Molly & Ben

Hello and thanks for stopping by our blog! Those Christmas cards are WAY to small to put any updates.

Before we get into the highs & lows of this last year, we want to thank you for being apart of our lives. We would love to hear an update from you as a comment below!

Life is crazy and we want to keep in touch in some way and figured a Christmas card is a good/adult way of doing so. Let’s get started!

Molly Highlights For 2019

Molly had an amazing year traveling the country with Ben in an RV. She really loved planning the routes and activities around the country, as well as the”driving days” because of the long talks and great views.

She saw many places between Florida, all the way up to Oregon, and down the California coast, all within a year.

One of her favorite stops was in New Orleans where were she attended Mardi Gras and had a ridiculously good time. However, the biggest highlight of the year was June 4th, 2019 when Molly found out she was pregnant with her first baby. She is looking forward to being a mom this next year to a little girl!

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Molly’s Lowlights For 2019

This year had a few lows just like everyone does. However, the ones that stand out the most to Molly would have to be the morning sickness between weeks 8-14. Molly’s mother didn’t remember ever being sick with her 5 kids, so she figured good genes would take over and it wouldn’t be a problem. However, it was much worse than she expected. NOT FUN!

The other low was this last month in November when hiking in Peoria on Thunderbird Mountain. Molly was just walking and somehow twisted her ankle so bad on a ledge, she got a 3rd-degree sprain in her right ankle and really struggled to walk for a few weeks. The swelling and bruising were really bad. Even the underside of her toes was purple! As an update, she is doing fine and the pregnancy/sprained ankle waddle has been reduced to a minimum.

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During the little “fall” she totally smashed her iPhone but thought it was sweet when Ben pushed her around in a wheelchair at the mall that night to get it fixed at the Apple store.

Bens Highlights For 2019

As Molly, mentioned we are really excited to have our first child! So aside from that here are some of the other exciting parts of 2019.

Exploring National Parks
America is huge! We spent 16 months driving around it and still didn’t see everything. Ben loved being able to go to so many types of National Parks. From the awe-inspiring giant Redwoods, to the freaks of nature in Yellowstone, to the amazing hikes and views in Zions & Yosemite.

• Zion National Park
• Yellowstone National Park
• Redwoods National Forest
• Yosemite National Park

Re-connecting With Friends

Another awesome part of driving all over the country is that we were able to connect with friends and family to enjoy their city with them . We didn’t get to see everyone we wanted to, but we love excuses to visit more people

• Magic Castle with Friends
• Grabbing Drinks in San Francisco

Working Remote

A lot of people think that we are on permanent vacation, but we still put in fulltime hours into our jobs. Ben has been running his own consulting company from the RV, and recently has joined a great agency called KlientBoost.

Bens Lowlights For 2019

Forcing Pregnant Wife To Travel in a RV
We really enjoyed the traveling, but it is not always easy or glamours. Molly was a trooper for sticking with RVing through morning sickness and fluctuating weather conditions .

Looking Forward To 2020!

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This next year will be interesting as there are a lot of unknowns!

We will be spending the first few months of 2020 in Salt Lake City waiting for our new family member to arrive. We are both excited to become parents but also nervous about the learning curve that comes along with it. We figure it’s like everything else that’s new. Just take it a day at a time.

We plan to move back to Texas in the Spring but not sure where we will exactly land or live. There is a chance we could buy a house in Austin Texas, (where we met) or we have toyed with the idea of getting an RV park somewhere in east Texas on a lake. Either way, they are both fun options we look forward too.

We are extremely blessed and grateful this time of year as we remember Jesus Christ. We are thankful for so many things, and one of them is knowing you!

Wishing you and yours the best in the next year!

Hi! My husband and I have been traveling in an RV for the last 16 months and wanted to give everyone a summary of our travels. In this article, we will talk about the two different routes we took, what our costs were to live full time in an RV, some interesting facts, and our lessons learned while on the road. 

