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Weird things happen at 4 am. Last night I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately and every time I put my phone down for sleep, the anxiety reared its ugly head again. -How many sales are we going to have this week? -Have I paid all of our bills? -Did I forget to answer any customer emails? -Did I eat dinner? Those were the trivial ones (not unimportant but trivial on the scale). Then the big ones hit me. -What value am I adding to our family? -Why can’t I seem to find my joy? -Will I ever find what I’m searching for? Yep, I told you. They were big ones. Ever since I quit my job as Vice President of Finance for a marketing company three years ago, I seem to be caught in this vicious cycle: Get a big idea. Pursue the big idea. Abandon the big idea because I hit a roadblock. Decide I’m going to go back to a traditional job. Look for a traditional job. Hit a dead end because nothing I find is exciting enough and I’m either under-qualified or overqualified. Question my entire self-worth. Retreat to myself and ignore it all. Find new inspiration. Repeat. THIS IS AN EXHAUSTING CYCLE. Well, last night it hit me - at 4 am.  I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. And I need to quit torturing myself. The cycle is simply distracting me from doing everything I’m already doing just a little bit better. Who else can say these things? -I am able to travel and experience the entire country, coast to coast. -I am able to spend countless hours with my family, making memories. -I love what I do for work. -I love sharing my experiences with people. Sounds pretty perfect, right? There’s one small problem - I need to make more money. Yep, I know, pretty significant problem. But there is some good news! We have an incredible, quickly growing business that I can directly impact. We need to increase our profit margins and we’re taking some pretty big steps to make sure that happens by the end of 2022. We’ve also made a ton of progress on growing our social media following for Lackeys Be Trippin’. If we can get our YouTube channels for both Bison and LBT to 1,000 followers, we will automatically start monetizing those channels. If we can get more traffic to our website and more people to engage with our content, we can increase our Amazon Associates revenue. We are so incredibly close to making a living - off simply living! And that, my friends, gives me joy. P.S. I know you didn’t ask but here are a few ways you can help if you feel inclined! (But no pressure!)
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Cliche opening alert: It was a dark and stormy night on the plains of Eastern Kansas. We rolled across the border just before midnight on a 2-lane highway. A 40 mph crosswind was driving rain into the passenger side of the rig and ensuring that I kept both hands on the wheel at all times. Every passing semi swayed our tall, relatively lightweight motorhome like a ship in high seas and left a wake of road spray that my wiper blades could only just clear off in time for me to catch glimpses of the yellow and white stripes on the road. Oh, and it was cold. These conditions represented about “Defcon 2” on my RV driver’s scale, the only thing worse being ice (which is absolutely Defcon 1). I couldn’t see, I was hydroplaning even at greatly reduced speeds, there was no moonlight and no shoulder for us to pull off to wait it out. We just had to push headlong into the monsoon and hope for the distant lights of a roadside gas station or rest area. Then it happened. “KA-CHUNK.” The wiper arms flipped past the windshield and hung off the driver’s side of the coach, moving ever so slightly as the wiper motor attempted to reign them back to their normal position. The windshield immediately became about as opaque as one of those glass-block walls that coke dealers had in their houses in the 80’s. I leaned forward and moved my head all around, trying to find an angle where I could at least find the road stripes. An oncoming semi approached, the glare of his lights reducing visibility even more. “WHOOOSH!” The truck blazed by, the fine mist of his road spray making the windshield somehow even worse. The RV grazed the rumble strip on the thin shoulder of the road. “Mr. President, we’re raising the threat level to Defcon 1.” I slowed from 55 to 45… then to 35… and 25. There was risk at this point of being rear-ended by one of these cattle trucks hurtling unfazed across the prairie at 10 mph above the speed limit, but I certainly chose that as the better option when compared to driving into one of them head-on. I committed my ultimate pet peeve and turned our hazard lights on as I continued to drive. There was still no shoulder on this highway, and any intersecting road was dirt and/or mud with no way of turning the rig around on. We were on a one-way ride to Valhalla whether we wanted to be or not. Eventually we saw the distant glow of street lights at an intersecting overpass and cloverleaf. I limped the rig along until we could pull safely onto the shoulder and brave the cold and driving rain, huddled into the cowl of the motorhome attempting to fix the wiper linkage as semi trucks blasted by within feet of me. Honestly, all I could do was laugh. A maniacal laugh, sure… but I laughed. As bad as that situation was, it didn’t hold a candle to our most recent setback. Whereas I managed to get the wipers fixed(ish) relatively quickly on the side of the road, our next big problem wasn’t so easy to address. Death by Potholes During our recent travels from Oklahoma to Washington state, we found ourselves on some