We need to talk about this.

We're going to speak candidly here. Season 5 has been hell on wheels.

We started the year at our home-base in MA, unexpectedly back in our RV after our winter rental fell through. We didn't know how long we'd stay, but we felt stationary time would do us some good. After all, the whole reason for renting in the first place was to slow down after Season 4 almost burned us full out. Little did we know, though, that our stationary time would be during the worst winter MA had seen in over a decade.

We got snowed into our parking spot long before the worst snowstorm hit, but when it did, our trailer got damaged right alongside our morale. Suddenly, hitting the road again seemed more appealing. We waited patiently for the snow to melt, and as soon as it did, launched out of New England.

We can't fully explain what it felt like to be back on the road full-time. All we can do is provide adequate context. At the end of Season 3, we were already hinting at transitioning out of full-time RV life. We had just bought land in NH and were setting up a timeline for building a mountain cabin.

We fully believed that Season 4 would be our finale year. Then we'd build our cabin and figure out our RV/home life balance. We felt a strong need for this type of settling. We always knew that full-timing wasn't endgame. It was a means to an end – a spectacular one for sure, but a way for us to save money for our next chapter. As soon as we started writing that next chapter, our hearts kept getting pulled off the road and into NH. Season 4's burnout was apparent. We were visiting some of the most extraordinary places in all our travels, but we could barely muster the excitement. It didn't help that, in addition to our homesickness, we were grieving the loss of our cat Lily. She was such a presence, and traveling without her felt empty.

We plugged along through the year, making it across the country and venturing around the western states for 4 months. But as summer rolled around and we faced our compass east, home started calling us more loudly. We began making plans then and there to get off the road. We didn't need to wait for our cabin build; we could start now! In that spirit, we signed a lease on a furnished rental for November 2025 to May 2026. This way, we could be out of the RV for winter and end our lease around the time we planned to build the cabin. As we waited for November, we decided to head back to New England and slow travel between our MA and NH home-bases to regroup. Also in the spirit of home, we picked up 2 cats on our way back to New England. Not to fill the Lily void because no one can, but because we were entering stability and wanted to gift that stability to 2 deserving furbabies, too.

After that, something shifted. It felt like cosmic forces came raining down on us, fighting our decisions tooth-and-nail. Just a few weeks after signing the rental lease, Anthony lost his job. One of our new kitties, Mac, had evidently been battling ringworm asymptomatically, but a misdiagnosis from a vet led to a flare-up. Was it dangerous? No. Stressful? Immensely. We ended up shelling out over $1300 on ringworm treatment, right as we were feeling the pressures of our new delicate financial situation. We needed to overhaul our entire rig, taking everything out and sanitizing it all top to bottom multiple times. All 3 pets had to start treatment, both topical and oral. The cats weren't adjusted to their lives with us yet, and suddenly we were "torturing" them with baths and meds, and we took away all their belongings. Safe to say, they freaked out a bit.

Tanner reacted to the stress, too. We noticed an increase in his fatigue and confusion. We soon found out he was suffering from dementia, and the worst thing for dementia is sudden change. First, he was introduced to the cats. Then, he came home to find his grandhumans' house completely renovated. Then we all suffered the sudden loss of Yana, my parents' dog and Tanner's lifelong companion. And finally, the rig overhaul and all our stressed-out energy. He had some scary cognitive episodes, one of which left me crying on the floor and calling the vet, thinking he had suffered something he wouldn't bounce back from.

Even with all this, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel: our season of stability in the rental. We felt so lucky to find a place that allowed 3 pets, because this is almost impossible in the Northeast. Management companies there are bound by insurance policies that limit pets to 2 max. Our only choice was to lease from a private landlord, but thankfully our top choice rental accepted 3 pets. While there, we could line up all the contractors for our cabin build, so we'd be ready to break ground in the spring. I could work from a studio space that didn't force me to constantly pack and unpack my harp and equipment. Anthony could devote more time to his job search without balancing travel and RV repairs.

In retrospect, we probably put too much weight on this rental being a fix for all our troubles, but what happened next wasn't just a let-down. It was signs within signs that we were doing life wrong. We signed the lease before we understood Tanner's needs. He struggled to adjust to a home that wasn't his. We didn't choose the layout. We didn't choose the furniture. We just plopped him down and said "you live here now." It didn't work.

As we've alluded, that wasn't the whole story. Our move stripped away one of the most important things we had on the road: autonomy. We had no environmental flexibility. We didn't feel in control of our own lives. We broke our lease after just 3 weeks and scrambled to find another rental that allowed 3 pets, but nowhere fit. So we decided to move back into the RV, because at least there, we would feel secure and comfortable.

