Three Years of Tiny Living on Wheels: A Personal Story of How We Got Here

Travel is a huge thing for me and I always wanted to have a lot of travel in my life.

I remember when I first learned that people lived full time in rv's, not just retirees but people like me, young, still working and with kids. I had never been in an rv before but a dream was born and it grew bigger and bigger.

I used to go sit in my car during lunch at my office job (where I was inside all day with no windows) and watch videos of people who lived this lifestyle. I would call my partner, Johnny, feeling desperate to go off and live like this. We knew someday we would although we didn't expect it to happen the way it did.

It was March, almost 6 months after our home and business had flooded, we knew we weren't going to stay in Charleston but we hadn't figured out what we were going to do next. We had so many different places in consideration that we may as well have thrown a dart at a map to choose. Johnny was pretty set on heading to California and I was pretty set on NOT heading to California. The last thing I wanted was to trade one natural disaster (or two - floods & hurricanes) for another (earthquakes). Plus the idea of moving all of our stuff that far across the country was daunting. Way farther away from family in a place that is notoriously expensive to live.

I had a nice sized tax return sitting in the bank. I was watching more full time rv family videos when I realized that if we sold everything we could probably have enough money to buy a small rv and go to California that way. Then in the event of an earthquake or whatever else might happen, we could leave at a moments notice, already packed and with no lease to break. It was a win-win in my book. I was so excited to tell him that I called him before I left the parking lot to come home that day.

He was in.

The rest of the journey to us getting on the road was bumpy at best. There were many different tweaks to the plans, but once we made up our minds to do it the universe really did step up and start bringing the right opportunities into our path. Sometimes everything seemed to be going wrong but much of it was actually serendipitous.

Our last days in Charleston were a frenzy. There was a hurricane off the coast and it was headed right for us. We still needed time to finish going through the last of our things. In the end we had to make a new plan to get some of the stress off our shoulders. We got a small storage shed and stuffed it late that night.

We spent our last couple of days in the driveway of friends. The night we were going to take the rv from our house to theirs we had a brake line bust while Johnny was trying to hook up the rv. He went to that same friends house and they fixed it together. I can't imagine if that had happened with what was to be our new home hooked to the back, or if it had waited a few days and happened when we were driving through the mountains. I hardly think about that anymore but it does make me a little queasy.

Our last day in town we went to get food for the road. The grocery store was packed as everyone was stocking up for the storm. There was no water available and the shelves were looking bare.

We headed out of town in the late afternoon on the 5th to get as far from the coast as possible before the hurricane hit. We had hardly slept in our rig and weren't prepared to go through a hurricane in our first nights. I was driving behind Johnny in our car as we headed down the empty streets. What I saw in front of me was smoke coming from the tires of the fifth wheel. I called him and told him to pull over. There was a Camping World just before we were going to get on the interstate so we pulled in there. The parking lot was empty. It didn't matter that it was a Wednesday late afternoon, almost all the businesses in the area were closed so that people could evacuate for the storm. We sat there in the empty parking lot trying to figure out what was wrong with the rv.

It just so happened that in the few moments we were there someone who worked at the store came to check his own rv on the lot and make sure it was prepped for the storm. He took a look and showed us that we had it plugged in to the truck upside down and the brakes weren't working. Our first of many lessons in how an rv works. I can't imagine what we would have done if he hadn't shown up at that exact moment. A few minutes were all it would have taken to miss him.

We headed out of Charleston going westbound in the eastbound lanes. All roads went out of Charleston. We were almost the only ones on that side of the road. It was eerie. There were blue flashing lights at all the entrances to get on the highway. We drove into the night and made it as far as the mountains, almost into North Carolina. We spent that first night on the road at a rest stop trying to catch our breath from the days before.

We drove the next day into Knoxville TN and stayed in our first campground, set up for the first time, cooked our first dinner in the kitchen, watched our first movie in the living room and visited our first friends.

So many more firsts to come. So many more things to learn. I don't think we really calmed down much until we got to California.

But here we are, three years later. The madness is over and I love this home more than any other I have ever lived in❤️