With my international having been put on hold since my March 4th return from Asia, it has been a struggle to figure out what I will be doing next. My focus started with catching up on sorting through my photos and choosing which ones I feel are worthy to keep to help make my stories come alive or help me to remember different moments of my travel that I feel I could write about. When that was done, I switched to online courses to help me figure out how to become a better travel writer, however as I was doing those courses I realized there were other things I needed to focus on too. How to write in general and how to keep a journal. How to overcome procrastination. How to better organize my thoughts and creating ways to make sure I keep up with writing. This also led to my realization that I will also need help on creating my blog and how to best put out content on that platform. At times overwhelming and a process that is taking much longer than I thought it would, I am finding myself in a much better place because I took the time to step back, learn what I needed to learn, and seek help through the guidance of others who are more experienced and knowledgeable about these subjects.
Through that process of searching for people to assist me in learning how to better keep track, organize, overcome procrastination, and well….just write, I came across a man named Dave Fox. He has created a number of online courses on the Udemy website and his personality and style of teaching was just perfect for me. I really was able to connect and relate to him in a number of ways, such as our love of travel, experiencing new cultures and meeting new people as well as dealing with personal struggles of staying motivated, overcoming procrastination, and dealing with ADD. So helpful has his classes been, that I have now completed three of them and started a forth, with a 5th waiting for me further into the future. Two are related to writing about traveling and two are focused simply on writing and dealing with distractions. The 5th course is about how to put yourself out there more while traveling so you can meet more people and experience more things. He also has a course on comedy writing, which while interesting, is not something I plan to get into myself and he also has plans for two more additional writing courses that he’s been working on. (I’m looking forward to their release!)
Using all of the information I’ve learned, I feel much stronger about my ability to do what I set out to do and have found myself able to write almost every single day. I’m figuring out what steps I need to take from where I am now and will be setting up goals for myself for the next month of two in the coming days. I will also be working on creating some motivational reward systems that I can use to keep myself writing, even when it gets difficult, and should help me push through to keep creating new content going forward. I’m also realizing that a change of environment and getting back out into nature more would likely help in fueling my ability to write more as well as to give me more experiences that I will be able to write about. Right now, I am sitting outside at my parents house at the pool side table overlooking some coastal islands and enjoying a cooling breeze that is helping to keep me from wanting to go back inside. I was also provided a quick distraction as a dolphin swam by right in front of our dock as it hunted down some fish to eat. Was even able to snap a few pics of it! Then it was back to writing I went.
So, how does this all lead me into the topic of RVing? Well, as I said at the beginning of this, I have been trying to figure out what I will be doing next as our lockdown because of the coronavirus has continued. International travel seems very unlikely in the next few months, although I would love to continue to do that, but it’s seeming more and more that domestic travel may be better for me in the foreseeable future. So how would I travel domestically without spending too much money and give me the ability to keep up with my writing? Why not an RV? This would be my transportation, my accommodation, my writing study, and my photography studio. I’d also have the ability to cook for myself, allowing for myself to look after myself better in that regard as well as get me to locations where I will be more likely to get outside and do more activities.
So, how have I gone about figuring out if this is something that could even work for me? Well, I did what I do best, I started to research RV’s and RV life. I first searched Google for the different RV sizes and what each mean in terms of size and cost. Then I used Youtube to show me different RV’s in both the class B and class C size to help me narrow down which would likely work best for my needs. While I like the idea of a class B as they are smaller, they are also more compact meaning that areas often double or triple up in their functionality and I would also be left almost certainly with either no onboard bathroom or a combination bathroom/shower wet room. While a wet room is similar to the style of bathroom found throughout Asia, they are not what I personally enjoy using. As funny as it sounds, my bathroom time is important to me and I want to be as comfortable as I can be while I’m using the facilities in there. A class C would give me the ability to get a separated shower and toilet area as well as more areas with one dedicated purpose allowing me to spread out the places I would be doing my work, sleep, play, etc in. A class C would also provide more storage areas meaning I could better organize my things to make them accessible in the most functional way possible for my needs. It would also mean that were I to find someone to travel with, there would be room for them and their things as well.
So now that I’ve found that the class C designed RV’s seem to be best for me, what would I need to do next. Well, I’d need to figure out what brands are best and how much it would cost to own or rent one of them to see if it would fall within the budget I’d be willing to spend. I used my travel budget of $3,000/month will a goal of being closer to $2,000 as my numbers and then found some RV bloggers posts that talked about budget and expenses. Using these I was able to put together a rough estimate of what RVing would cost me and was pleased to find it would fall within what I was willing to be spending. But is living and traveling in an RV going to work for me? Well, the only way to know is going to be to try it out. With this conclusion, I started both planning out how I would test it out as well as important things that would make RVing a dealbreaker. What would those immediate dealbreakers be? One of these four things. (1) Would the driver’s seat extend back far enough, recline enough, or would there be enough leg room to be comfortable for my 6’ 3” frame? (2) Would I be able to sit and work comfortably at the dinette table? (3) Would I fit on the bed comfortably and be able to sleep well? (4) Would my larger size prohibit me from sitting comfortably on the toilet inside the RV?
To answer these questions, I knew the best place for answers would be to visit some local RV dealerships and talk to the people there. So that is where I went. If I am happy with the answers to my questions and found one or more RV’s I’d like to test out, my next stage would be to go out for 7-14 days on a short road trip to see how things work out. If that went well, I would then go out for a longer period of time. Likely 1-3 months, as that would give me a really good idea if I could live like that full time and keep myself motivated to keep writing, create new content, and be as active as I hope it would help me be. After that, I would make a decision on whether or not I’d like to keep doing the RV thing, switch back to international travel, or decide to settle back down someone new and get a desk job again (ICK!).
So, it was off to some RV Dealerships to help me figure out: Is RV Life for me?
Take care and remember to Travel Tall and Small
~Aaron
Please note: The above was written several weeks prior to my eventual purchase of an RV and setting out to travel within it. I wanted to share the above because in my opinion it's important backstory information to help you, the reader, understand where I was coming from in turning to the RV Life as a potential new step in my life and the decision making process I followed to figure it out. Please come back and read Part Two to learn how the rest of this story unfolds.
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