This context is important. It wasn't like Season 5 started and suddenly we were hit with strife. We were already wounded by compounded stress and grief. So we aren't blaming Season 5 or calling it a "bad season." It came during a period when we were forced to be reactive, constantly battling things that were unforeseen or out of our control. But this meant, when we escaped winter and hit the road, all the RV-related problems that arose weren't just nuisances. They sent us into existential crisis.

It's true that there were a lot of problems. Out of our first 11 campgrounds, we faced crises at 6 of them. It was really hard to not go to a dark place and lament that we "weren't even supposed to be on the road." We wrote that sentence in the blog at least a few times.

Beyond the RV problems, we were desperately trying to get back to financial sustainability. Anthony's job search was a rollercoaster. My job was causing whiplash, too. I set my 2026 business goals under the assumption that I'd have a consistent routine and studio space. Reverting back to an RV-friendly structure was a struggle financially and creatively. Then we had our pets – Tanner, who now needed extra care to thrive on the road, and the cats who had barely RVed with us, except for the few months of slow travel after bringing them home to New England.

The biggest blow, though, came when we finally admitted defeat and delayed our cabin build for another year. A spring 2026 build was out of the question. Even if we could get our financial footing to build later in the year, we can't. There's no time to line things up before the ground freezes. Heavy equipment wouldn't even be allowed on our street until the following spring. At this point, our best case scenario would be construction in late spring 2027.

We continued blogging through all of this, sharing the reality but also capturing the good moments – because sometimes the sun beams down, even on the most treacherous seas. The good moments reinstilled hope, but even better were the quiet moments, the ones where we could just be. No RV problems to triage. No hypervigilance. No trauma or drama. These moments were scarce, but they gave us space to soul search. And we dug deep – the work of people searching for some semblance of meaning from these past several months. Finding levels of resilience we were proud to have, but dismayed that we needed it. The days after we fled our excavation site, we found ourselves in a surprisingly tranquil bird paradise, the perfect place for our own internal cultivation.

I spent those days logging all my thoughts and emotions through journaling, reflections, and yes, even talks with my AI assistant on how to use this internal work to inform my business. Here are some excerpts from the day we escaped the excavation site:

It’s so weird to think about days prior to the last 24 hours because the last 24 hours were so insane, but when we were at our campground before yesterday's and things were relatively settled, that became the time for me to emotionally release. I had a couple of days where I was crying multiple times a day. I took Tanner to the dog park one of the days. I sat there, watching him walk around in the grass and then come back over to me. This little moment of joy in his life. I just started crying, watching him.

I think that, at every juncture that I come to, I should just allow myself to choose whatever is going to help me get through all of this. And being okay with the fact that I don't want to push, I don't want to fight. So much of it has been me fighting and resisting. I'm just so tired of resisting. I'm tired of resisting being back in the RV.

Even in the midst of today being so difficult, leaving that campground and Anthony turning to me and saying, 'where should we go?' In that moment, I don't feel any concern. I don't feel any worry. I don't feel any anxiety. I just handle it. Part of that stems from the great autonomy that I feel when it's just us and the open road. But also this confidence in our ability to, in the middle of crisis, come up with this whole plan. I mapped all that while I was running around, while I was going to the office to talk to the staff, while I was going in between the staff and the excavator guy, listening to their choice words for each other. And at the same time dealing with the smell, dealing with the bugs, dealing with my poor cats hiding because they didn't know what was happening. I was somehow logically planning out our next two nights, where we were going, and how we were going to get there. There's so much power in that. Maybe this is the year where I can go, 'Wow, year five. I am a bonafide veteran. I am a nomad.'

You know the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance? An often overlooked but important aspect of this process is that these stages are not linear. People can experience them in any order, in cycles, bounce between them, face some but not others, and even face more than one stage at a time. My excerpts illustrate a moment of acceptance, where I willfully decided to let go of my anger. It felt good. I finally let myself see clearly that the RV was our vessel for a year of rehabilitation. I said in this blog post that it's our refuge. Bet you can't guess when I drafted that post.

But as I said, the 5 stages of grief are hardly linear, and after the bird sanctuary came our next train of RV crises, starting with 2 flat tires and ending with a dead inverter. That inverter ended up leading to a total life inversion.

If you caught the June 2 livestream, you know what's coming. If you didn't, here's your spoiler, if you want it. Otherwise, hang tight, because there's a lot more to unpack.

To be continued.