Frequently Asked Questions

We've been getting a lot of interesting questions, so I thought you all might want to hear what other people are curious about!

1) How do you get your mail?

We use a really handy service called Traveling Mailbox. It's so handy that we were actually using it in SF even before we left. You get your mail sent to their address (they have multiple to choose from throughout the country; ours is a San Francisco address), and when a letter arrives there, they scan the outside of the envelope and alert you. You can then view the envelope and let them know what to do with it: open and scan the inside, ship it to you, or do nothing/get rid of it. You can even get packages sent there, although we haven't tried that yet. This gives us a consistent address for people to send stuff to, and also an easy means of forwarding important things to ourselves wherever we are.

2) Where does the poop go?

This is actually the most common question, but it seemed wrong to lead with it.

The RV water system has three different parts: the fresh water, the gray water, and the black water. The fresh water is water we put in by connecting a hose or putting directly into the tank with gallon jugs; this is the water that comes out of the pipes when we want to shower, wash our hands, or drink water from the tap. The fresh water system is what is most at risk for freezing and bursting pipes if we're in cold weather. This is why we didn't put water in when we were staying in it during freezing weather. As far as we understand, the other way to handle that is to put antifreeze in there and flush it out well when you're out of the freezing cold, but then obviously you still can't use the fresh water in the meantime.

When we put something down the drain in the sink or shower, it goes into the gray water tank. Whatever gets put into the toilet goes into the black water tank. Both of these tanks have an electric heater attached to them, so you don't end up with a block of poopsicle when you're camping in cold weather. (We also put antifreeze in ours to make double sure.)

The gray and black tanks each have a valve that releases the contents into a shared black/gray dump pipe on the underside of the RV. We have to carry around a big tub of poop supplies, the main component of which is a long extendable accordion-like tube that attaches to that pipe. So, attach one end of the tube to the RV, attach the other end of the tube to whatever pipe you're flushing it into (most/many RV parks have a dump station either at each site or one main one you can pull up to; you start noticing dump places everywhere once you are aware of them!). One rookie mistake we have fortunately not made yet is forgetting to secure the end to the dump station: poopsplosion. Once you're hooked up, you flush the black water tank, and then the gray water tank. Another rookie mistake we have not yet made is doing gray then black. (You can use your imagination to figure out why you do it in that order. Or don't. It's gross.) One rookie mistake we HAVE made is forgetting to close the gray water valve when dumping the black, which could potentially get some black water into your gray tank. We only made that mistake the first time.

Yes, you can see poop water going down the pipe. Yes, you need to handle a lot of poopy tools and crawl around on wet ground where other people likely spilled their poop. Yes, it is super gross. Every time. No, it doesn't get less gross the more you do it. Yes, you feel gross and dirty for the rest of the day, even if you wear gloves and slather your whole body in hand sanitizer afterwards. Yes, we have discussed buying dedicated Poop Shoes for the occasion. And yes, Mike is my hero and basically does it by himself every single time. That's true love.

3) What does your RV look like?

It's a 2015 Itasca Navion 24V, just under 26 feet long. It's basically a Sprinter cargo van as the cab and engine, and they just take the van part off the back and plop on a Winnebago shell with the prefab everything inside. Engine runs on diesel; we get between 10-17 miles per gallon (usually average around 13 when we're doing long hauls). There's a popout in the living area where you can set up a table, so that functions as the dining area and workspace. There's a loft above the driver and passenger seats which we use for storage. There's a bed in the back for sleeping, and we also use part of that for storage (it's a really big bed). There's a full bathroom with a shower so tiny you can't pick up the soap if you drop it. And the kitchen has a two-burner propane stove, fridge with separate freezer, and a microwave that's also a convection oven. 

Here's the floorplan:

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Here's the outside (photo credit to Jill!):

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Half the people who see it say "oh it's so cute and little!" and the other half say "oh my gosh it's so big!"

4) Don't you miss your stuff/is it liberating to have no stuff?

