In May, 2007, we sold everything we owned, rented out our house in
Arizona, and moved into a travel trailer to have the adventure of a
lifetime. For two and a half years we criss-crossed the North American
continent. We traveled primarily throughout the American West and
Southwest and scooted across the south to Florida twice. We also got
out of the trailer for two extended motel-based excursions, one around
Michigan's perimeter and the other to the southern Caribbean islands.
In January, 2010, we took to the sea, purchasing and moving aboard a
sailboat with plans to divide our time between summer RVing in North
America and winter cruising in Mexico.
These pages are a photo journal of our experiences. If you are
planning similar adventures, enjoy pretty photos of fun places, or are
curious to find out what the full-time RV lifestyle or liveaboard
cruising lifestyle is all about, we hope this website will serve as an
inspiration.
Highlights of places we have visited are grouped on individual pages,
by state and country, and are accompanied by anecdotal stories.
The Route shows the chronological order of our adventures with
links to each area we have seen. Latest Items (above right) and
News (left) both link to a list of the most recent updates to our
website.
Full-time RVing
There are pages describing our rigs and other equipment, including
our solar setup and vent-free propane heater. The full-time RV
lifestyle is unusual, so there are some pages related to it, including
resources about other travelers that inspired us before we left, and
some thoughts about why we chose to live this way. There are some
fun statistics from our first year and a half of travel, and information
about our favorite method of camping, boondocking. There is also
some nuts-and-bolts info about living in an RV full-time, a peek at
our budget, and some tips & tricks we've learned along the way.
"What's it like?" offers a play-by-play view of our lives, describing all
that happened in one month on the road.
Our first RV was a popup tent trailer. It was a blast. Every time we
took it on a trip we fell in love all over again -- with each other, with
the trailer, and with life. So we called it The Luvnest. For good luck,
we gave that name to our first fulltime travel trailer, and the name
stuck when we upgraded to our current fifth wheel.
Cruising
We had contemplated a sailing lifestyle before we ran off in a trailer,
but the distance was too great from the desert to the deep blue sea.
Besides, we could never come up with a good name for the boat.
Everything for a cruising lifestyle fell into place when Mark awoke one
morning with the name "Groovy" on his mind.
As our voyaging lifestyle has progressed and we have drifted away from
our former, more conventional, daily patterns, we have found ourselves
wandering off the well-worn paths of other travelers as well. So, when a
friend sent me a heartfelt email entitled, "The Road Less Traveled" (after
he had read my notes about why we are pursuing this dream), it seemed
appropriate to adapt that phrase for the top of this web page.
The self-reflections that conclude Robert Frost's famous poem,
written so many years ago, ring true for us today:
Two roads diverged in a wood
And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.
Here are a few more of our favorite photos...