Day seven of our eight-day Michigan road trip took us down the coast from Petoskey to Traverse City, and somewhere between checking into the Airbnb and picking a dinner spot, the wheels came off. Not on the car. On us. This is the episode where we got properly hangry, and we left the argument in the edit because pretending travel is all sunsets and fudge shops would be lying.
A morning in Petoskey
Petoskey sits on Little Traverse Bay, and the downtown is the kind of place where you park once and walk everything. We poked through the shops in the Gaslight District and hunted for Petoskey stones, the fossilized coral the town is named for. Fabiola is better at spotting them than Nathan wants to admit. It was a quiet, easy morning, which in hindsight was the calm before the blood sugar storm.
Talking about RV life in the car
On the drive south we got into a conversation we'd been circling for months: what would it actually take to live on the road full time? At this point it was still hypothetical. We talked through the honest stuff, working remotely from a rig, what we'd give up, whether we'd drive each other crazy in 400 square feet. If you've seen our newer videos you know how that conversation ended. We now full-time in a Brinkley fifth wheel, and this drive was one of the moments that pushed us there.
Settling into Traverse City
Traverse City is bigger than Petoskey, with a long strip of downtown along Front Street and Grand Traverse Bay right at the end of it. Our Airbnb was comfortable and close to everything, which should have made the evening easy. We walked the downtown, checked out The Filling Station near the old railroad depot, and put The Backlot Beer Garden on the list. So far so good.
The hangry discussion
Here's where it fell apart. It was late, we were both starving, and neither of us would just pick a restaurant. Nathan wanted tacos from Happy Taco Shop. Fabiola wanted to keep options open. The Apple Tree Inn came up. So did three other places. What followed was ten minutes of the most useless conversation two hungry adults can have, each of us saying "I don't care, you choose" while visibly caring a lot. If you travel with a partner you have had this exact fight. Ours just happens to be on camera.
The lesson we keep relearning: decide on food before you're hungry. We now keep snacks in the truck for exactly this reason, and travel days have a designated decider for meals. It sounds silly until you've lost an hour of your evening to a standoff over tacos.
Pizza and solar talk
We ended the night with pizza from Dino's Pizza, and with food in us we turned back into people who like each other. Over the box we got into solar power, how much battery and panel capacity a full-time rig would actually need to work remotely without hookups. Again, hypothetical at the time. Again, not hypothetical anymore. It's funny to watch this episode back and see us sketching out the life we're living now, one slice at a time.
If you want to see Petoskey, Traverse City, and the meltdown in between, watch the full video on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.