• Routes
• Finances
• RV Saving Tips
• Interesting Facts
• Lessons Learned

RV Route

We did two huge loops across the USA. Starting in Austin Texas, we went north and followed the east coast down to Florida, and back around to Texas. We left August 10th, 2018 and found our way back to Austin on April 1st, 2019.

East Coast Destinations Include

East Coast Highlights

• Ziplining over a zoo in Richmond VA… Yes, it happened
• Have you ever heard of Dollywood in Knoxville TN? 
• Mardi Gras was even better than we expected in New Orleans LA!

We had so much fun, we decided to keep going and do the west coast! We left Austin on April 23rd, 2019, and finished in Phoenix AZ on October 26th, 2019.

West Coast Destinations Include

West Coast Highlights

• Carlsbad Caverns in NM is out of this world
• Sand Dunes in OR
• Magic Castle in Los Angeles was truly magical

RV Finances Overview

Ben and I really were not sure if we would enjoy living in an RV full time so we decided to buy an old used RV and remodel it rather than buying a newer one.  We went to a bunch of consignment places and were initially looking for a gas RV that was less than 32 feet long. However, we ended up getting a 37 foot Allegro Bay diesel engine from Tiffin. It was a great vehicle and the end result turned out well if you ask us!

RV Purchase & Renovation Costs

• $23,357 purchase price
• $8,021 in additional costs
• $31,378 in total costs to get on the road

Cost of RVing Full Time

We Averaged $1,265/month

We also weren’t sure how the cost of living in an RV would be a month over month so we started tracking from the beginning. The categories we considered our “rent” included; RV parks, Car fuel, RV fuel, and RV/car maintenance. This came out to $20,245 over 16 months which would be $1,265 a month. Not a bad price to see so many cool places!!! Here are a few more facts.

• $9,660 spent on RV parks (Stayed in RV parks full time)
• $5,964 Vehicle maintenance costs
• $3,474 RV diesel fuel
• $962 Car fuel
• $185 Other costs like liquid propane or tolls/parking
• TOTAL: $20,245 (16 Month Expenses)

Monthly Costs Break Down

The annual numbers can be a bit large and intimidating, but if you break it down into monthly costs they look a lot more manageable. Also, we stayed in RV parks full time and moved about every 2 weeks. So if you do any kind of boondocking or long term renting your rates could be a lot cheaper.

• $603 a month for RV parks
• $372 a month in maintenance repairs
• $217 a month in diesel fuel
• $74 a month in car fuel

* These numbers don’t include food, adventures, shopping, and everything else. This is strictly what we considered our rent.

Total RV Costs For 16 Months

• $31,378 for RV purchase & remodel
• $20,245 rent for gas/parks/maintenance
• TOTAL: $51,623

* We plan on selling the RV when we get back to Texas to hopefully recoup what we spent on it. Fingers crossed!

RVing Money Saving Tips

There are ways to save while on the road which we discovered as we traveled. Here are our best tips!

Saving at RV Parks

• Thousand Trails (Free Parks) – This is a membership that allows you to stay up to 2 weeks at a time for free at specific parks. Then you have to spend 1 week out of their system of parks. We scheduled most of our trips around these parks and stayed for free a total of 201 days during our trip. If we would have paid our average park cost, the total cost would be close to $6,000! This totally made the $550 annual fee worth it to us. 
• Passport America (50% Discount Parks) – When we were not staying for free in Thousand Trails we would try to stay in a Passport America park because they are 50% off the price. You have to call each park because they usually only allow a couple of days off or blackout at certain times. When we went through Utah & Idaho during the summer, none of the Passport America parks gave us the discount because it was the busy season. We didn’t track these numbers as well, but our spending on “non thousand trails” parks was around $6000, so my guess is, we probably saved $4-$5K using Passport America. 
• Good Sam (10% Discount Parks) – We didn’t use this one much, but it was always nice to have because almost every park took it.
• State Parks – State parks always seemed to be cheaper than regular parks and they were closer to the attractions we wanted to go to anyway. This saved us a lot of money for Mardi Gras! The state park was only about $20 a night whereas ALL the other parks were $50+ a night upto over a hundred a night.

