3 years of RV living: How it started vs. how it's going
Have you heard of the Power of 3? It's the idea that whatever energetic force is being put towards you at a given time, that force will return to you 3 times. It's the belief that bad luck comes in a string of 3 events in a row, as does good luck. The number 3, in general, has a lot of power. Story writers will often create 3 characters, 3 major plot points, and lists of 3 because it's been known to better captivate the reader. We see trinities depicted in Christianity. We use "3" as balance in abstract concepts, such as when we talk about "mind, body and spirit" making up our living being. The idea that major events will happen in 3s, however, has no evidential basis; it's likely superstition based on our brains' attraction to groupings of 3. Many psychologists believe that, when we're experiencing negative life events, it cushions the blow for us to think that the pattern is finite. Once 3 events happen, we're off the hook. This is quite simplified, when we think about it. "Good" and "bad" events happen all the time, and our perception of them has a lot to do with how major they become in our lives. Many major life events are also far more nuanced than the good-versus-bad dichotomy. It almost seems like a cop-out to go through life thinking that it's happening to us, instead of seeing ourselves as actively moving through with some accountability.
However, my cynicism on the subject didn't stop me from exclaiming to my mom one night, "Isn't it weird how we're experiencing another limbo period, exactly 3 years from the first one?!" The limbo period I was referring to, was that we were supposed to launch on the road around New Year's, but we got delayed due to grief, overwhelm, and repairs.
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Nicole Anderson
The parallels were easy to spot.
Grief:
In 2021, we severely underestimated the emotional toll that selling our house would take on us, and this was compounded by the fact that we ran out of time and needed to rush to clear all our belongings out in the week between Christmas and New Year's.
In 2024, we unexpectedly lost our kitty Lily to renal failure, two weeks before Christmas.
Overwhelm:
Emotional stress sets you back. Life takes a backseat because each day, you just do your best to heal. In 2021, we were emotionally exhausted from hastily clearing out our house and rushing to our closing, and we found ourselves living in a 28ft trailer filled with boxes, with even more boxes spilling into my parents' garage, because we hadn't yet finished downsizing.
In 2024, we spent 3 straight days doing nothing but taking care of Lily and spending as much time with her as we possibly could. After she died, we spent weeks trying to heal and recover. Work and chores were placed on the back burner, and we prepared for the holidays in a daze. When we finally got through the holidays, we were met with a huge pile of responsibilities to catch up on.
Repairs:
In 2021, we started down on the count. Delivery of our trailer to the dealer got delayed, and so our only shakedown trip was our maiden voyage, when we didn't know what we were doing and hadn't even outfitted the rig yet. We did the outfitting over the course of two months, from October to December, but even with that progress, we were in no shape to hit the road by New Year's. We needed to put all our stuff away, at least to the point where it wouldn't shift and break during travel. We also battled winter weather and decided to winterize the rig. This meant we didn't know until we de-winterized that our water pump wasn't working. Around the same time, we made a newbie RVer mistake, where we raised our tongue jack forgetting to retract our stabilizer jacks first. If we weren't new to the RV life, we could have still traveled without these pieces of equipment – and since then, we have – but every broken item broke our confidence that much more.
In 2024, as we navigated our emotional turmoil, the trailer was going through turmoil of its own. A cold front moved in that froze our plumbing and left us with a broken water pump and water heater. As soon as we got that taken care of, the domino effect began. Suddenly, if we weren't dealing with no water, we were dealing with no heat. Most of the time, we were dealing with not having either. The repairs after losing these essentials always took priority, which meant the other repairs we wanted to do before hitting the road kept getting pushed back. They were, however, just as necessary, because one was a repair to our hitch and the other was replacing our tongue jack, both extremely overdue after using them for thousands of miles past their optimum functionality.
In 2021, we had no choice but to delay our launch into full-time travel. In 2024, we made that choice again. And so both years, we sat in our limbo period, where we tried to be in the rig as much as possible, but also utilized the convenience of my parents' house. After all, both years we ended up not having running water in our rig, for different reasons. During those weeks, we would often think about where we'd be if we had stuck with our original plans. Both years, we would have hit a snowstorm down in DC. Both years, we watched winter weather wreak havoc on other parts of the country, and even though MA was no picnic, we at least felt relatively safe staying stationary. We stayed hopeful that at some point, the weather would clear and we could clear our schedules alongside it, so we could finally break free from limbo.
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It's easy to feel like we're repeating history when so many familiar experiences and feelings have cycled back around to us, but the truth is, we are not at all the same as those newbies who struggled to get on the road for the first time. All this deja vu has brought to light how differently we react to these types of circumstances, how at-home we feel in our rig, and how much our travels have helped us to grow.
I mentioned traveling with a busted water pump and busted stabilizer jacks, which was something we didn't feel prepared to do right out the gate. That's understandable, because we didn't want extra stress of repairs on top of the stress of adjusting to full-time travel life. But since then, we have learned how to live life on the road with lots of busted components on our rig. We actually did deal with water pump issues immediately, and as a result booked campsites with water hookups, which isn't the easiest feat in wintertime, but thankfully we were far enough south at that point that most water hookups were turned back on for the year. That wasn't our only time dealing with water pump issues. The most memorable time was as we struggled to finish boondocking our way through Wyoming in the summer of 2023. Talk about continuing to travel when tons of stuff needed repairs!
As for traveling with busted stabilizer jacks, that definitely happened at one point.
The list of "broken things that we refused to let derail our travels" is so long, it wouldn't even fit in this post, but I'll just mention the recent ones: Our furnace completely dying. Driving on bum axles to the point where our tires started wearing. And that lovely hitch receiver that wobbled its way all the way into 2025. A lot of times when things start breaking, we opt for "staying the course." That means, if we're on the road, we try to stay on the road. If we're at our home-base, we try to stay at our home-base.
We also noticed that, this year, we have a much better handle on our repairs. In our first limbo period, we called a mobile tech to replace our first water pump. By now, we've replaced so many ourselves that we've lost count. This partly has to do with building handy skills over time, but it's also mental. Over the years, we've learned much better how to critically think about issues and troubleshoot them. We've also built a lot of confidence, which gives us the courage to try at least some repairs on our own.
The biggest difference between our first limbo period and this year's is that back then, we were preparing to march into the complete unknown. We had no idea what full-time travel would actually be like. We didn't know what campsites we would like. We barely even knew how to navigate into campsites! We were leaving all our familiar comforts behind and daring to venture into completely new territory. This year, we're delaying getting back to our normal lives. We feel comfortable on the road now, if not invigorated! The thought of not being able to travel makes us feel like we're ending life as we know it. These feelings deepen with the knowledge that our full-time travel life is coming to an end sooner than we anticipated. Don't get us wrong, we're absolutely thrilled for the next chapter, but we hoped and expected an amazing launch to an even more amazing season of travels. After all, this was expected to be our last truly nomadic year, before we gradually shorten our travel time and spend more time back in New England.
So much has happened in the past few months, we'd be lying if we said we weren't feeling resistant to getting back on the road. We may now know who we are as nomads, but we don't know who we are on the road in 2025. We only know nomadic life as a family of 4. We only know travel days with Lily sitting in her car seat right between us. We only know RVing free as birds, but now we own land and have a strong emotional (and financial) attachment to it. We may not be marching into a complete unknown like 3 years ago, but our circumstances have changed greatly since that February day we finally took the biggest leap of our lives. Will we be able to make the leap again this year? A lot still hangs in the air. We will need to endure limbo for a little while longer.