188sqft With Mandy And Kevin

Let’s Travel the World

We took a road trip in my aunts pop-up camper and fell in love with the lifestyle. We kept joking about what if we did this full-time? We had no idea there were a ton of people who were doing it until after this trip and seeing all of them encouraged us. After 6 months of being back in our apartment, we started to get the itch again and decided we wanted this lifestyle ASAP. We saved 10k and bought our camper for 5k and had some money left over for renovations and a small down payment on a truck. We really just went for it.

Our Lives  before we started Full-Timing

Kevin’s job as a web/app developer was location independent, while mine (being a wedding photographer) was a bit harder to figure out. I fly to weddings now, but since hitting the road I found a new love in Jewelry making. Hoping this year is a big year for my jewelry business, I have a lot of plans for its growth.

Traveling to Galveston Texas and Boondocking

We really love boondocking. We usually find a gorgeous place that we practically have to ourselves for free and it is always magical. Our experiencing parking on the beach in Galveston, TX sticks out to us. We had the beach to ourselves, the dogs LOVED it, I could beach-comb every day, and it really was surreal having our little home on the ocean alone.

Our Set-up

We are really tall and wanted a rig we didn’t feel super cramped in. We also were on a budget so we looked for the best deal we could find. We have a truck!

Traveling with Our Four Pets

We have four pets and we love them like crazy. One crazy energetic dog, one chill dog, and two indoor cats. If you dogs listen, boondocking is absolutely amazing for our dogs. Especially the wild one. She can run around while we just hang out outside with her, and will come when she is called. Only just recently (after two years) our one cat is starting to show interest in going outside. He escaped a couple times but each time he does he just goes under the camper and rubs on everything. Our theory is he just wants to hang out with us when we are outside. We are trying to train him with a harness and leash, the progress is slow, but he seems to enjoy the outside time.

I guess my main advice here is every animal is different, as you live on the road you start to figure out what their needs are. Keep an eye on your animals as you adjust to this lifestyle. There are so many tweaks you can make to make your animals extra happy!

Our Love for Boondocking

The biggest site we use for finding boondocking sites is Campendium. So many good reviews and lots of information about the quality of internet on this website. Boondocking is the most fun, but our rig really isn’t set up for it. So we do spend some time at state parks and the occasional RV park.

What to Do Next

Honestly, we have no idea. We aren’t really “life planners”. We do know that we love living this way currently and will continue living like this until it no longer makes sense for us.

We toy with a lot of ideas. Probably the most realistic of them being to buy some land somewhere we love. We can park our rig on it when we want to stay put for a while. Some of the less realistic options are buying a small house somewhere to make this lifestyle more part-time, or buying a sailboat and floating away.