Saving on Gas

• Gas Credit Card – you get points!
• Good Sam Card Discount – 10% off at Flying J.
• Gas Buddy App – a great way to find cheap gas close by.

Other Money Saving Hacks

• Storage / Maintenance – Pay for the maintenance and get the storage for free 🙂 We did this twice! We stored the RV in Atlanta and got a few things done while we flew to Salt Lake City and Hawaii for Christmas. The second time was in Salt Lake City while we stayed with family and had some maintenance work done at the same time.  
• National Parks Pass – We loved going to the  National Parks. We did 6 National Parks on our West Coast trip. Having the park pass easily paid for itself and made it an easy decision to spend a day going to a National Park.
• Audio Books From Library – Free Audio Book apps so we could listen to lots of books for free! Our favorite app is called Libby. 
• Amazon Prime – Free Shipping Anywhere, this is how we did a lot of shopping.

Interesting Facts:

These are just a few random facts about our trip. Enjoy!

• 65 – The number of times we moved
• 11, 431 – The number of miles we drove together in the RV
• 201 – The number of free rent days we got through Thousand Trails
• $28.79 – The average cost per day of an RV park we paid for
• 442 – Number of days living full-time in an RV

People We Met Along The Way

One of the absolute best things about this trip was meeting up with people that we usually don’t see who live out of state. We made it a goal to take a picture with everyone but sadly, we didn’t quite get everyone! Here are some of the ones we did we see.

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Lessons Learned

Vitamin G is Important  – A huge lesson learned we learned was the advantages of living in nature. The RV parks were usually surrounded by trees, by a lake, or close to a river. It felt so nice to walk out your door and get some “vitamin G” (G stands for green) as we would call it.

Connections & Experiences > Stuff – You really don’t need that much stuff… seriously. When we got married, we didn’t have that much stuff so we sold a bunch, combined what we had, and put a few things in storage. As we traveled, we went and dropped off more stuff at goodwill because we realized, if we didn’t touch it in a few months, we really didn’t need to keep holding on to it.

LifeStyle- We have been extremely blessed that we can work remotely. We realized that the corporate life wasn’t for us and we really wanted to create our days that didn’t involve looking forward to the weekend. We spent all day, every day, together and found a good balance between work, play, and travel. It wasn’t easy to find the balance at first, but once we did, life got a lot easier. It also helped that our commute was about 10 feet 😀

Physical Breaks – Because the morning commute is only about 10 feet in our 37 foot RV, we made it a habit to go on a few walks a day. We would take a football or frisbee with us to work on our hand-eye coordination. It really helped us not to feel stuck inside all the time and a good chance to stretch our legs.

Why Stop?

Great question! There are people that do this for years but that’s just not for us. We are expecting our first child in Feb 2020 and looking forward to settling down as a family. We will continue to travel and have adventures but they will look different with little ones.

What Ben Will Miss About the RV

• Waking up in new and beautiful places
• Finding stickers to put on our sticker wall
• Seeing people across the country
• All the natural light
• Minimal lifestyle
• Using the RV as a great conversation piece and ice breaker

What Molly Will Miss About the RV

• Planning out the routes and locations to explore
• Having the flexibility of traveling
• Driving through beautiful places with the huge windshield
• Hunting for stickers and patches as our souvenirs
• Spending so much time with Ben and working together

What We Will NOT Miss About Living in an RV

• Living in such a small space
• The stress of breakdowns and surprise maintenance costs
• Internet uncertainty
• Weather and how noisy rain can be while trying to sleep
• Not knowing if the next park was a good one or not until we got there
• Shopping at Walmart all the time
• Cooking in such a small kitchen
• Driving on rough roads (we felt everything in that old RV)
• Paying for laundry
• Having low water pressure

We created a video of our most frequently asked questions if you are interested in the RV lifestyle. If there are any that we didn’t cover, please reach out to us! We love talking about it!

