We’re going back in time to share our 2017 car camping adventure through the Southwest! While our trip ended up being shorter than planned, we had some amazing adventures, including several new national parks and getting to be on one of our favorite TV shows! Thanks for reading along! … The Plan had been to leave the Texas coast and head straight for our next stop: Big Bend National Park (cue heart eyes). But you guys should know by now that we rarely stick to the plan — and this time, it was for an unexpected and welcome detour. At the time my brother, who lives in San Antonio ..read more

We’re going back in time to share our 2017 car camping adventure through the Southwest! While our trip ended up being shorter than planned, we had some amazing adventures, including several new national parks and getting to be on one of our favorite TV shows! Thanks for reading along! … A much-awaited highlight of this trip was beach camping on the Texas coast — although our travels ended up not quite going as planned! Our trip from Louisiana took us through Houston in a crazy rainstorm … … but as we turned south, the weather slowly turned to reveal some gorgeous clouds and Tex ..read more

We’re going back in time to share our 2017 car camping adventure through the Southwest! While our trip ended up being shorter than planned, we had some amazing adventures, including several new national parks and getting to be on one of our favorite TV shows! Thanks for reading along! … Building The Hitchenette and outfitting Franklin the Tahoe with a new camping rig took several weeks longer than planned. So instead of hitting the road shortly after New Year’s, it was January 19 before we had Franklin packed and pointed south. No two people have ever felt so ready to hit the road ..read more

So with the new camping platform put together,  and all our updated storage worked out to keep us organized as we go full-time in the truck this year, we were eager to hit the road. But despite all the improvements, we weren’t quite done. One of the reasons we were so eager to build a new platform and get more organized was that we got tired of constantly moving our cooler and bins of food gear in and out of the truck — then stashing it in the front seat every night to keep it away from animals. Laziness is the mother of invention! Having spent almost six months mulling it ..read more

In my last post, I showed you guys the new camping/storage platform that I build for our travels this year. As we were driving around last year, we realized we still had a lot of loose items rolling around that drove us nuts, and a lot of unnecessary clutter we didn’t want to spend another year dealing with.  So today, I’m going to show you a few of the things I built, bought, or was given (thanks, Moms!) that we are using to stay neat, orderly, functional, and organized. Hopefully, you’ll find a few things you like that will work for you as well! 1) Shelves For both of our previous ..read more

During our time in New Hampshire over Christmas, Rebecca and I went back and forth quite a few times about how we wanted to travel this year. We had originally been planning on taking the camper, but during our Appalachian Adventure we discovered that regular camper towing was just not always super fun, and decided to give extended #vanlife a shot. I began researching a number of different vehicles, everything from Chevy Astros (gotta love that AWD!) to 12 and 15 passenger vans (after truck camping, they seemed so spacious!). We even looked at some really cool little Toyot ..read more

As we’ve alluded to a few times here on the blog and on Instagram, we’ve decided to make some big changes to our travel style for upcoming adventures in 2017. So we wanted to share our thoughts on why we decided to leave our camper behind as we set off to criss-cross the country this year! On our drive north after wrapping up our Appalachian adventure Ryan and I began discussing what our 2017 travels would look like. We’d previously assumed we’d be taking the camper with us around the country, but after six weeks of having it on the road with us, we weren’t as excited about the ..read more

By late this past summer, our trusty and beloved Chevy Tahoe Franklin had carried us safely almost 40,000 miles, through almost 40 states, and was getting close to hitting 200,000 miles. And honestly — he was starting to look like it. The carpets looked terrible; some small tears in the leather seats had turned into not-so-small tears; one of the rain guards was coming loose; the wheel wells had all kind of garbage in them — he was just looking old and run down. I’ve always cared about the vehicles I drive, and although I’ve always bought higher mileage older cars, I’ve also managed to buy on ..read more

A constant surprise in our 18 months of full time camper life is just how cyclical it has been. Instead of endless days on the road, a pattern has emerged: six (or so) weeks of intensive travel, twelve (or so) weeks of localized travel. And while our parked weeks have proven immensely valuable in terms of cost-cutting and business-building, another constant is just how itchy we get to hit the road again after being in one place too long. With that in mind, 2017 is going to be different. We have a full nine months of travel in the forecast, and the big challenge of our year will be le ..read more

2016 flew by and was absolutely packed with adventure. In the past year we’ve seen ourselves grow more comfortable in the full-time travel life, spent a lot of time with family, and traveled to many new cities and states. Despite a few stressful moments, 2016 was a pretty great year! Here’s the 12-month recap of trips we took, people we saw, and adventures we had! January // January found us still in Louisiana with Ryan’s family after enjoying a wonderful holiday season with them. We helped his parents move into their beautiful new home, saw his youngest brother Kennan become ..read more