The phrasing of this question depends on whether the person asking thinks it'll be fun or horrifying to have no stuff.

We each packed about a week's worth of clothes, which means Mike had to just grab seven black t-shirts and seven pairs of identical socks and underwear. For me, I just tried to pick a mix of things that all matched so I can mix and match and feel like I still have variety. I was anticipating missing having the variety to choose from. I, like many people, basically had three wardrobes: one for work, one for casual, and one for fancy. I wore basically all of it, though not necessarily often. I don't get sentimental about clothes -- if they're not being worn, they get donated -- but I do like mixing it up. However, so far at least, it is TOTALLY LIBERATING to have one fewer decision to have to make every day. I don't miss the other clothes. The ones I do miss, it's because of function. Now I understand Mike and Steve Jobs better.

The rest of the stuff we also don't really miss. Every once in a while, we'll be like, "man, it would be handy to have [this particular thing] right now," but it's fairly rare. If we really actually need it, we'll just order a cheap replacement. The bigger issue is probably all the stuff we thought we'd need but don't actually. So frankly, we could probably do with even less stuff and be happy and comfortable.

As for when we get back, I suspect this is one of those lessons that will start out as "Yeah! We should go back home and get rid of all of our stuff!" But then just end up having as much stuff as before. Which is okay. It's just a good reminder about what things are actually important, and that few things are as irreplaceable as they seem.

5) Is it scary? Is it hard?

Sometimes, I'll think about the bigness of this trip. I'll think about how a year is really long, and how I can't know anything about what's going to happen in that year, and how I can't control much of what's going to happen in that year. And this can feel overwhelming.

But then I remember that the future is always big. And long. And unknowable.  Even if you've lived in the same house for decades, and are married, and have a stable job, you never really know what could happen next. In that way, this year is really no less predictable than any other year. So this year, like every year, the beautiful challenge is to focus on living each day at a time and try your best to really be there, and really savor it, because we can never know what the future will bring.

So really, it's not scary. But any time the bigness feels a little too big, I am using it as an opportunity to continue practicing acceptance of any circumstances, being okay with not being able to control everything, and deeply enjoying everything that comes up. 

Other lessons that have helped with this: First, this trip makes is really apparent how quickly time actually goes. We'll show up somewhere and think, wow! We're here six weeks! That's so long! And then, to use the cliche, you blink your eyes and you have one week left and it doesn't feel like enough time. Second, you notice how surprisingly quickly you do adapt to new things. It just feels like life, wherever you are. Which is comforting, because you know that, whatever happens, you will always adapt. And it helps to have your best friend with you, of course.

6) Are you sick of each other yet?

This one is usually said as a joke, but it's asked a lot, so I thought it was worth including.

We are incredibly used to being around each other 24/7. We haven't gotten sick of each other, and don't expect to. On the rare occasion we do something separately, it feels weird to not have the other person there. In fact, traveling with your best friend is pretty much the best thing ever, because even boring things are fun together.

The surprising flipside of this, though, is actually that we've noticed we're actually spending less "quality time" together than we did in San Francisco. When we were in SF, Mike was at work all day, so he'd come home and we'd stop working and just be together and hang out. Here, we're around each other all the time, so we often default to working, and there's no built-in time to stop working and hang out instead. Luckily, we're both pretty tuned in to this, so if it feels like we haven't bonded for a while, we'll take a walk or have a date night or play a game or something. But we've learned that we have to be a little more proactive about quality bonding time, which we also acknowledge is unexpected and a little ironic.

7) How is it to work remotely?

For me, the major theme of this trip so far has been the balancing of priorities. I've never felt so acutely how our priorities -- the things we choose to spend our limited time on -- make up our lives. And that balancing act is made really obvious when we have a relatively short amount of time in each place, and during this trip as a whole.