Updates from AZ, and storing the RV.

If you have been following along with our travels, you know we have been staying at Bens folk’s house near Phoenix Arizona. I am currently 26 weeks pregnant, and we have been getting the RV ready for storage while we are in Utah for the next few months.

As an update, it really has been nice to stay at a house. The Beck’s have a lot of room so we can bring stuff in to organize and sort so we know what to leave, and what to bring up to Utah. It’s been awesome having such a large fridge and counter space to cook! It’s also been nice to have so many stores close by like Target, or for food like Rudy’s. We missed BBQ real bad!

We super lucked out and made a connection that will let us park our RV on their gated property. There really are some super nice and generous people here in AZ!

As we researched how to store the RV, we decided it would be best to take it to an actual RV park overnight so we could use the 50 amp electricity, as well as their water and not worry about flipping any breakers or using someone else’s water supply. You would think we would be over RV parks by now! However, it just made sense.

So on Friday, we drove the RV to a run-down park and started working!

We first went through all the drawers and “dejunked” whatever we didn’t want to bring back to Texas with us, then vacuumed and wiped everything down. After a deep clean with the kitchen and bathroom, we sterilized anything fabric, then swept and mopped the floors. It was a disaster zone for a while but we made it work.

If you look close, you can see our list of “to-dos” on the mirror.

We came back on Saturday morning to complete some finishing touches and clean the tanks for storage. This place has never felt so clean!

It was actually fun to be back in the RV with Benjamin and work the day away. We made some good memories with this beast and will miss it. It took care of us for 16 months and was our first home.

After everything was checked off our list, we pulled in the slide-out and headed back to store for the Arizona winter.

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This was a major project to tackle before heading up to Utah and I am glad we got it done. See you in April Allegro Bae!

If you are interested in a final summary of our adventures, click here!

This really wasn’t what we were expecting…

So most of our Thousand Trails membership RV parks are within 30-40 minutes from the main city which is fine for us. This park was about 40 minutes from San Diego, but 20 miles away from any civilization or a simple grocery store. When we got there, the staff wasn’t very helpful, they didn’t have full hookups, and (the nail in the coffin) a terrible internet connection.

As we work from our RV, this is a deal-breaker. We even bought the premium internet package they promoted at the park but it still didn’t work. We asked the staff if something was wrong as they said it was because of the wind… but there wasn’t any wind when we went outside. Ugh… It wouldn’t be bad if there was a lodge that we could use the internet from but alas… nothing.

Ben and I did some brainstorming and decided we really wanted to visit the San Diego Zoo, then we’re ok with calling it a day with our RV adventures. I am almost 6 months pregnant and he was stressed out about work. We were also really ready to stay in one place for a while. SO! We made arrangements with Ben’s parents in AZ who were more than happy to have us come 2 weeks earlier than expected!

Let’s Go To The Zoo!

The next morning we woke up nice and early and headed to the zoo. We planned to be there in the morning, then work a bit during the hottest hours of the day and head back for the Hall-Glow-Ween events they had at night. This is a world-famous zoo and we knew we didn’t want to miss it!

Going in the morning was a great idea. It wasn’t very crowded for a Friday and the animals were still active as it wasn’t the hottest part of the day.

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Some of our favorites to see were the hippos, giraffes, rhinos, polar bears, and tiger! Not sure if you can see in the first photo but this kangaroo was totally posing for the picture. The zoo was laid out really nicely and had events and shows throughout the day.

For a mid-day break, we stopped at a nearby park called Old Town San Diego where we took a nap under a tree, walked around the shops, and worked for a few hours. It was decorated as “Dia-De-Los-Muertos” which was also super fun. It inspired us to watch “Coco” that night and I totally cried. #pregnancy

Heading back in the early evening was also a great idea. Things had cooled down and the sun was setting. Usually, the zoo closes at 5 pm but was open until 9 pm with activities like dance parties (directed toward kids) bands, and even an acrobatic show!

