About a year ago (spring 2022), Scott and I went on a camping trip starting in Colorado and ending in Oregon. Scott wanted to book everything but I said we could just have a loose plan without booking any camp sites or hotels. He trusted me. The idea was to stop when we wanted and camp on public land or at campsites we came across on our journey. It mostly worked, though a few times I was a bit stressed when we couldn’t find a spot… This trip, along with a question of where we wanted to live, put us on the path we now find ourselves on.
After a whole lot of research (much of which was watching youtube videos of people who live full time on the road in an RV or fifth wheel), we purchased a 2019 Dodge Ram 3500 Dually truck in October and a 2020 Grand Design Solitude 310GK in December 2022. We picked up the Solitude from the prior owners who gave us a nice quick tutorial on hitching and backing up the 36’ long monster and then drove it from Bend to Beaverton to a storage facility since the street at the house we were renting wasn’t big enough (length, height, or width). Of course the spots at this RV storage facility were barely big enough (10’ wide for our 8’ wide vehicle), so we had a very difficult hour trying to back up into this spot in a truck running on fumes, in the dark, on a gravel road… But that’s a different story, and one many of you have already heard.
We did have some modifications we wanted to make before actually living in it full time though, so we switched spots to one that was much easier to back in to and started taking it out to a parking lot to work on for a few hours each weekend. We hired a contractor to install a solar system for us, removed a few of the standard furniture items (the full foldout couch, the dresser) and replaced them with desks so we could work. We took out the carpet in the living room slide and put in vinyl flooring.
Based on our youtube, blog, and other research, we purchased several memberships to help us plan where we would stay and our route to get around. Our loose plan in January was to get solar installed, do whatever upgrades and work we wanted while we still had the house, figure out what we were keeping and get rid of the rest, and hit the road in May. For the first month we would stay in campgrounds with hookups (water, electricity, sewer, dumpsters, bathrooms, etc) as we got used to living in a tiny space on wheels. Then we would head out to Bend and start boondocking, or dry camping, staying on public land with no hookups.
Tiny living requires you to give up a lot of stuff. Like all that full collection of yarn I’ve collected over many years… all my kitchen toys like my icecream and yogurt maker that I use occasionally but not weekly. Those are going into storage.