Chasing Experiences: Kali And Glenn

Oh man, let’s see how condensed we can make this, haha!! RVing became the obvious choice for many different reasons. I think our biggest reason was to get out of debt. We were military for years and multiple overseas moves + evacuations while living that life left us with lots to pay off. We got out of the military so that we can eventually settle down in one place and have a farm (our dream home on a back road in Iowa pictured) and we’d love to have all of our debt paid off so that we can start our dream with ease! The other big reason we chose RVing is since we are in this in-between stage of our life where we need to live in Florida for now but, our forever home will be in the Midwest in a few years. We didn’t want to go through the stress of owning and selling a house within the course of a couple years. Plus, the cost of doing that would have been much more than it would be to purchase, reno, & eventually sell an RV!

Our Home For When We Roam

We have a Travel Trailer with full Bunkhouse. We don’t have a truck with the ability to pull a fifth wheel (and don’t plan to buy one that can) so a travel trailer worked for us. When it came to layout, a bunkhouse, pantry, and bathtub were musts for us! Our son loves his tubs so we wanted him to still have that. The bunkhouse is fantastic for storage and also gives us enough space to fit a desk for homeschooling! The pantry was on my must list simply because we knew we wanted to take out the upper cabinets in the kitchen so we’d absolutely need the extra storage space of a pantry!!

Creating Airbnb’s While We Travel

Since I was a little girl, all I’ve wanted to do was be a momma! So before I met my husband I was an elementary teacher but once we got married and started moving for the military I was able to stay home with our son! I still do but am working on starting our first Airbnb (near Disney!!) and I’m so happy to be able still to stay home with our little man but also pursue my love for design!!

Community Is Everything

We’re stationary, but the place where we are parked participates in Harvest Host. People are constantly coming through and it has been so incredible to connect with so many of them! It’s amazing to chat with others and find out where they came from and how they ended up choosing the RV life. It’s beautiful when you see that we each have different why’s and some even come from different parts of the world, but we all connect through our love of this crazy unconventional life choice! I’m continuously blown away by how kind & warm the RV community is!

Okay, so I have to be honest here when it comes to renovating… expect the unexpected! Renovating an RV to create a space that feels like home for your family is 1000% worth it!!! But I think (at least for me) it’s easy to see all of the pretty “after” pictures of everyone’s RV’s and think that reno will be quick and painless. When we bought our RV and started demo we found A LOT of water damage. There were a lot of tears and I actually considered selling our RV for scraps! But, I kept pushing forward and after talking to other people who had renovated,  we found out that most people run into some form of water damage. And if not that then they find what they’d planned for their design won’t work because of where something is located. I guess I just want to let you know when you find an unexpected issue please do not feel alone! When you’re frustrated, reach out to any of us in the RV community! We’ve all been there and know the feeling. It’s hard to talk about because no one wants to seem negative, so I get why the hard stuff isn’t discussed very often. But it can also be deceiving if you’re new to the RV reno thing! So just go in prepared & if things go wrong, know you’ve got a tribe to vent to!

Life Is Unexpected No Matter How You Live

Ohhhh goodness!! We’ve only been in our RV for a month and we already have so many stories to tell, haha!! Some days our cat tries to escape as we’re taking the dogs out and I have to tackle him so he doesn’t run off, one time we tried to explore a walking trail with the dogs and they ended up rolling in burs (super fun trying to get my zoo home in between picking them off every surface of us), every day attempting to empty the gray tank is an adventure trying not to spill it all over myself (I always angle the hose wrong), and on Christmas Eve (1 week after we moved in) I fried our microwave! Haha! Basically, the first bit of RV living is a massive learning curve but you have to learn to just laugh at and embrace the chaos and know it’ll become your norm & get easier as you figure it all out!

Enjoying The Ride

As of now, our plan is to full time for 3 years!! We may take breaks in between to work on our Airbnb’s, which we’d live in while renovating, but when we aren’t working on those we will be in our RV for a good while!! We hope that when those 3 years are finished we will have a clearer direction on where our forever home will be (mostly I just can’t wait to own land for every possible animal). But we’ve learned not to plan too much because we plan and God laughs! So we will see where life takes us!