Letting the Road Lead the Way: RV Travel Update

You may have noticed things have been a little quiet around here, but that’s only because the last couple weeks have been spent taking an impromptu trip to Georgia to help my mom get ready to move. We were just about to leave Florida and head West, but it turns out the road had other plans for us. Here’s an update to what’s been going on and where we plan to travel next.

RV Travel Update

Back when we were downsizing for our RV adventure, my mom decided to keep some (errr a lot) of the stuff we no longer needed, which was nice, although I definitely broke the “KonMari” method of not asking family members if they want anything you’re about to donate or trash, haha.

She also offered to hold onto some of the furniture we wanted to keep, like the first dining table we ever built.

We were using the storage room in her garage to hold boxes of other random things like personal papers, vintage finds, and random wall art which saved us having to make a trip to a storage unit before we headed out. However, she recently decided to move into a smaller space and since we were only 5 hours away, we decided it would be best to turn around and do some more purging before we headed West. Especially since we have no idea how long we’ll be gone or when we may be back in town.

Random Fact: Did you know this blog was originally called “Upcycled Treasures”? We re-branded a year or so ago to Mountain Modern Life because we wanted a blog name we could grow into. I made the sign below a couple years ago, which is one of the items we now have in storage. I don’t want to forget where this blog started.

Eric and I never wanted to fully plan our RV adventure, although it was difficult at first because I had kinda forgotten how to be spontaneous. Instead, we wanted to be flexible and let the road lead the way. The trip back to Georgia felt right, although a few months ago I would have been frustrated at the thought of turning around, vs. moving “forward”.

I’ve come to realize that it’s all about floating with the current or going downstream rather than up, and I like to think I’m finally getting the hang of it. I’ve been a control freak for so long that it feels good to surrender and let life lead the way. It’s also a lot easier than I thought.

The truth is, most of the time it’s not that I don’t want to do “x,y,z”, it’s more about me being concerned about what others are going to think about me doing “x,y,z”. It may sound silly to you, but I’m finally learning to accept myself and in doing that I’m learning to let go of the judgment I assume others will place on me.

So we got to Georgia and did some major purging, cleaning, and helped my mom have a garage sale. We even sold the dining table we thought we wanted to hang onto.

While we had no problem letting go of the majority of our furniture before our original departure, we had wanted to keep the table based on the idea of our “someday” kids sitting at the first table we ever built.

We then realized we don’t know how long we’re going to travel, or where we may decide to put down roots and ummm we can just build a new (better) table later on. And just like that we no longer felt the need to hold onto our dining table. It was kind of a relief, to be honest.

Then we rented a 5 x 5 storage space for $30/month so my mom won’t have to worry about moving any of our crap later on. We don’t know when we’ll be back, but 5 x 5 was the smallest storage space we could find and we figured $30 a month was worth it.

While this was going on we booked the Fort Yargo State Park, which turned out to be 30 minutes away from where we used to live. It goes to show you don’t need to travel far to experience the beauty around you.

Side note: If you find yourself heading towards Winder, Georgia and stay at Ft. Yargo State Park, RV site #7 was an awesome spot!

Then a couple of days ago we were talking about the plans for our trip, which had vaguely been to head West and possibly hit up Canada or Alaska in the summer. We knew we now may be heading West on a new path, but then an idea popped into our head… maybe we should spend some time in the North Georgia and North Carolina mountains first?

Letting the Road Lead the Way

In my opinion, Spring is the best time in Georgia and North Carolina because it’s not too humid and the bugs aren’t too crazy yet. Plus there are some great mountain towns nearby that we’ve been wanting to explore further.

North Carolina is pretty much the only place on the East Coast that we’ve considered settling down. It’s basically been either the Pacific Northwest or the mountains of North Carolina. Growing up on the West Coast I’m definitely leaning that direction, but we’re open to a few mountain towns in NC since it would be closer to family. Not to mention it’s where we were married.

We originally planned to explore the West for a year, then maybe come back to NC before finally deciding where we want to settle down. The only reason we didn’t hit up NC when we first headed out in our RV was that it was July and we figured it would be way too humid, buggy, and crowded.

This actually works out a little better in my opinion because now we’ll be visiting NC in the Spring and then have something to compare with our favorite towns out West. Sure it screws up our (semi-vague) plans a bit, but we keep saying we’re letting the road lead the way, so that’s what we’re gonna do.

We don’t know for sure how long we’ll be in North Carolina… maybe a month? Maybe a little longer?

Our original plan was to RV for one year, in search of the perfect mountain town to call home, but as you may have noticed we haven’t even made it to the mountains yet, haha. We had no idea how this journey would unfold, or if we would even like living and traveling in less than 300 square feet.

As it turns out we love the freedom of RVing and realize we have no deadline and instead will continue this journey until we’re ready to stop. Whenever that is…

We plan to park at a mixture of places during this journey of ours and that includes state parks, national parks, RV parks, and boondocking. For those unfamiliar with the term “boondocking”, it’s essentially free camping in the middle of nowhere with no hookups. This is also one of the reasons we recently installed the Ring stick-up security camera.

There’s a ton of info on the best spots to “boondock”, “dry camp”, or “disperse camp” in the SouthWest or West Coast, but not as much info for the East Coast.

Finding boondocking spots in the North Carolina mountains may be a challenge, especially in our 35 foot RV, but we’ll figure it out along the way, and share our favorite resources as we do.

If you have any tips for us or towns you think we should check out, we’d love to hear about them!