It's a constant struggle to balance the time between 1) sightseeing and really getting a feel for the places we spend our time, 2) maximizing time with our friends and family, and 3) working and doing Adult Life Stuff (still gotta pay bills and go to the grocery store!). Even just picking our route and deciding how long we'll be in each place is incredibly difficult, because you have to decide how important each priority is relative to the other. Often, it just feels like we're not giving any of them as much time as we'd like to, and that's frustrating. But mostly, I feel like we've actually done a pretty good job with this. We always just wish we had more time, and wonder at how quickly it flies by.

As far as work itself, it's been totally fine. All I really need is a computer and the internet. My team on the ground in Oakland is kicking butt even though I'm not physically there, but even when I lived in town we mostly all worked remotely, so at least on my end, I think it's going great. It's also a good opportunity for me to develop better delegation skills, which was a long time coming, I think. Another good consequence of the constant balancing of priorities is that it helped me realize that I've been spending too much time working, and could be far more effective with the time I spend. Because of that, I've been improving my time management skills, so I can be more productive when I am working and then have more (guilt-free) time to spend on the other priorities, too.

The one lesson I did have to learn was that I just don't want to work on travel days. We have internet in the RV, there's nothing stopping me from working in the passenger seat as we drive. But during the week of long drives to New Orleans, I just did not want to. I did enough work to keep the wheels turning, but had to finally admit that, even if we were just driving through hours of flat nothingness, I'd still rather be experiencing that alongside Mike instead of checked out in my own world with my email. It's a good thing to know, and now I'll just try to build those travel days into my work schedule so I don't feel constantly torn.

Musings from the Early Days

It's been about a week, and so far there haven't been any overarching themes or ground-shaking revelations. Just some percolations. But in an effort to give a real representation of the trip as we go, here's a few of the bigger ones:

It's really nice to live near family.

I've only ever lived near family when I was living with my parents as a kid, and then the occasional bits here or there when visiting from school. I've never really had the experience of just being able to go over to my aunt's house for dinner, or get breakfast with my cousin, or visit someone at work. Now, we can do that, and it's really meaningful to be able to have those moments. Those real-life moments, instead of just the annual holiday party where you talk for seven minutes and ask "so how have you been?" Being able to sit around the Thanksgiving table and share what we're grateful for... that was a moment that I was grateful for.

The whole point of this trip was to be closer to family, but it's already becoming clear that living near family would be something that would mean a lot to both of us.

It's really nice to be able to be helpful.

In the same vein, it feels so rewarding to be able to BE there for our families. It's one thing to be there over the phone, but it feels so much nicer to be able to dog sit for someone, or run an errand, or cook a dinner so they can take the night off. This makes me especially look forward to visiting our siblings with kids, so we can help as much as we can. When you're in person, there are just more ways to show love, and that part makes us happy.

It's probably going to be hard for me to carve out personal time.

I'm used to working at home alone all day long, and for most of the next year, it'll probably be a rare occurrence to be home alone. Those who don't yet know me well won't know that I'm actually a pretty extreme introvert -- I love being around people, but I also need a lot of time alone and a lot of recuperation time post-socializing. This will mostly be on me to communicate with people that a) I need some alone time (and then actually take it), and b) that if I'm ever off by myself, that doesn't mean I don't want to socialize or aren't happy, it just means I need to decompress a little. I, historically, have never been good at either of those things, and end up just being around people until I am completely depleted and can't function. I'll need to make a conscious effort not only to communicate well about this, but also to specifically carve out time for myself, even if it's just running errands on my own or going to bed a little earlier so I can read in my room.

Quantity of Time is not the same thing as Quality Time

While having more quantity of time together is really nice, it's very easy not to make actual Quality Time a priority. I could easily see Mike and I spending days solid together without actually doing much bonding, like talking or playing or going for walks or doing activities together. Same goes for the people we'll be staying with. Actual quality time requires an active choice and a prioritization of time, and we will make sure to stay aware of this so we don't just fall into the habit of quantity over quality. 

Not knowing where anything is is frustrating.

Cooking in someone else's kitchen. Shopping in an unfamiliar grocery store. Things you usually can do without thinking about now take much longer and require lots of searching. This will be a good practice in patience, because for the next year, I won't know where anything is.

