On May 20th we celebrated our one year Nomadiversary. It really doesn’t feel like it has been a year since we left on our maiden voyage from Houston, Texas to Kinder, Louisiana. It hasn’t been all fun and games. There were a couple of times in the first three months that we actually thought about calling it quits. It was just so many changes and RV problems all at once and at times it was pretty overwhelming. I’m very happy that we pushed through it and now we really love our RV Life.
Read: It's a Wanderful RV Life Intro Blog
Here are a couple of our favorite things about this whole traveling lifestyle.
Meeting New People -
Stop and think about how often you meet new people in your daily life. When Chris and I were living in Houston it was pretty rare for us to meet anyone except maybe at a get together with friends or if someone new had started at work. We rented a house for a year and never met our neighbors, and it was pretty much the same thing living in an apartment. So, a big bonus to this RVing thing has been meeting some very cool and likeminded new friends.
Surprisingly, we haven’t met too many people at RV Parks. Instagram and Facebook groups have been the main ways we have connected with fellow RVers. Convergences are another great way to meet new friends. We did the Xscapers Balloon Fiesta convergence last year in Albuquerque, NM and had a blast hanging out with everyone. We highly recommend attending one.
We have also been able to hang out with family members we haven’t seen in a long time and meet some that we hadn’t met before, which has been another awesome part of this nomadic lifestyle.
National Parks/Monuments-
We have fallen in love with our National Parks and monuments and are constantly amazed at their beauty. We have already been to 11 National Parks and can’t wait to see more. So, far Yosemite has been our favorite. We were blown away by all the gorgeous waterfalls and we only barely scratched the surface of the park. We didn’t get much time there. Some honorable mentions are Big Bend for its immense vastness and beauty and Carlsbad Cavern for the grand underground caves that outshine any other caverns we have seen.
The National Monuments have been great too. Places like White Sands have amazing and unique landscapes that are breathtaking. Others like Bandelier are just so fascinating and full of history.
Much of our travel routes have been planned around visiting most of the National Parks. We hope to be able to make some upgrades and repairs to Lucy (our rig) so we are able to actually stay at some the park’s campgrounds and explore a lot more.
The Experience of Living in New Places-
For the most part living somewhere new every couple of weeks is pretty awesome. You get to check out the best of what each city has to offer and then move on to the next place. If you like it, you can stay or go back to it and if you don’t, you never have to go back. Sometimes it is really hard to remember we are not on vacation though. You know how when you go on vacation you pretty much do everything you can and eat everything in sight? A year in and we are still working on this. We have a budget but we find ourselves struggling to stick to it.
Some of our favorite things to do in new cities are checking out are local parks, attractions, restaurants, coffee shops, wineries and breweries.
We of course miss a couple things from Houston, especially the familiarity of knowing where everything is. Like sometimes I really miss my old grocery store. Is that weird? Haha! Chris misses some of our favorite restaurants, too.
Living with less/living in a smaller space-
I really don’t ever feel like I need more room. Having a smaller space actually helps us constantly stay on our toes about getting rid of things we aren’t really using or we don’t really need. We have a one in one out rule. If you buy something new then you have to get rid of something else. Like my drawer can’t possibly fit a new pair of jeans so I would have to get rid of another pair if I was to get one. We have purged so many items while traveling and are constantly donating more items we haven’t used. We spend a lot less money on “things” now and way more money on experiences and we love it.
Freedom-
Having a moving home gives us the freedom to go wherever whenever. For example if it is getting too hot in the city we are in we can chose to go somewhere else with cooler temperatures. Or if we get tired of the desert and want to head to the beach we can just take our house and move it near the beach. When we start missing family too much we can just take our house and go see them. The possibilities are endless.
It was really hard to narrow down our favorite things to just the above because the past year has been full of so much fun and adventure. We are so excited to continue this journey and see what else we will get to experience. Along with the ups of any adventure there are also the downs. We have our fair share of things we could do without from RV Life as well. Check out our post next week to hear about some of our least favorite things.
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