Too Much of a Good Thing – RVing Burnout

It happened.  I never thought it would.  I burned out on RV’ing.  It was on day 91-ish of our almost 4-month trip.  We were on RV park number 18 where we were staying for close to two months.  It was hot.  I had just made the round-trip walk to the laundry room (also known as the sweatshop for its lack of air conditioning) that was eight campsites away – yes, I counted.  I realized I…was…done!

To be fair, we were moving from Washington State to Florida.  We decided to take an epic RV trip to make our way there.  We had set up to have our movers haul our belongings and our realtor meet them at our storage unit in Florida to watch them off load the truck.  On our trip, we received word that our moving truck had been broken into which caused a fair amount of phone calls and coordinating.  While we were in our longer-term spot, we found out that, as a result of the break-in and our desktop computer getting stolen, we also had bank fraud problems.  So, we were trying to take care of stressful life things from the trailer with two dogs, the laundry room eight sites away in a town we’d probably never choose to live in.  Oh, and we had no internet so we were running everything through one bar of hotspot on our phones.  It was probably the worst possible way to conduct life’s business.

To be even more fair, the RV Park we were staying in was the best part of the town!  It was its own community with lots of great amenities like golf, water aerobics, dog park, etc.  The people were great.  I was taking golf lessons.  My husband was playing and practicing golf a lot.  We made friends in the RV park!  I’d highly recommend the RV park.  It’s a short drive from a lot of cool places.  

Nevertheless, I was done.  It was after one of my 8-site walks to the sweatshop when my husband walked into the trailer to find me laying on the bed sprawled out and not moving.  I was hot, burned out, and soaking up some air conditioning.  He asked if I was OK because it’s rare to find me not moving and awake at the same time.  I told him, “I believe it’s day 91 and I’ve decided my limit is 90 days for a trailer trip.  I’m done.” As it turns out, it was going to be a few more weeks before our house was ready for moving in and I was going to have to suck it up … buttercup… like I used to tell my kids.  

I’ve had some time to think about my RV burnout and here’s what I have come to learn and some things I’m going to put into place for future long trips to prevent it.

• 90 Days is my limit – We will now plan our extended trips within a 90-ish day window.  It was really plenty for both of us.
• I am not full-timer material – My RV dream was once to sell everything except what we really loved, put the stuff we loved in storage, and take off for a year.  I have learned that I probably couldn’t handle that trip.  I need a place to go home to after the trip and an itinerary.  I have newfound respect for people who do this full-time RVing thing – especially the ones who do this with kids.  My kids can tell you, I would have made a horrible homeschool teacher!  My hat’s off to you for your patience and perseverance.  I’d probably be in jail.
• Slow the trip down! – 18 RV Parks?  What were we thinking?!  We regret trying to get from Washington to Florida too quickly.  We thought we needed to be in Florida sooner that we did.  In the future, we’ll have a 3-5 night minimum at any stop depending on what’s there to see and do.  There will obviously be some stops that should be one-nighters on the way to someplace better.  On this trip, we wished we had scheduled more time in most of the places we stayed.  
• As much is possible, stay in vacation mode – We really had no other choice than to deal with our moving break-in and bank fraud.  We were also working on our mortgage process and had to keep dealing with that.   This is too much un-fun stuff to do on an RV trip.  It’s total buzz-kill!   Since we’re never planning to move again, we should be able to avoid the moving fiasco on the next long trip.  Life happens and we’ll have to deal with whatever comes up, but we’ll try to find more vacation-fun type things to do to off-set it.
• Don’t stay in one place too long – We were in one spot for two months.  This was a new experience for us.  While we enjoyed getting to know people and getting involved in the activities at the RV park, we really felt the desire to move on and explore someplace new.  We are figuring our maximum stay at any one place will be a week.  Of course, there will be exceptions depending on where we are, who we’re visiting, and what’s going on in life but, this will be our general rule.

In all reality, our trip was really great!  Apart from the moving stress, I’d do it again while spending less time in the last RV park and more time in many of the others.   We really had a blast and loved getting to see so much of our beautiful country.  We visited several National Parks.  We also visited Las Vegas, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Galveston, New Orleans, and several of the top tourist vacation spots on the gulf side of Florida.   This blog post is not a complaint.  It’s more of a lessons-learned share.

We’ve been in our house for six weeks now.  I love it!  I Iove where we live!  Guess what – I’m ready for another trailer trip!  I’ve been bugging my husband about going on a little three-night trip.  He’s not completely over his burnout just yet.  So, we wait.  We’ll go soon enough, I’m sure!

Photo Note:  The fussy kid in the photo is my daughter (now 25 years old) one night when she was just done!   This is one of four in a photo series.  In the last photo, she’s asleep with her head on the tray of the highchair.  It’s one of my favorites because it tells the story she couldn’t articulate.  She was just done!

Next Trailer Girl Blog – From Freezing to 100 Degrees – Packing for Multiple Climates Without Losing your Sanity or your SpaceT