We're doing it again! Our winter RV plans

If you've been following along our full-time RV journey since the beginning, you know that we didn't get off to the best start. Last year, we closed on the sale of our house just before New Year's and had plans to launch out New Year's Day. Instead, we got delayed for a multitude of reasons, but the main ones being that, 1, we weren't prepared, 2, we had equipment issues, and 3, the snow moved in. We found ourselves hunkering down in a half-livable RV for almost 2 months before finally hitting the road in late February, getting out as fast as we could before the next snowstorm came. This would be stressful at any point in full-time life, but being our very first attempt to hit the road, we were overwhelmed. When we made it to Philadelphia at the end of our first day, we were so relieved because it meant we had finally moved out of the snow line and could start gearing up for life on the road. In 2022, we ventured as far south as Everglades City, FL, as far west as Indiana and Michigan, and as far north as Canada. Some of these travel plans were set in stone for a while, and others we developed along the way. A big plan we had for our first year was to return to New England for the winter holidays, but after all the misery we went through, would we risk a winter up north again?

After much discussion, we finally made a concrete decision in April. We would rent a house for the month of December, winterize our rig, and keep it at our home-base on my parents' property. This way we'd have everything we need in case winter weather rolls in, without needing to overwhelm my parents like we did last year. We booked an Airbnb about an hour from my parents' house and were all set to move out of the rig the week after Thanksgiving.

For context, in April we still didn't have a working water pump, we hadn't yet moved out of our rig to stay in an Airbnb, and we weren't exactly confident RVers yet. As the months wore on, we gained more experience and the rig issues got fixed (and additional ones didn't seem as catastrophic). Doubt started creeping in, at least in my mind. We traveled back to New England in July and spent a few weeks staying on my parents' property. Natural disaster aside, we noticed how much easier the arrangement was for everyone, now that Anthony and I were better acquainted with our rig and everything that goes into living in it. There's also the emotional component. Last year I fell into a severe state of anxiety, wondering if I'd ever feel comfortable living in the trailer. Now, Buggy is our home. All our stuff is here, the memories we've made this past year are here, and the love is here. As summer ended and fall rolled in, we stayed at more Airbnbs while our trailer was at the manufacturer, and while they were lovely, they weren't ours. I started having visions of decorating our little home-on-wheels for Christmas and being just steps away from my family and all the festivities that we would enjoy together. I mentioned my doubts to Anthony, and he said that we had until November 1 to cancel our Airbnb reservation and get a refund, but logistically he didn't see us being able to stay in the RV. We wouldn't have full hookups, plus we'd blow through propane because we'd need it for heat, something that was a huge issue last winter.

At the end of September, our cat Lily got really sick. She suffers from chronic bacterial cystitis, a rare bladder condition. Since 2017 when she started showing symptoms, we have taken her to numerous specialty vets, who all tried to narrow down her illness. It took us years to figure out that her flare-ups were actually all bacterial, because only one specific test shows bacterial growth. We still don't know the origin of her illness and probably never will, but the more answers we got, the more we were able to at least get her symptoms under control. We overhauled her diet which helped a great deal, and when she has a flare-up, we now keep antibiotics handy. Before we launched, we stockpiled her meds and got her lots of tests to make sure she was cleared for travel. Our only concern was that we'd be on the road and Lily would become resistant to her antibiotic, but we knew this was unlikely.

Unfortunately, the unlikely happened, and after doing amazing for several months, the infections started coming back. She had a few in the summer, and by September, she wasn't responding to her antibiotic. We'll save the specifics of our panicky run-around trying to get her vet care, but we theorized why she might have started getting infections again after being OK for so long. She's really good at handling stress and typically feeds off adventure, but we had recently stayed in the two Airbnbs while our rig was getting repaired, and we noticed that it was hard to keep her hydrated during these days. When we're in Airbnbs we also keep her diapered 24/7 because we can't risk her leaking on someone else's furniture. Not surprisingly, Lily's illness has left her with bouts of incontinence. We wondered if constant diapering was causing too much bacteria to fester when she was already infected, especially when the meds weren't helping to kill the bacteria. The day we got back from her vet visit in Philadelphia, I broached the December Airbnb subject with Anthony again, this time factoring in Lily's health.

If there's even a chance that Lily's diapering exacerbated her infection, we definitely don't want her diapered 24/7 for an entire month. We also factored in that we don't tend to keep the pets home alone in rental houses for safety reasons, meaning that Lily would need to be traveling in the car a lot - basically every time we went to visit my parents. The logic of the Airbnb was fast going out the window, and we needed to face the fact that, the obstacles of living in the Airbnb now outnumbered the obstacles of staying in the trailer. Anthony was convinced, and that day we alerted my parents of our change of heart.

