Pau Hana Travels: Part-Time Full-Timers

Gary and I, Stacey are what you would call part-time full-timers. We still own a sticks and bricks home but are out on the road 8 to 10 months out of the year. We use our home base as a place to unwind, do maintenance and of course visit friends and family. We never thought we would do the full timing thing, however, we found the more we were on the road, the more we wanted to explore it. Currently, we have plans to be out until the Fall of 2019 visiting Southern Canada and the Eastern Seaboard in 2018 and then back to Alaska in the summer of 2019.

Prior To Hitting The Road

Gary worked for an airline where he supervised the ramp operations at our local regional airport. This fed our love of travel as we could fly away anywhere his airline flew, which led us to amazing travels to Europe and beyond.

Stacey was a Program Analyst for a private missile defense contracting company working for the Navy in Hawaii before retiring to take care of her grandparents after her father passed away.

By 2013 we were both retired and that is when we started our love of RVing.

Traveling From Canada to Alaska

By far our favorite experience of full-timing is traveling to Alaska in the summer of 2017. We spent over 4 months on the road seeing everything Western Canada and Alaska had to offer. From tent camping on the North Slope on our way to Prudhoe Bay to take a polar plunge in the Arctic Ocean to spending 4 days camping inside Denali National Park, we feel we gave Alaska a pretty good run. However, we know we did not see it all, therefore we are going back in 2019.

Boondocking and Staying Connected

We have outfitted our motorhome with 1040watts of solar on the roof with an all-house inverter that allows us to boondock most of the time. We are proud to say that on our travels up to Alaska we were only on hookups (electric/water) for only 16 days out of the 125 days while on the road. That is a lot of boondocking. We can offer boondocking tips and tricks to help you experience a positive one, as well as share some of our favorite free camping locations we have found along the way.

While traveling we have had up to three carriers (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile) to stay connected while on the road, as well as a WeBoost system to boost our cellular signal when out and away from the big cities.

We have also recently partnered with a company that offers unlimited and unthrottled. AT&T and Verizon plan to help folks stay in touch with the world while traveling. I don’t necessarily want to push these plans on folks, but I have to know how to stay connected while on the road.

Where We are Heading Next

I don’t think an end will ever be in sight. Currently, our plans are to start 2018 in the Southwest desert of Arizona and California. We will roll home for April to do spring maintenance at our Sticks and Bricks and in May will head out to Salidia, MO for the Escapees RV Club Escapade gathering. After exploring middle-America for a month or two we will head back to the Pacific Northwest to visit family before we head out for another 8-month adventure East. By August we should be traveling across Southern Canadian providences working our way to the Eastern Seaboard. We plan to cross back into Maine sometime in September and attend a fellow fulltime RVers wedding in Connecticut in October. We will then continue our travels south and probably find ourselves in Florida by Christmas of 2018. Early 2019 we will be skirting our way west via I-10 and hit up the Gulf Coast of Texas and then work our way to Big Bend National Park. In 2018 our goal is to complete our travel map with all 49 States that are drivable. Finally, we will work our way back to the Pacific Northwest in time for Easter to spend time with friends and family and then head back North to Alaska in May of 2019.