During the sunset, Ben and I took the Skytram back to the entrance and enjoyed seeing the city from so high up, as well as the zoo animals below. It seemed like a great way to end the day, as well as our RV adventures. As much as I have loved seeing all these different places all around the USA, the best part of this trip has been spending so much time with this guy. He is truly the love of my life. I am so grateful to be his wife and to be taking this next step together into parenthood.

Let’s Go!

Ok… We can do this!

The drive from San Diego to Pheonix AZ is about 350 miles and about 5 1/2 hours away (as GPS says but it takes longer in the RV). We usually don’t drive over 250 miles in a day so we knew we needed to pace things out, and that it would be a long day.

We got everything ready to go and were on the road at 7:30 am! If you couldn’t tell…we were super ready to get out of there. The trip was bittersweet, as we drove we talked about all the places we visited and how different the east coast was from the west coast, and what places stood out to us the most. We also knew it was time to close this chapter of our life.

Switching off about every hour helped, as well as our audiobooks. One thing I will miss about the RV is our long talks with the beautiful scenery. I came to love the moving days. As stressful as they were, it was also exciting to be in a new place together.

We found ourselves in Pheonix around 2:30 pm in the afternoon and parked right outside Ben’s parent’s house for the night before putting it in storage the next day. It feels SO GOOD to be with family again.

I called my dad to let him know we made it safely, and he said: “I am glad you are in a safe port for a while.” Which is so true! Being in a home again really feels nice.

Thanks for coming along our adventures and reading our blog. Not sure what the future of this blog will bring but we appreciate you tuning into our lives.

Until next time my friends…

Oh! and happy Halloween!

We spoiled ourselves…

After our “lovely” (eye roll) RV park that we stayed at in Acton CA, we decided to stay at a super nice park in the city. We originally booked a place an hour away from Anaheim but we spoiled ourselves and stayed at a place called Orangeland RV park only 3 miles away from Disneyland.

It was awesome and was actually the most expensive place we have stayed (per night) in the 14 months we have been on the road. It had all types of citrus trees around the park which I haven’t really been exposed to in my life. Ben grew up with a grapefruit tree in his backyard but I grew up in Salt Lake with more apple and peach trees. So! It was fun to see these things grow on trees.

The office even had orange pickers for us to use! The oranges were super sweet but hard to peel. A fun experience for me!

A highlight of Anaheim was being able to visit Bens partner company Klient Boost. I went there a few days as well just to work and get out of the RV. Everyone there was incredibly friendly and so welcoming. We also went to dinner with the owner Johnathan and his lovely wife Hailey. Great people that we hope to see sooner than later!

Disneyland!

We couldn’t miss a chance to go to Disneyland while in Anaheim!

Being 5 1/2 months pregnant, we did our best to really pace ourselves throughout the park. I waited for rides I couldn’t go on while Ben took the single passenger line (so smart) and he patiently went on rides that were “pregnancy approved” that were not as exciting. We walked slow, drank lots of water, and rested frequently.

Some of my favorite rides in the park were ones that I could go on like the Haunted Mansion. It was holiday-themed for the Nightmare before Christmas so that was fun. Why is Halloween so fun?

Ben went on rides like Indiana Jones, Starwars Millenial Falcon, Thunder Mountain, and Space Mountain. It was a bummer that I could go but since we did Disneyworld earlier this year it was fine. I enjoyed being able to sit down for a while without making him feel like I was slowing him down. We really wanted to stay to the end for the projection display on the castle but it was 7 pm and my back was killing me. We decided to call it a night and was asleep before 9. #oldpeople

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Overall, I love Disney and am always surprised by how much it’s integrated into my life. I am also grateful I could go with just my husband for now. In a few months, we will have a little one and everything will have changed.

Next and Final Stop, San Diego!

P.S. It wasn’t what we expected…