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:

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

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.