I know a couple who, during their 2-year long full-time stint in their camper, stopped and was very happy to be out of their camper for good. They mentioned how much they missed having more-space, and dealing with harsh cold winters, as well as their struggles they had with some issues with leaks in their camper.

When I asked them how often they moved, they said “Twice a year”.

This kinda shocked me. I can’t imagine living in a camper, and only moving two times a year. The single best thing a camper is its mobility, and these people chose to live in a camper and use its most-valuable feature 4 times during the entire time they lived in it. They opted to live in their camper much like you live in a house – stay in one place, and prepare the camper for all of the seasons that come, instead of planning to hook the camper up, and move to better weather during the cold months. This made me realize – one of the things that I think isn’t given much thought when you first start talking about living full-time in an RV is just how often you should move to a different spot.Z

Your Camper Shrinks When You’re Not Moving

Well, obviously it doesn’t literally shrink, but it sure does feel like it. When you’re traveling, changing pace, and seeing different things frequently, you’re usually too busy to notice that you’re living in tight quarters. In our experience, after a few weeks at a single location, we find that we will spend more, and more time in our camper instead of going out and doing things. We also start to get a little lax on putting things away, and just in-general keeping the camper tight and tidy. Before we know it, there’s toys on the floor, dishes need done, and we’ve had to hear the same “daddy finger” song on YouTube because there’s just nowhere to go to get away from it. This is not the RV life you’re seeing on Instagram.

When we first got started, Kate and I spent a lot of time debating over pace. How frequently should we move the camper? Should it be every day? every week? monthly? quarterly? We’ve found a mix of all of these paces is the key. Plan for spending no more than 2 months in one place, and most of the time plan on spending no-more than 1 week there. This helps keep your camper tidy because you have to strap everything down before you go. It also keeps what’s going on outside interesting enough to keep everyone engaged with the world instead of what’s going on in your camper.

There is No Perfect Pace

The truth is, there is no “perfect pace” for travel. The perfect pace is whatever you need in that moment. We find that mixing it up, using different paces throughout the year, helps keep travel from stagnating. If you do any one pace for too-long, things get monotonous, and even with a litany of novel experiences, it becomes hard to stay engaged with the moment.

After traveling daily for weeks on-end, all I want to-do is park at a campground and stay put for a month, and not think about hooking up the camper for a bit. Fast forward 2 weeks, and Kate and I start talking about the next places we want to go, and before you know it, we start to get antsy. We found that if you lean into that, and plan for pace as much as you plan for location, you’ll find that your RV life experience becomes much more sustainable.

Daily

In our experience, traveling each day was easier than expected, even sustainable for several weeks if you keep your daily mileage really low (think 1-2 hours of driving at most). We hopped from winery, to winery all the way up through the Sierra Nevada’s this summer using this pace. Naturally, your daily routine becomes pretty rigid, but that rigidity provides a certain consistent rhythm that can be kind-of nice. Most days looked a lot like this during this phase:

1. I would Wake up early, and do a couple hours of work
2. While I worked, Kate would make breakfast, and help Ben with home-school.
3. We would load up the trailer, and be on the road just after lunch
4. Devin would sleep in the car, and we would drive to the next stop, listening to an audio-book or casually talking about the new things we’re seeing.
5. Set up the rig (we have gotten very efficient) and I finish my work day
6. Enjoy a wine tasting, take in the sunset, and call it a night.

It’s a nice rhythm, really. The drive feels more like a really pretty daily commute than a long, drawn-out drive. You find that you start to look forward to the drive, simply because it breaks up your day a bit, and at least for me, it forced me to step away from my computer for a few hours.

The thing about a daily rhythm that isn’t so great, however, is there’s really no room for anything else, and things crop up. In the middle of this routine, for example, our heater broke. That put a damper on our daily move, and we had to do some weird juggling to make that work okay. There’s not really a lot of room for “normal life things” with this routine, either. Laundry, and groceries are particularly annoying, because you’re always in a new place, and are pretty much at the mercy of the locale when doing these two tasks. There were a handful of evenings where Kate would immediately leave the camper when we arrived to go do find a laundromat, and we had several days where we had to leave early just to be able to make a stop to get groceries – usually with the camper in-tow.

