We’ve got a secret…
One Saturday morning in late July, we were driving from Orlando to Melbourne to celebrate a couple birthdays in the family. We naturally spoke of nothing else but our RV life plan during both the drive into Melbourne and back home. Really, the excitement and desire to get more and more information on this was overflowing. Once again during another long drive on an interstate, we noticed a large billboard for an RV dealership, Camping World, in Cocoa and decided to make a stop there before heading back to Orlando. After previously perusing their Tampa location, we learned they have quite the stock to explore.
Towards the end of our day with the family, we all found ourselves in the living room, randomly watching a marathon of some tiny house show on HGTV. It was quite an interesting moment for James and I as we were sitting next to each other in an over-sized chair, listening to everyone comment on their ideas, pros and cons of tiny living and here we were holding onto such a huge secret and all we could do was give each other an occasional glance or hand squeeze. Granted, our plan wasn’t to build and live in a tiny house (YET), but it’s pretty much in the same wheelhouse and our family did have some pretty interesting commentary!
For the record, our plan was ALWAYS to keep this whole process of ours a secret and have a surprise reveal once we found our dream RV to show everyone and THAT was of course yet another thing for us to excitedly talk about and plan out – and trust me, we were REALLY excited about surprising our family!! This was something that we were not only excited about achieving for ourselves, but also explaining our plans and goals to our family as we knew we would have loads of love and support, but plenty of wonderful shock at the same time.
Unfortunately, by the time we left, the nearby dealership was closed for the day… and to be honest, we were bummed as we just sat there in the parking lot gazing at the lot full of RV’s blocked with locked gates. Back to Orlando we went, and when we returned home that evening, I said to James excitedly, “Why don’t we get up early tomorrow and just start first thing in the morning and check out some RV dealerships?!” Not really a question because clearly he’s up for it.
As we we both googled away for local RV dealerships near us and saw a list to choose from – which we were pleasantly surprised that Orlando did have a decent variety of options to offer us. James at one point noticed that one place we knew we wanted to check out was actually closed on Sundays. I almost began to get a little disappointed thinking we would have to wait the whole week before we could go to any dealerships until the following Saturday, but then I started looking into all of the ones with Sunday hours and I found three in the area that had operating hours for the next day… this gal was excited! We mapped them out and picked two that were closer to us to check out the next morning and like I’ve said before and I KNOW I will mention a million times hereafter, we were excited, enthusiastic, thrilled, psyched, giddy and well, you get the idea!
As we prepared for the next morning, we researched some more and reviewed our new desires to peruse the Class A and Class C options since ruling out the fifth wheels and travel trailers. Trying to decide the style, layout and length we would like to stay within. Our main thing with the length of our rig is that we wanted to make sure that we kept it under 34 feet to ensure that we can take it into National Parks, as they tend to have length limitations. Plus, we had an idea that we didn’t want to get up into the 40+ foot length rigs simply due to the obvious size and operational aspects of it, I mean we’ve never driven these things before so why roll out of the gate with a giant beast, right? During all of this, we are still discussing what the perfect tow car would be for us as well. James was thinking a Honda CRV, but we are both loving the Jeep as a tow car option – my vote goes for the Jeep! We are also trying to decide if we really need a vehicle that has four doors since it will only be the two of us for most of our travels, unless we have visitors – either way, keeping it to a two door is less weight to tow as well and that’s a huge plus.
One thing we have never stopped learning and acknowledging through this entire process is that there is SO much information to know about these rigs, the logistics and especially the lifestyle. It’s a lot and at times overwhelming, but everything still just makes so much sense for us when it comes to this decision and we have really accomplished some incredible goals in order to achieve this dream of ours and were determined to continue doing more of that!
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