We told my mom we were going to buy an RV and move into it in about a year.
It took six months.
Here is how we got from an apartment in Marquette, Michigan to a Ford F-350 pulling a fifth wheel around the United States, including the part where I stood in front of a hitch and could not work out how it attached to a truck.
If you want the earlier chapters, Brazil and COVID and how the two of us met at all, that is How We Met.
We were interviewing cities
Fabiola's green card came through and we moved to Marquette in June 2023. I am from the Upper Peninsula, so this was home for me and a completely new country for her.
After about a year and a half we knew we wanted to be somewhere else. We did not know where, so we started looking.
Chicago was first. We went, we liked visiting, and we came away sure we did not want to live there. The traffic did most of the arguing. We drove around lower Michigan. Minneapolis got further than the others and was a real contender for a while, right up until we remembered that Minneapolis is also extremely cold, and cold was one of the things we were trying to get away from.
Nothing was winning. Every city had a version of the same problem, which is that picking one means giving up all the others.
An RV show, and a hitch I did not understand
My mom took us to an RV show in Marquette.
We walked through everything, and we stopped at a fifth wheel, and I stood there looking at the hitch with no idea how it worked. I have lived my whole life around trucks and trailers. I have driven past ten thousand of these. I could not have told you how one connects.
That bothered me in a productive way.
The idea landed on both of us
I want to be clear that this was mutual, because the easy way to tell it is that I got interested in a machine and talked my wife into living in it. That is not what happened.
We both like to travel. The problem with traveling is that a job hands you a fixed number of days and then wants you back. I already worked remotely, as a programmer, for a company in the US, and I had been doing that from another hemisphere for two and a half years, so I had a fairly settled opinion about where my desk had to be.
If the house comes with you, the days stop being the constraint. You are not taking a trip that ends. You just live somewhere, and then later you live somewhere else.
Once we said that out loud, the city search was over. The question had stopped being which city and become whether it had to be a city.
A week of going all the way down
Neither of us had any idea how to actually do this.
So we spent about a week on it. What is a fifth wheel and how is it different from a travel trailer. How does the hitch work. What truck can pull what, and what do the numbers on the sticker actually mean. What breaks, how often, and what does it cost when it does.
We binged other people's YouTube channels for hours. That is genuinely how we learned most of it. A lot of full-timers had already made the video for every question we had.
The channel came before the RV
Somewhere in that apartment, before we owned a truck or a trailer or anything else, we decided we were going to film it.
So this channel is slightly older than our RV. The first videos are just us in Marquette, doing normal things. Then we took a couple of trips and filmed and edited those, mostly to find out how filming and editing work, which is its own skill and not one either of us had.
That turned out to matter more than we expected. By the time there was an RV to document, we had already made the beginner mistakes on footage nobody was waiting for.
Serenity
We almost ordered a Brinkley Model Z 3100.
Right before we finalized the order, Brinkley released the 3515. The difference that mattered to us is the office in the back. I work for a living from wherever we happen to be parked, and a dedicated space to do that in is not a luxury item when it is where your income comes from. We switched the order.
That rig is Serenity, and she is still our first and only. Everything on this site since then has happened in or around her.
The part I think about
We spent months trying to answer “where should we live” and the answer turned out to be that the question was wrong.
It is not that RV life is better than a city. Plenty of things about it are worse, and we have filmed most of them: the mice, the leaks, the day the macerator died mid-dump. It is that we stopped having to pick one place and give up the rest, and for two people from two different countries who each miss a home whenever they are in the other one, that trade made more sense than it would for most people.
We still have the house in Belo Horizonte. We go back every year. And in between we are somewhere else, which is the whole point.