RVE 006: What It’s Like Living, Working, and Traveling in an RV With Your Spouse

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Welcome to episode six of The RV Entrepreneur Podcast! In this episode of The RV Entrepreneur Alyssa and I sit down to talk about what it’s been like living, working, and traveling in an RV during our first couple years of marriage.

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When looking at Instagram profiles of people who travel a lot it’s easy to be convinced they are living this perfect kind of dream life, constantly going on adventures, doing yoga on random mountain tops (do people really do Yoga on top of mountains?) and posting corny photos of their lattes in the snowy mountains.

But now that we’ve done the whole traveling bit for a couple of years, I have a much more realistic view of what the full-time travel lifestyle is really like (especially when you’re balancing it with a new marriage). Everyday is not a new adventure on a mountain or swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

Most of our mornings in the RV are extremely non glamorous and normal. We wake up, put on a cup of coffee, read a while, journal and then get to work.

Typical morning view of the Padgett’s. I’m working on uploading episode 6 of The RV Entrepreneur podcast and Alyssa is finishing up some work for a client project. Love getting to work side by side with this girl… Well, we work across from each other, but you get the point. #rvlife #rving #winnebagolife

A photo posted by Heath Padgett (@heathpadgett) on Feb 25, 2016 at 6:41am PST

While our “off days” are a bit more exciting, they are very few and far in between. In the past couple years we’ve traveled to multiple national parks, adventured the Pacific Coast Highway, and even slept on a glacier in Alaska.

Randomly came across this photo of me sitting on a bench at Glacier National Park in northern Montana. It was the summer before last. It’s been awhile since we’ve ventured to any national parks and I miss it so much. This summer we’re making it a priority to spend more time in national parks, dry camping, excessively roasting s’mores and going on random hikes. Right now our priority has been just finishing our documentary and work work work… but I’m really longing to get back to the more “nomadic-style” of life that first sucked us into the RV lifestyle. The first park we plan on hitting up this spring is Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas! Can’t wait. I’m going to veg out and do absolutely nothing all week. Except for sit in the hot springs and chase off bears who try to eat my food. Wait a minute… There’s no bears in Arkansas, right?

A photo posted by Heath Padgett (@heathpadgett) on Jan 29, 2016 at 5:53pm PST

But most of our days aren’t the crazy adventure they probably seem like on Instagram (and I apologize if I ever lead you otherwise). Most of our time is spent working during the day on our laptops (like regular people), occasionally questioning the overall direction of our lives (like regular 20 somethings), and binge-watching Marvel and DC shows on Netflix during the evening (like regular nerdy millennials).

And if we’re being really honest here for a moment (and we are), living, working, and traveling full-time in an RV hasn’t always been peachy keen.

In the past two years of living and traveling full-time in an RV, we’ve had to figure out:

• How to get along together in a small space
• How to work together on client projects (essentially: how in the heck do we be creative and honest with each other without being rude?)
• How to not get stressed when our GPS tells us to go a certain way and we end up lost in a city we’ve never been in before
• Is it okay for one of us to be working and the other one to hang out and watch The Office?

While we’re a million miles away from having all of these things figured out, we’ve been forced to grow a lot together since moving into an RV two years ago.

What Does This Have to Do With Starting a Business on the Road?

Back in Austin today and on a shoot with two of my favorite people. @alyssapadge and I have had a blast this fall shooting weddings and other videos along with this guy. Tonight we’re shooting a reenactment of the life of Jesus called Follow the Star. Video work has taken us to so many random places since we picked up a camera last spring, excited to see where it goes. ?

A photo posted by Heath Padgett (@heathpadgett) on Dec 3, 2015 at 6:58pm PST

First of all, Alyssa and I are business partners. We’ve filmed multiple client projects over the past couple years and work on everything as a team. Secondly, if you want to travel with your spouse and work on the road, then some of the problems we talk about on today’s episode will inevitably be issues that rise up.

We just wanted to be transparent and share some of the journey with you guys (the good and the bad).

In today’s episode we talk about:

• Our “30 day” rule towards stuff we don’t use in our RV
• How long it took us before we monetized our film skills
• What a typical work day looks like in the RV
• Whether you should start a business before traveling or build one while you’re already on the road
• How we made it through our first year of full-time travel (even when at one point we had $62 in our bank account)
• The most stressful part of living, working, and traveling in an RV

A few of the links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 2 of The RV Entrepreneur where Adam and I talked about creating financial runway
• Alyssa’s blog: “Who Would Want to Spend Their Honeymoon in an RV (What I Wish I Could Say to People)”
• Alyssa’s blog: “What Fighting in Marriage Looks Like”

You’re Awesome! Thanks for listening

I’m having a blast so far with this podcast and the response so far has been incredible! Last week The RV Entrepreneur hit the “New and Noteworthy” in iTunes and has been hovering in there ever since.

If you’re enjoying the show so far, I would love a review from you in iTunes. To leave a review, just click here and then select “ratings and reviews” at the top of the page to leave a review.

P.S Most importantly, if you want to download the pre-launch check list that we mentioned in this episode, you can do that below!