There's still not enough time.

The ironic lesson of them all. We're traveling for a year, and always feel like we don't have enough time. We'll be working on the itinerary, and we'll end up in a situation where we just have to rush through the in-between places instead of being able to savor and explore them. And even as we're here in Oceanside, our entire calendar is already full with weekend trips and birthday stuff and family visits and everything else, and it feels like we have very little time here that's just to hang out and live life. We tried to change the itinerary a bit to give us a little bit of extra time here, but circle back to the first problem of rushing through the in-between places, and we could only add three days. (Additional side lesson: the United States is really big and it takes a long time to drive across it.) There are so many places we'd like to go, things we'd like to do, and people we'd like to see. And meanwhile, it'd also be nice to just do nothing sometimes, too! I suspect that no matter what we do, a part of us will wish we could have done even more. Maybe this is just life, amplified.

Everything Takes Twice as Long, and Other Lessons.

Lessons from Day One of living in an RV.

1. Always close the cabinet doors. I suspect it will take many many more bangs to the head before this lesson actually sinks in. We discussed making a spreadsheet of who left the cabinet open vs who hit their head on it. So far, it's mostly Galia's fault, and mostly Mike's head. (Sorry, Boo.)
2. There is no such thing as privacy, part one. Everything that happens in the RV is seen, heard, and smelled by every person in the RV.
3. There is no such thing as privacy, part two. RV parks are basically parking lots with bigger spaces. If you wake up in the morning and want to open the curtains to let in the light of day, your neighbor can see you walking around in your PJs with your bed hair and retainers in. (Note to self: research removable frosted screens for windows.)
4. The world ends at the edges of the RV. Once inside with the shades drawn, it feels like you could be anywhere or nowhere. It feels strangely remote, like you're in a cabin in the woods with no one else around. This is really cool and interesting and makes it feel quiet and peaceful, but can also feel a little isolated and lonely. (Another note to self: text friends often.)
5. Living small is expensive. Money can buy you space. Space gets you the ability to buy in bulk. Buying in bulk is cheaper. I always knew I was privileged to be able to buy in bulk, and I am really feeling it now. Limited space means you need to buy singles of everything, and the smallest version of that single. A four pack of toilet paper is a lot more per roll than a 24 pack. A travel shampoo is a lot more per ounce than a salon-size shampoo. It adds up dramatically over time.
6. Living small is also bad for the environment. A dozen small containers in the trash (now) versus reusing and refilling a single one (before), because keeping the refill jug on hand takes space. Not being able to compost. Using way more disposable plates, cups, utensils.  Even if we're using less water, electricity, and goods, a lot of the other ways we normally minimize our impact are a lot more difficult.
7. Living small is more work. Each dish has to be washed, dried, put away immediately, because there's no space to keep it. The floor should be swept daily. I still haven't figured out how to wash my face without getting water all over the bathroom. 
8. But it's good for practicing minimalism. Lesson learned from moving out: all your stuff is junk and nobody wants it. Keep only what you actually need. If you have the urge to keep something just in case you might need it: get rid of it; if you really need it, you'll know and you can get another one. (Thanks, Andrea!)
9. Only one person can do a thing at a time. Both need to brush your teeth before bed? Too bad. Only one of you can reach the sink, so you're on your own. Carrying something and need to get by? Too bad. I'm already standing here trying to find something, you'll have to wait. But hey, while you're there -- give me a hug. (So, this one can be a bonus.)
10. Everything takes twice as long as you think it will. "We'll be leaving the house at 11 and need to go pick up the RV, so we should be there by 1." Did I say 1? Make that 3. Because somehow, whenever the RV is involved, it takes longer to get there, longer to pack up, longer to drive, longer to park, and time slows down times two. I call this the Theory of R[V]elativity.

None of these things are good or bad, or better or worse than before. It's all just part of a new way of life, and one we're excited about.

Here's to a year of learning. I'm sure there will be many, many more lessons to come!