pretty questionable roads but easily the worst was I-70 westbound just past the Kansas/Colorado border. Whereas the Kansas side was glass-smooth and quiet, the Colorado side went absolutely nuts. As soon as we crossed the Colorado border, a rash of mis-leveled pavement and large potholes rattled our cabinets open, woke Tosha and Edith, and as we would come to find out… sheared the passenger side wall right off the rig. Since it was dark when we hit the washboard from hell, I actually had no idea the wall was broken. I could see that the dashboard had come loose and it was bouncing, but I couldn’t see much more. The real surprise came the following morning when I couldn’t open the door to go outside for my morning walkaround. After busting my way out I inspected the latch, trying to figure out if I needed to adjust it or what else might be. Everything looked okay. I then opened the first basement door closest to the front of the rig so I could get my tire gauge out. The door opened a few inches and bound up, stuck on the edge of the panel ahead of it. At this point I knew we were in for a long day. I traced the misaligned body panels to the front fender area where - just as I suspected - the wall had broken free of the floor. The wall was resting on top of the fiberglass fender below it, bulging it outward and cracking the corners. All this pressure was twisting the body of the coach and causing all sorts of issues, but it was fixable. The problem was, I didn’t have all my tools nor did I have any workspace. I was at a loss at that moment, but thanks to a few friends in the Denver area (and the kind folks at Transwest Truck and RV in Frederick, Colorado), we managed to get Rumble fixed up in a couple of days and we were back on the road!  Adapt and Overcome The two stories above are just larger, more interesting examples of the type of struggles we deal with almost every day. The truth is, most RVs aren’t built with full-time living in mind. The materials and methods used in the construction of motorhomes like ours are employed with cost-cutting and weight savings in mind, not luxury and longevity. That being said, if you go into the adventure expecting some hiccups (and with a willingness to learn new things and become a handy person), you’re going to find yourself a lot more prepared and in a better mindset when things do start to fall apart. By the way, things are gonna fall apart. It doesn’t matter if you paid $10,000 or $1,000,000 for your rig. They all have their problems. To me, the hardest thing about full-timing has been keeping up with the unexpected repairs while still maintaining a brisk travel pace. I do think this is something that is pretty unique to our situation. Take the wall thing for example: we were on a sprint to Washington for an event that we absolutely could not miss. For this reason, my stress and anxiety were magnified quite a bit more than it would have been on a normal family road trip. One thing we all have in common is that no one likes setbacks and no one likes spending money on unplanned repairs. Speaking of expense, I’ve found that I’ve become quite handy since going full time! Many people ask if they should buy the extended warranty… maybe that’s a blog for next week. What I can tell you is that we bought the extended warranty mostly out of fear of a large mechanical failure which, thankfully, we have yet to experience [knocks on wood]. We did use the warranty on some smaller house repairs during the off-season, but honestly we found ourselves buying parts and installing them ourselves to save time. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with wait times and down times without our home. We also burned right through the mileage and expired the contract well before the three years’ time. Future blog spoiler alert: My advice to full-timers would be to pass on the warranty. In addition to saving time and money when you do work on the rig yourself, there’s a great deal of satisfaction and security in knowing that you completed the task on your own. The more things I fix on the coach, the more confident I am in diagnosing and fixing it when something does go wrong. Since going full-time I’ve suddenly become at least somewhat adept at plumbing, woodwork, painting, mechanical diagnosis and repair - even my self-proclaimed worst enemy, electrical diagnosis! That’s right, not only can I use a multimeter, I can trace and rewire shorted wires! I even added some outlets and installed LED strips throughout the living space in our rig. Final Thoughts So, while full-timing in a motorhome hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, it has certainly kept us on our toes. Would we do it again and would we buy the same rig? Honestly, I wouldn’t do a single thing differently. We got the best floorplan possible for us and we got a great deal on it at purchase. I think one thing we have learned is that our travel schedule and life structure require a more “substantial” rig, so we are shopping for a semi conversion with a big trailer (thanks to our business, not our family needs). I guess you could say we’re really going all-in. But the ol’ Outlaw has been an excellent partner as we’ve traveled 45 of the 48 continental… and the plan is for Rumble to take us through all 48 before we move on to the next one. The bottom line is, if you’re planning to go full-time and you find a floorplan that suits your family’s needs, go for it! Just be prepared for the unexpected at all times and set aside a few bucks for some impromptu repairs. Hey, I never owned a house that didn’t need attention and a few thousand bucks every now and then!  |