Staying in the RV for December means we will save a ton of money (even in wintertime, MA Airbnbs are expensive!). We'll be closer to family, friends, Lily's vet, and facilities where I'll be working for holiday events. We won't have to pack all our stuff. We won't have to winterize. And I'll get to celebrate Christmas in the coziness of the tiny home I've grown to love. Now we just needed to put on our thinking caps and figure out the final logistics of voluntarily wintering in our RV.

Climate-wise, December will not be as bitter as February. Coastal MA typically doesn't see snow in December, or at least not so much that it would wreak havoc on our plans. We also don't expect to use up as much propane as last winter because we'll hopefully be back on the road before the biting cold arrives. Just in case, though, we're calling in reinforcements. During our delayed departure last winter, we began getting our propane filled at a local energy supplier downtown, and when they discovered the bind we were in, they lent us an extra propane tank so Anthony didn't need to get constant refills. They provided us such amazing service that we didn't hesitate to reach out to them about our December plans. They were happy to offer us an extra tank or two, and were even happier to hear about our successful year on the road.

Of our hookup trifecta, electric is the least problematic. We can plug into my parents' garage outlet to get 15amp, and we have our generator when we need it. We even recently discovered that our electric heater can be powered on 15amp if we run it on low, so this too will help with our propane consumption. Water isn't a concern because we can run a long hose from my parents' spigot if we need to fill, but we also have a fresh water bladder if for some reason we couldn't run a hose. Sewer was the trickiest of the trifecta. Lots of moochdockers will dump straight into a home's septic system, but none of us were comfortable doing this with my parents' system which is old and not set up the way modern systems are. Plus it's technically illegal in their town. We brainstormed a lot of different ways we could get through the month. We could conserve our tanks and use my parents' bathroom as much as possible, but this does us no good when it's cold out and we need to constantly run 50 yards inside to use the toilet. We also know from previous experience that this gets really old really fast for the entire family. We could hitch up and take the RV to a dump station when we need to, which seemed like a good option. Some dump stations would be closed in the winter, but the town Wastewater Treatment Plant would likely be open. Only problem is that the plant has limited hours, so we'd need to time our dumps for the middle of the day in the middle of the week, when we're working. Not an issue when it takes 20 minutes to dump, but we'd also need to pack up, hitch up, and tow across town. Suddenly 20 minutes turns into at least a couple of hours. But, if that's what we'd need to do, we could manage.

In my dump station research, I had a thought. I wondered if RV-unfriendly Massachusetts would have any tank pump services nearby, that operated in the off-season. It was a shot in the dark for sure, but I dove deep into Google results, fielding results from companies in other states despite specifically searching for "Massachusetts." Eventually I did find one company, located about an hour away in Sandwich, MA. The guy specializes in RV tanks and the website said pump-out services were available. We decided to reach out and were pretty surprised when we got a "yes" response. His service radius was large enough to include us, and he does pump-out services for RVs on residential properties in the wintertime. The downside? It's not cheap. Hitching up and dumping at a station would be free.99, minus the gas we use to get there. This service would be the hefty price of convenience. Initially we thought "thanks but no thanks," but then we thought about it some more. What is the price of being able to stay in one spot without doing an entire breakdown/hitch up/travel process? What's the price of not needing to block off 2-3 hours of work in the middle of the week? What's the price of peace of mind that we can use our tanks and someone would come to us whenever we'd need them emptied? And it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than a month-long Airbnb rental!

We gave Joe the pump dude a test run while we were staying at our home-base in November. We had stayed an unforeseen extra couple of weeks due to Lily's sickness and were running low on tank space. Everything went really smoothly, and we knew we had our answer: throw some money at the problem and stop worrying about it.

That was all we needed to feel totally prepared for a December in the RV in Massachusetts. The advantage to our crazy miserable winter last year is that we learned so much. The full-time RV learning curve is steep enough without adding winter weather to the mix, but we got through it. We have a whole list of hacks and strategies for winter RVing if we need them, but with our foundation set, we're ready to just see how things go. Are we our own worst enemy, repeating history that should be left in yesteryear? Or will we prove that a year of RVing has made us the bosses of wisdom that we feel we've become? Stay tuned and we'll let you know!

(God speed, Anthony and Nicole. God speed).