How we decided to do this: Rob’s perspective

One afternoon early this summer, I was reading a comment in a Hacker News thread, where someone mentioned they were going to travel around in a van and do their job remotely for a few months. I’d known that we didn’t really need to be home, with my work fully remote and the kids’ school likely going to be remote in the fall, but it’d never really occurred to me that we could be away from home for an extended period. Should we travel around the country, too? In about a minute, my thoughts quickly went from “it’s possible to do this” to “we’d be crazy not to do this.” After all, when else are we going to be totally detached from home? Even if we went during a “normal” summer and I took a sabbatical from work, the kids would still have friends and summer activities that they’d miss. This seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I discussed it with Kelly, who is always up for an adventure, so I wasn’t surprised she didn’t shoot down the idea right away. She isn’t the best with big changes, though, so it needed time to sink in. In the meantime, I started talking about what I thought a trip could look like (hypothetically, of course).

How to travel

At first I thought we could fly our RV-10 airplane around the country, being able to cover ground relatively quickly without having to expose ourselves to a bunch of people on commercial flights. The downside, though, was that we’d have to stay in hotels, AirBNBs, etc. Having just spent a week at a hotel in Denver for my sister’s wedding and seeing all the mask noncompliance and other risky COVID-related behavior, we weren’t excited about that. Plus, it could be really expensive, we’d be at the mercy of weather at times (especially bad in the fall), we’d have to do rental cars, and only I could do the “airplane driving”.

I then started thinking traveling in an RV (the other kind of RV) would make sense. I didn’t grow up camping or staying in RVs; in fact, I’d only been in an RV a couple times. It always seemed interesting, though, and we could drive around the country and have a built-in place to stay! Of course, travel would be slow, and we’d have to figure out the whole RV thing, but it was an option.

My last idea is that we could just drive around in our car. It has the same tradeoffs as the airplane option, but we wouldn’t be at the mercy of the weather, and Kelly could do much of the driving while I was working. As a bonus, we could get a Tesla Model Y and do the trip in that! Have I mentioned I really want a Tesla?

Narrowing down our options

Kelly, who was increasingly warming up to the idea in general, suggested we make a chart of all the pros and cons for each option.

Looking at it all together, it became pretty clear that the RV would be the best option. The biggest downside, which I hadn’t really considered, is that the RV is a commitment. We’d have to either buy one or do a longer-term rental, so if we tried a trip and decided after a few days/weeks that we wanted to go home, we’d be stuck (or at least out some money).

Making a decision

We didn’t make a decision. Well, not a hard decision anyway, but we did agree to at least start looking at some RVs. More on the RV search in an upcoming post.