’ll get into) but it gave us absolutely zero troubles on the road. What a machine!
RV roads traveled

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.

One of the biggest reasons for the lack of documentation was time. RV life comes with a few more chores. Each day that we travel we’ve got to completely clean our house (ok, it’s not that big of a house) and secure everything that can move. Unless you are a super clean person (we are not) you really start to appreciate how much mess you can make in a day or two. Then you’ve got to unhook all the hookups, make sure everything outside is in, get the car secured on the tow dolly, figure out a route to the next place (assuming that’s planned), dump tanks if needed (a stinky and potentially messy process), gas up (which is an ordeal), and spend hours on the road getting to the next place. I didn’t mind it mostly. But during all that it would have just been one more thing to pull out all my camera gear and try to capture it all. I coulda done it. But I just didn’t.

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.

A map of our travels
Who wants to watch a video of us working on our computers in a Wal-Mart parking lot? Long stretches of the trip were fairly uneventful apart from being in a new place. In truth people probably did want to see those things. It might have been fascinating to see how we were living. At the time we thought it wasn’t that interesting.

It was just our life

Deven drinking beer and RVing

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.

Rumple The Dog

2014-2018
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    DEVEN JAMES LANGSTON
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