It’s Not Always Rainbows and Butterflies

A lot of people see #vanlife and #fulltimetravel on Instagram and get envious over these beautiful pics of beautiful people doing beautiful things. Let me tell you something…that stuff is only happening like 5% of the time. Let me give you the scoop on the last 24 hours of my #fulltimetravel.

I’ve been up for 36 hours now, because I got absolutely ZERO sleep last night.
Why you may ask?

From 7 pm to 7 am our little boondocking spot at Indian Bread Rocks was hit with a major wind storm. The wind was 15-20 MPH with gusts from 30-40 mph. We modified Frankenstein the Pop-Up so we can strap him down in the desert so he doesn’t sway as much in the wind. Didn’t seem to do much last night, because I thought for sure a couple times he was gonna lift off and head to the Land of Oz. Therefore I didn’t get a wink of sleep.

Today was moving day so I stumbled out of the bunkend and started packing up. You see that cow in the pic above.  He took a monster dump 6 feet from the truck so we had to move it to pack. The stench was unbelievable.

We have a checklist we go through before leaving each site. Making sure the lights work is one of those items. They weren’t working. Fifteen minutes later and a new ground wire we head out.

So we stop and get our propane tanks filled. Jamey goes to pay and a couple minutes later I see him leave the store, but a few minutes later he still isn’t in the truck. I get out, walk around the camper and find him and the guy who filled up our tanks lying on the ground looking under the camper.

We broke a leaf spring…AGAIN!

The propane guy was super nice though and we drove to his RV (there’s also an RV park there) and he gives us a 2×6 piece of wood. Jamey jacks up Frankenstein and with a piece of wood and some gorilla tape he jerry-rigged a fix to get us back on the road. We stopped multiple times to make sure it was holding up.

So what was suppose to be a quick 2 hour drive from one campsite to another turned into 4 hours. It also snowed on us, twice.

It’s been 4 days since I showered. My hair is greasy and just laughs when I try to spruce it up with some dry shampoo.

We got to our new camp and Dexter (our dog) stared at us for 2 hours and just whined while we set-up. I still have no idea what his problem was.

So there you go one day in the life of a full-time traveler. No Instagram worthy selfies, no grand adventures and no fun to be had at all. Now the last 24 hours is atypical of what we normally have going on. This was one of those really bad days. We have a lot of really good days too.

We have a lot of fun, go see some amazing things and every once in a while I take a pretty good pic I upload to Instagram. We are traveling full-time, but we also have to work, clean, and handle the everyday things that everyone in their bricks and sticks does too.

The only difference is we are usually sitting in the middle of a desert or a lake or a remote forest so our views may be just a tad better than the average joe’s.