A Few of My Favorite (RV Life) Things

Plenty of people live in an RV for a season and then return home, and some people try it out for a while to see if they like it for several months. I tend to be an all-or-nothing person, and with just a few short trips under our belt after acquiring our fifth wheel in March, we rented out our home in North Carolina and commenced full-time RV life in June.

In addition to a travel log, I had planned for this blog to detail what it’s really like to live in an RV full time as a family of five. Now that we have lived in our RV almost seven months, I finally feel experienced enough to write about RV life.

The potential topics regarding what it’s like to live in an RV are numerous, and I’m too wordy to tackle a top-10 list, much less such a broad topic as “RV life” in a single post. I’ve decided to put together some lists of fives – five things I love, five things I miss, five things I’d recommend first, five things I wouldn’t live without, five places/experiences I want to repeat, etc. I’m kicking it off with five of my favorite things:

Foot flushing just makes life easier.

5. Foot flusher

This might sound crazy, but I actually really like RV toilets, mainly for this reason: Not only can I, but I’m supposed to flush with my foot. I almost always flush public toilets with my foot, but sometimes I nearly pull a muscle to make it happen. We still wash our hands after using the toilet (naturally), but the absence of a hand flusher means less hand exposure to toilet germs. I do prefer larger, sturdier porcelain toilets to the smaller, plastic versions, but foot flushing is a great feature. I’m keeping it as a top-5 favorite no matter how weird you think I am.

A birthday boy's morning

4. Purged life

I’ve been a pack rat pretty much my entire life. Objects often have sentimental value to me, and I find giving or throwing away anything that was given to me as a gift truly agonizing. I kept school photos and notes passed in class as a child, and as an adult that habit morphed into keeping nearly every photograph, letter, card, and trinket with any relational or event-related tie. Purging our home so that we could move into 420 square feet was painful more often than not but also wonderfully liberating. Sifting through boxes and piles of stuff and keeping only the most important items slowly began to feel like throwing heavy burdens off my back. At first I had to lay eyes on every item, but as time grew short and my attachment to things decreased, I told my husband just to toss things without asking me. The truth is, I’ll never know the difference. Now we do have a lower tolerance for clutter. We still manage to accumulate and spread clutter around our small living space, but we can’t shove it into closets or under beds, so we have to deal with it usually within a few days. Wherever clutter might amass is also a surface that we use for eating, sleeping, cooking, or sitting and must be cleared for those activities to take place. We’ve celebrated one birthday and Christmas in our RV, and everyone is beginning to understand that acquiring a new thing is probably going to mean getting rid of an old one – a concept we tried to apply in our house but didn’t succeed in executing. Now we really have no choice. I find myself enjoying (and even needing) clutter-free spaces more than I thought possible. Maybe one of these days I’ll even clean out my e-mail inboxes.

Our home on wheels

3. Living small

Although I liked the ideas of conserving energy and reusing rather than wasting while living in a house, I often require being backed into a corner to form new habits (just like with purging/decluttering). I no longer have the option of taking a shower more than 5 minutes long unless I a) want to do so with ice-cold water (which I don’t), b) don’t mind turning the pressure down to just a trickle so I can stretch my shower to 7.5 minutes, or c) take a shower outside my RV at the campground showers (no thanks). We use much less water and electricity, of course, and I also waste less space and less food because I simply don’t have the luxury of so much extra. I’ve never been much of a shopper anyway, but I certainly think twice about a cute pair of shoes now and don’t even give home décor a second glance. Many arguments could be made against my idea that living in an RV results in a smaller footprint, even by me (we use more fuel; what kind of materials go into making an RV; I rarely recycle anything anymore, etc.) However, I think if I could weigh it out physically, the scales would tip in my favor, especially when we stop and stay in one place for weeks at a time (conserving fuel) and follow mild weather that doesn’t tempt us to use our gas heat or electric air conditioner. What’s funny to me is that a year ago I thought our house was closing in on us at 1,500 square feet for a family of 5. Sometimes seeing the big picture requires choosing a different perspective.

Redwood Forest, CA

2.  Oh, the places we’ve been

You knew this one was coming. It’s why most RVers choose the RV life: freedom of the open road, ability to see new sights, more sunsets and oceans and mountains and historic sites. I hope my children never forget the year that they saw the Washington Monument, coast of Maine, Niagara Falls, St. Louis arch, Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, California coast, Redwood Forest, and Grand Canyon all within 6 months. They finally got to meet their Oregon cousins and reunite with family in Idaho and Texas, too. We’ve had rainy days and boring days and rest days and movie nights, but we can only take in so many beautiful national parks and renowned monuments and amazing museums and new animals and different foods in one week. Some days I wonder which memories will stand out for each one of us since our brains can’t possibly retain all of the details for years to come. If we could put our top memories all together, I would make one phenomenal highlight reel.

Snowball fight atop Sandia Mountain, Albuquerque, NM

1. Family time (and friends, too)

After all, our time together is what’s most valuable. Family time is the reason my husband quit his job, the reason I worked to replace his income so he could, the reason we decided we needed to break away from normal life and cherish these years while our children are young and want to be with us as much as possible. Bert says in Mary Poppins that “childhood slips like sand through a sieve.” I can’t grasp or cling to it, but I can make a concerted effort to relish it. I can choose to live intentionally and try to be fully present. For me, the greatest gift is being able to spend this time together, and that makes all of the sacrifices worthwhile. We miss our friends, some conveniences of our house, and activities in our community, but quality time with our family – our little family unit, my parents in the RV next door, extended family, and friends we don’t normally see but have been able to visit along the way – is the big take-away, the one my husband and I will treasure and the one we hope our children remember when the vivid scenes around us are fading memories and these fleeting days have turned to decades gone by. We are certainly far from perfect, but imperfection lends itself to the best lessons about grace and transformation, lessons that I hope our expansive family time gives us to teach and discuss more openly than ever. However long it lasts, I want to make this RV life count for our kids, both for this life and for eternity as our increased time together allows us to show and tell them even more about why and how we follow Christ. I pray we can serve others around us, give generously as God has given to us, glorify Him with our lives, and strengthen our ties not only to each other but also to Him – especially to Him.