Go RVing uses cookies on gorving.com in accordance with our privacy policy. By using this site, you consent to the use of cookies. We use cookies for the following purposes: To enable certain functions of the service, to provide analytics, to store your preferences, and to enable advertisements delivery, including behavioral advertising.
Ryan Robinson takes you for a ride in the passenger seat of his RV, off the grid, deep among the dramatic rock formations of the Utah Desert. Robinson and friends chill by the fire, tell stories, and of course, rig a one of a kind highline over the Looking Glass Arch in Moab, UT.
I never thought I would be such an RV advocate. Heck, I never thought I would live in one full-time. Traveling the country in a Winnebago wasn’t on my bucket list.
Like most people, I didn’t dream of growing up and living in a motorhome. Yet it’s literally been the vehicle that has allowed us to cross so many adventures off our bucket list and live an incredible life.
If you are someone who isn’t sure whether the RV lifestyle is for you, I wanted to share 7 reasons why you should’ve bought an RV by now.
1. You love the outdoors.
When your ideal getaway involves a state park, a campfire, and s’mores, you know that RV life would suit you perfectly.
Our favorite part of full-time RVing is the chance to spend more time outside, whether we’re hiking, kayaking, or just taking a nap in the hammock. Best of all, this keeps us more active and healthier on the road.
2. You’re tired of up keeping a house.
In America, we have too much stuff. We’ve got knick-knacks and hand-me-downs and that pile of stuff we’re going to take to Goodwill, when we have the time.
When you move into an RV, you’re forced to purge, downsize, and take less with you. There simply isn’t the room! We donated clothes, gave away old furniture, and packed only the essentials in our rig.
In such a small space now, cleaning the whole house takes 10 minutes max, 15 if you decide to check the oil and the batteries while you’re at it.
3. You follow way too many travelers on Instagram.
Raise your hand if your Instagram feed is full of photos of mountains, beaches, and vanlifers staring off into the horizon dramatically (mine definitely is).
When we were engaged, this was us, scrolling through amazing photos by full-time travelers, completely jealous of their lifestyle. We wanted to travel too, but we were 23 years old with student debt and in the middle of paying for a wedding. We didn’t think we could afford a honeymoon, let alone extended travel.
In sixth grade, I had to memorize all 50 states and their capitals and our big test was marking them on a map. I scored 48/50
Ever since, ‘visit all 50 states’ was always at the top of my bucket list. I wanted to know what each state was like and what made them different.
For our honeymoon, we visited all 50 states in our first year of marriage (49/50 in an RV). If you’re interested in the cost of driving an RV to 49 states, you can read more about that here.
5. You want more quality time with your family.
My family came to visit us last summer in Banff National Park.
Once, on Valentine’s Day nonetheless, it took Heath three hours to drive from his office in downtown Austin to my apartment to pick me up. As you can imagine, I wasn’t hangry or crabby at all when he finally showed up for our date.
That night taught us one thing pretty quickly: We waste too much of our time commuting. In a single week, we spent more time apart than we did together and that isn’t how we wanted to spend our marriage.
We decided that night that we were done commuting. We wanted jobs that we could work from anywhere, hopefully jobs that we could take with us in an RV.
6. You want more freedom.
During our first month of full-time RVing back in 2014 Heath and I drove up the entire Pacific Coast Highway. At one point, we were running along the beach outside of LA and the next we were camping on a bluff, overlooking the ocean just south of Big Sur.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more of a freeing sense of adventure in my entire life.
Over the past few years we’ve explored national parks and small towns I’d never heard of. We run our own business from the road and create our own hours. We pick the places we want to visit and decide how long we want to stay there.
We have a sense of freedom that we didn’t know was possible at this stage of our lives.
7. You don’t want to wait (to live your life, to travel, to visit the Grand Canyon, etc).
One of Heath’s all-time favorite quotes goes something like this:
“There’s never a right time to travel. When you’re young you’ll have the time and energy, but not the means. When you’re middle aged you’ll have the means and energy, but not the time. And when you’re old you’ll have the time and means, but not the energy.”
No matter when we decide to travel in life, there will always be a sacrifice. For us, we had to take a financial risk at a young age and figure out how to support ourselves on the road. Worst case scenario, we’d just move back home and get another job.
If you’re tired of waiting until the ever elusive “perfect time to travel”, you should have bought an RV by now.
We've been RVing since 2014. What started as a honeymoon dream to visit all fifty states spun into an obsession with RV living and RVing around the world.
