If you know us, you are probably wondering why we suddenly bought an RV.

“I thought you guys wanted to live on a sailboat full time. Did you change your mind?”

Short answer: No!

Long answer: Realistically, we are still several years from living our full-time sailing dream. We are planning to buy a boat and be at least part-time sailors when Josh retires from the military. He’s not quite there yet, so we aren’t ready to set off over the horizon.

I (Rachel) finished my sailing classes in 2019. We planned a week-long charter in the Florida Keys with our friends who also sail to test our chops, and to move the dream forward. We had lots of sailing planned for 2020, and then of course, Covid-19 put a stop to it all. Now it’s been over a year since I was last at the helm. When it’s safe to be in close quarters with people again, we’ll be back out there refreshing our skills and that Florida Keys trip is happening!

In the meantime, we spent most of summer 2020 out on power boats in the Potomac River, near our Washington, DC home. We belong to a boat club here that is just steps from our door (literally, we don’t even have to drive to the marina), so we masked up and checked out a boat anytime we had 2 daylight hours free. I also spent a lot of quarantine time watching YouTube channels. One of my favorite genres is tiny houses and YouTube started recommending a lot of RV channels to me, so I bit. I had watched some of the Wynns’ older RV videos a while back, but I had no idea how many other channels were out there!

We also knew back in the summer that our time here in DC was drawing to a close. Our next assignment was right around the corner, and the idea of tiny living and full-time RVing was growing on both of us. We started watching YouTube tours of RVs and tossing around the idea of buying one for ourselves. When we drove down to Ashland, VA to General RV, we were specifically interested in a Winnebago Adventurer 33C they had on the lot, but were open to other models if they had anything to show us. We thought we’d probably find a floorpan we liked and custom order one since we had several months until we needed it and we wanted to get something custom if we were spending that much money.

We drove down and looked at the Winnebago and it turns out, they only had 2 other class A models on the lot in our price range. They had no used models and the salesman explained their inventory had just been wiped clean over the summer with all the new first-time RVers and the delay in manufacturing due to Covid. We went home that evening still planning to custom order one, but by Monday we had decided to go for it.

We had full-timing in mind, but we figured we still had 3-4 months left in 2020 to get out and go camping on the weekends that we would miss if we were waiting on a custom unit. After 5 months of barely leaving our apartment (with no private outdoor space), we were itching to get outside safely. We also had the pets to think of, and having our own traveling hotel room is much better for them than paying outrageous nightly pet fees or having a pet sitter stay in our home (during a pandemic). We never seriously considered a towable RV because our only vehicle is a Tesla Model 3 and we have no desire or plans to have a big truck. I love the space and layout options of towables, but it just wasn’t a viable option for us.

Our new plan was to pick up the RV after a last minute vacation we had planned to visit Charleston, SC. Then Josh’s work schedule changed and that plan was no longer going to work out, so we ended up having to pick it up that same Friday, one day before we left for Charleston. We literally went back down to Ashland, signed the papers, drove it half way back to DC to park it in a secure storage lot, and left it there so we could get home and pack for vacation. Trying to arrange insurance and storage in just a few days was pretty interesting!

Luckily Josh has experience driving all sorts of large vehicles at work, so he drove our brand new 34′ motorhome off the lot like a boss, went straight to the Interstate, and when we got to storage he parked it like he’d been doing it for 10 years.

In our next video, we’ll share our first camping trip. Make sure you subscribe so you know when we post a new video. I’m sure you won’t want to miss laughing along with us as we figure out what the heck we’re doing!