How We Got Started with RV Life

Both Charlie & I grew up with road tripping families. Road trips birthed an interest in international travel, which is how we met, and which became a crucial component of our dating years, and so when we got married, it was only natural that we rented our first RV for our wedding getaway car and honeymoon! (Details on that in a future blog post.)

We loved it so much we rented again for a winter vacation while I was pregnant with Stewart and when he turned 1, we bit the bullet and bought our first trailer, a 2013 Airstream 27FB Flying Cloud. (More later!) We named her Trailer Swift, or “Swifty” for short.

I loved that trailer and we did a number of really great trips with it, but soon our daughter Mae arrived, and with two above average sized pups, two small children, and two teens (who are with us part time), we quickly outgrew the Airstream. 

In winter of 2019, we started to think about what our summer would look like, and knowing that we wouldn’t be happy towing poor Swifty, we decided to put her up for sale, and simultaneously check out some Class A RVs at local dealerships. We fell in love with a bunkhouse configuration, and found one that checked the boxes. The same week, Swifty got swept up by another family, and we brought our new to us rig, Valhalla (according to Charlie) and Valerie (to me), home in early February 2020. Our first trip was to Portland and Astoria, Oregon on Valentine’s weekend. 

Then, COVID-19 hit, and we hunkered down. But, after 6+ weeks of being at home with no outside interaction save a couple of exceptions (e.g. the grocery store and visiting Charlie’s mom through a window) we couldn’t take it anymore. We drove a couple of hours to find a dry camping site (future post), and found that we could be totally self contained, we could enjoy the outdoors, and not have to interact with anyone. 

Thus began our first summer in Val!