This is also can be an expensive option, unless you’re doing a lot of boondocking stays like we did. Between unexpectedly high costs for groceries, constant gas refills, and the tendency to, erm, purchase some bottles of wine we otherwise may not have purchased, I found we spent a bit more money doing this than pretty much any other routine. This would be way worse if we tried to do something like this in the eastern US, where there’s fewer boondocking options, and we would inevitably be paying for more stays. We’re heading east in 2022 and I don’t expect we’ll be traveling daily like this at all, unless we’re doing some sort-of cross-country sprint.

Weekly

I think of the weekly pace as the “default”. You spend the week working, make a point to go do something special before you go, and then hit the road over the weekend. The nice thing is, since you’re only driving once a week, you can go longer distances on the weekend without needing to worry about other life responsibilities that have to happen with the daily schedule. It feels a lot more like a routine outside of RV life, where you basically do the best stuff over the weekend.

It’s a nice, slower pace, with plenty of room to do everything else that needs done. When you’re full-time, you’re basically migrating all year – driving north to avoid the heat, and heading south to avoid the cold, but you have several months to do that. Because of that, it makes sense to kind-of meander up and down with the change of seasons, and traveling weekly makes it pretty easy to work with that pace.

From a price, and planning perspective this is generally a lot better than daily. For every week, you have to find 1 place to stay, whereas with daily you have to find 7 – that’s a lot of extra research, and effort that you just don’t have to deal with on slower paces like this. Plus, you can save some money with weekly rates that many campgrounds offer.

You can technically boondock on this routine, too, if you have enough solar and you’re very conservative with your water consumption. With the right setup, you can have some truly amazing experiences that few get to have just by going to places many won’t go. But this really requires a good setup, some experience, and the things needed to actually take advantage of the fact that you’re in the backcountry.

Monthly

The reality is there’s some things that just work better when you’re not moving. Personal projects, RV renovations, truck repairs, doctor appointments, and about a million other things are much easier to accomplish if you know you have a few weeks to schedule out appointments, and get things done.

We have kids, and another problem we’ve had is ensuring that Ben gets enough socialization and time spent with other kids. This happens when we do weekly trips sometimes, but with the “here today, gone tomorrow” nature of faster paces, Ben doesn’t get many chances to develop meaningful relationships with other kids. This is a challenge with any home-schooled family, but it’s especially difficult with a transient life. We’ve found that month-long stays at campgrounds that have other seasonal RV families has been a godsend for this issue.

The holiday season can be rough for a full-timer whose family is from a place that is impractical for a camper to reside during the holidays. It’s one of the few times I get truly homesick, really. To help combat this, we like to park at a familiar campground in Texas, where other full-timers often return each year. After a year of travel, it’s good to see familiar faces. It doesn’t replace that sense of “home” that you get from the holiday season completely, but it sure does come close.

All of these things scream “monthly travel”. A 1-2 month stay at a familiar campground, at the right time of year can give you the time and space needed to recharge your batteries (figuratively and literally) and get ready for the next year of travel. We find that rv resorts are best for this – they’re full of things for the kids to do, tend to attract a lot of other parents who have kids the same age as our children, and there’s plenty of facilities for us to use as well.

Conversely, we had one seriously terrible month-long stay in Northern California this year. This place provided a place for us to park the camper, but that’s just about it. We were bored, the kids were bored, and we were too tired from our long daily-driving stint to get to this campground to do anything fun for most of the month. I’ll never stay at an RV park like that again – these longer stays are 100% worth the extra money to go to a resort.

Quarterly

In pretty much any situation, my advice on quarterly stays is Don’t. Anything more than 2 months is just too much time in once place. But if you insist on staying somewhere this long, it’s best to plan on leaving the camper for a weekend or two. Go to an AirBNB somewhere, and live in a “giant” house for a weekend.

We did a 5-month stint when we first started. At the time, we were really new to pretty much everything about owning a camper, and use a lot of this time to, well, learn how we were going to live in the camper. At the time, we thought it made sense to stay put, build the camper, figure it all out, and have the “perfect” rig ready to go when we leave. Boy were we wrong about that approach! After about 3 months, we were so tired of being there, and basically had the camper as ready as we could before hitting the road. And guess what? 3 weeks after hitting the road, we changed a bunch of things.

Never again. Nope. Unless there’s something catastrophic that’s literally stopping me from going somewhere for several months, I will not do this again.

Conclusion

Living in an RV full-time is not a vacation, and you shouldn’t treat it like that. Spend the time to experiment with different paces, expect to need an occasional month or two stay, and change between daily and weekly schedules as you see fit. Avoid doing stays longer than 2 months, and maximize the benefits of each different pace, and you’ll be able to enjoy living in an RV for years if you choose to stick around.