RV Living, Sailing Life and Travel: Nomadic Lifestyle Tips!

Are you dreaming of RV living or the sailing life? Wondering what it would be like to travel full-time and live a nomadic lifestyle? We are Emily and Mark, and we’ve been have lived that way for many years! Back in 2007, we left convention behind to live a life of full-time travel adventures on the open road and at sea. As the years have gone by, we have fulfilled our most cherished dreams.

This website not only tells our story, from our first days of RVing full-time through our sailing years to our most recent travel, but also offers nomadic lifestyle tips and tech tips for upgrading and maintaining RVs and sailboats. In between, you’ll also find the many life lessons we’ve learned from “living the dream.”

Our sincerest hope is that our library of nearly 1,000 articles will inspire you to live your dreams too!

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OUR MOST RECENT POSTS:

For thirteen years we traveled full-time by RV, and for some of those years by sailboat too, and we’ve been sharing our travel stories as well as our cruising and RV lifestyle tips on this website ever since we started.

We have enjoyed several fabulous rolling and floating homes during all these years of travel, and we changed rigs and modes of transport as our personal dreams and ambitions evolved.

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We describe the rest of the rigs we’ve owned and traveled in on our page our Rigs for full-time and part-time travel. You can also find our thoughts about the pros and cons of truck campers — the good, the bad and the UGLY! as well as our description of what it’s like to live in a toy hauler. Both were great experiences that gave us an appreciation of different kinds of rolling homes.

Our travels have taken us throughout North America, from Canada to Mexico, RVing scenic back roads and byways and sailing Mexico’s Pacific coast. This blog brings our wealth of knowledge to you.

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From RV tech tips and RV lifestyle tips to cruising tips and travel stories, from full-time RVing ideas and pointers to a vivid glimpse of what goes into RV living, we give you the tools you need to plan your escape and live the dream of a nomadic lifestyle!

Our goal is to inspire you, to lift your spirits with fun travel stories, and to share our tips for how we’ve lived the dream of traveling full-time by RV and sailboat in an exciting nomadic lifestyle.

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OUR STORY IN A NUTSHELL

We began our full-time RV travels in 2007 in a 27′ travel trailer. We criss-crossed the US in that RV for a year and then upgraded to a 36′ fifth wheel. (You can see our progression of trucks and trailers at this link: Our Rigs for Full-timing (also in the menu)).

At the beginning of 2010, after nearly 3 years of full-timing in our RV, we bought a sailboat and took our travels to the sea. For the better part of the next 4 years, we cruised our 44′ sailboat Groovy up and down the entire 2,000 mile Pacific coast of Mexico, spending the summertime hurricane seasons traveling in our trailer in the US while Groovy waited for us in Mexico.

We sailed from the US border to the Guatemala border, and visited almost every Mexican port in between, including the Sea of Cortez. We also headed inland for some of our best adventures, taking public buses on long journeys to see Mexico’s magical colonial cities and visit the mind-blowing Mayan ruins way down south in the jungle.

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In the summer of 2013, we did the infamous Baja Bash, sailing Groovy uphill against the wind and waves from Puerto Vallarta back to San Diego. For the entire 1,200 mile journey we were tucked into the sweet spot between two hurricanes, riding the coattails of one while being chased by the other!

In early 2014 we said goodbye to our beautiful sailboat Groovy for the last time, and returned to RV living full-time.

In 2020 we put down roots once again and returned to living a conventional life in a stick-built home.

In early 2021, after 7 months of being happy homebodies, we yearned for the thrill of life on the road. We bought a truck camper for shorter duration adventures, however it wasn’t the right rig for us.

In 2022 we sold the camper and purchased a barely used Genesis Supreme 28CRT toy hauler. This rig made it easy for us to bring our Polaris RZR on our travels, gave the us the fun of an open air patio, and still gave us a comfortable home on the road.

During our summer months of travel in 2023 our wonderful 2016 Dodge Ram diesel truck died, costing us $6,600 in repairs to get back up and running again (it needed a new exhaust manifold and turbo). The following May it began throwing the same error codes again, so we traded it in for a 2021 Toyota Tundra gas truck and in January 2025 we bought a 2024 Arctic Wolf 17CB travel trailer.

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You can learn the rest of our backstory before we became full-time travelers on our About Us page (in the menu too). For a thrilling overview of our first ten years of full-time travel — chock full of gorgeous photos — check out these two posts:

• 10 Years of Full-time RVing and Sailng – Part 1: The Early Years
• 10 Years of Sailing and RV Adventures – Part 2: The 2nd Half!

In our nomadic lifestyle we have each discovered and nurtured a deep love of photography. In addition, I (Emily…the narrator of this site) have fulfilled my lifelong dream of writing as well.

We have both grown tremendously as photographers — photography has become a shared passion for us — and this website is a fun testament to our improved techniques and maturing artistry from 2007 to the present!

For tips on how we learned photography and the gear we use, visit our photography page (also found in the menu).

Over the years we have published our photos and travel articles extensively in various print and online publications. You can see our portfolio of published work here.

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PUBLISHED WORK

We have published over 240 feature articles in the major RVing and Sailing magazines. 52 of our photos have appeared on magazine covers in the RV and sailing industries, and 12 of our photos have appeared in commercial wall calendars. We’ve also created a video guide series for cruising Mexico.

In 2017 we began authoring a column on the back page of Trailer Life Magazine showcasing our photos of special places we’ve been.

RV LIVING and OUR NOMADIC LIFESTYLE

In our nomadic lifestyle we have lived almost exclusively off the grid on solar power. In our RV living we like to “boondock,” that is, camp independently on America’s gorgeous public lands, away from campgrounds and RV parks.

In our sailing life we “anchored out” in bays and coves rather than staying in marinas.

In our years of RVing, we’ve spent a total of 4,618 nights off-grid on solar and battery power: 3,713 nights boondocking in our RV and 905 nights anchoring out on our sailboat. This unique nomadic lifestyle has taught us a lot about how to live simply and frugally, without “hookups” to power or water.

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NAVIGATING THIS WEBSITE

With over 1,000 articles on this website, there is a ton of info for you about RVing full-time as well as cruising tips for sailors. And there are plenty of travel stories for armchair travelers too.

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To get yourself oriented so you can easily navigate to the articles that interest you, please visit these links which explain how the website is laid out:

WHERE DID WE GET THE NAME FOR OUR BLOG?

We are perpetually wandering off the well-worn paths of other travelers.

So, years ago, a friend sent me an email referencing Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken after he read my post about why we are pursuing this travel dream. Reading his heartfelt note, I realized the poet’s sentiments matched the theme of our travels.

The final lines of that famous poem, written so long 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.

Perhaps you are at a crossroad in your life the way we were when we started on our adventures. If so, and if, going forward, you decide to follow the roads that are less traveled by, we hope it will make all the difference for you too.

As John Irving once noted, “If you are lucky enough to find a way of life that you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

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Have a look around, and if you like what you see —

— Emily and Mark

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