Like There's No Tomorrow: The Full-Time RV Freedom Podcast
Your all-access guide to creating an extraordinary full-time RV lifestyle with practical advice from the road. Join Barry and Darlene Nicholson as they share hard-won insights on transitioning to RV living, avoiding costly mistakes, and maximizing adventures across America's most breathtaking destinations.
Like There's No Tomorrow: The Full-Time RV Freedom Podcast
Answering Your Most Burning RV Life Questions: From Internet to Storage Solutions
In this straight-talking episode, we address the questions you've been asking us across social media about both full-time and part-time RV living. Broadcasting from Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, we dive into everything from managing the transition anxiety (it was an 11 on a scale of 1-10!), handling packages while boondocking, and whether starlink is truly essential for working remotely (spoiler: yes). We share our honest take on relationship dynamics in tight quarters, the tools every RVer should carry, our mail forwarding setup with Escapees, and why we believe a storage unit is usually a waste of money. Plus, we give a sneak peek at our upcoming comprehensive Going Full-Time RV course that will provide the step-by-step guidance we wish we'd had when starting out. Whether you're contemplating the RV lifestyle or already on the road, these practical insights will help you navigate the challenges and maximize the adventure.
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Hosted by Barry & Darlene Nicholson
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Welcome to like There's No Tomorrow, your Guide to Full-Time RV Freedom. I'm Barry Nicholson and with my wife Darlene. We're bringing you real conversations about life on the road. Whether you're dreaming of RB living, we're already exploring alongside us. Join our community as we travel this beautiful country, like there's no tomorrow.
Speaker 8:Hey everybody. Welcome to this video. We're gonna answer questions about RV life and what we think about it.
Speaker 9:Okay, so the first question is how nervous were you to leave the sticks and bricks for full-time RV living?
Speaker 8:On a scale of one to 10, it was an 11.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You're doing something huge, especially if you are doing it like we did where we basically sold everything leased at our house. We did keep it for one year'cause we wanted to make sure we did like RV life. That's a process. It's a huge step to getting rid of everything. Now we are not. Super attached to places and things. We've never been that way. We've moved around a lot in our marriage. That really wasn't, it was just the whole moving into doing RV life.'cause we had never rvd, we'd never owned an rv. This was our first one. We had to learn everything from nothing.
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So there was a learning curve there. But that first six months is a huge adjustment period.
Speaker 8:Yeah, I think the, the anticipation of doing it, it's something new and exciting even though it's a heck of a lot of work. That was one thing, but then I think the much tougher period is the fir is the first six months when you first start out. And we've made videos about this and encourage you to, I'm sure Darlene will put a link where you can get to these. And I highly encourage you to watch'em because there's some emotional aspects, mental aspects, relationship aspects, things that, that a lot of people don't talk about. No. That are very real in, in that six month period. And it is, it's a tough transition period. Yeah. That's, if you can get through that you'll do just fine.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. So just know that Yes, it's a whole process is, I think it's super exciting when you're getting going. And then the reality for like our story is we took about a month and a half. We took our daughter, our last kid at home to college and dropped her off. And when we left that drop off moment, we realized. Not only are we empty nesters, we're full-time nomads. Holy crap. It was just like we were just like, here we go. And you just have to embrace that first six months. It's so fun. You're doing all these cool things, but it's also a little stressful. It's stressful, yeah. You're learning, you're getting used to the life the travel, the where you're going, all that stuff. Yeah, it was a little stressful, but you know what? The rewards are really great, so there you go. Okay. I thought this was a good question. Do you Mary asked, do you ever have to leave or fly away and leave your rig? Do you try, you like, actually she asks do we carry suitcases with us and things like that? Yeah, we do
Speaker 8:do have suitcases. We have a big rig. We have a 44 foot toy hauler. And we do have some storage cubby holes and stuff for things like that, that, that work out great. So we have regular luggage, couple of carryon. Yeah. One of the things, and I. I wondered about this, and this has been an issue and maybe a issue of some debate we have in the cases where we've left for like a week or so, maybe around the holidays. We just book regular RV parks. We just leave. Now. We don't know if you're supposed to do that, but nobody's ever said anything. It really depends on
Speaker 9:their RV park to be honest. But I've seen people, like when we were in Florida in the winter one time, there were people that were doing that and they had friends in the park to check on the rigs. Leaving their rig was no big deal. A lot of times you don't have that. On the holidays for a while there we were flying back to our family in Indiana. So we like left our rig in Las Vegas. We had to board the dog, which. Do not board in Vegas. It's super expensive. Yeah, it was awful. They did a good job. It's just, it's super expensive. So doing all this is super expensive. So that might not be feasible for a lot of people, but for us, we had to be out west and we didn't wanna miss Christmas. But, we do it different. We're trying to do it different for different holidays. Sometimes we'll fly our kids to us.'cause I actually, that was a second question. Debbie asked about, how staying connected with your kids and how do your children feel about your full-time lifestyle? So obviously our college age daughter. Her home base is no longer in a house. It's wherever we are. She just flies to us. This is why I do credit cards with airline points because I don't pay for'em. I use my points. Yeah
Speaker 8:we love the points too. We love
Speaker 9:the points. I just basically use my points to fly both the kids to New Orleans. For Christmas to stay with us. We actually have we found a campground with not only RV spots, but cottages. So we put the kids in the cottage.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Key. That's one thing that we did learn that's key is our son has stayed with us once in two years with our daughter and they were both back there in the toy hauler when we, yeah.
Speaker 9:It's just not worth it for us. It's, we have a big rig, but we don't have kids that enjoy that lifestyle. So we try to make it comfortable for them. Other people may be totally cool with their kids love to camp. They grew up camping. Ours did not. But yes, we do carry the luggage. We do fly. Barry has business trips. He has to go on sometimes. We work it out, it, it's not been a huge issue.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And it's one of those things though, but because of all the hassle of doing it, it's not something you take lightly. So like some business trips, I'd like for her to come along. My company would pay for it, but she's just like,
Speaker 9:but we're the dog. Do all this, that
Speaker 8:it's, so that's a little bit of a sacrifice.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So just because we don't have a home base, these are the things that we have to. Think about, which are fine, but those are things you'll want to consider if you're thinking about going full-time. Okay. So Lee asks about, I've been trying to think of what tools to carry that don't add a lot of weight. What do you guys carry to work on minor repairs and maintenance?
Speaker 8:I'm probably not the best guy to ask about that because I was of the persuasion, I was of the opposite persuasion. I bought everything. What I did is I went ahead and I didn't. I just had a hodgepodge of tools. I'm not a Mr. Fix it super Mr. Fix it, man. I've become much more of a mr. Fixes true since being on the road. But I went to Lowe's. And spent probably two,$300 on just all new tools. Bought a nice tool bag. And then over time, but see, you gotta remember though, it's not like you're gonna be so remote that you're not gonna be able to go to the hardware store. Trust me, I go to the hardware store all the time. So I'm always buying just one little thing that I don't have. But I do have a really good supply of. All the core stuff, and I've got metric and standard on everything. I do have some kind of splurge tools, like I've got a an impact driver that I got at Harbor Freight. That's a real heavy duty thing that I can get the lug nuts off. But, we have. Six tires on this thing. Yeah. But if you're really watching your weight, you may have to think about those things. But I would say don't scrimp on the tools'cause you're gonna need'em.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Repairs happen and are needed often. In fact, one of the things I would recommend you do is consider getting the inner VTA online course. This is specifically for RVs, how to fix it. They go through every system, plumbing, electrical, and you don't have to like take the whole course at once unless you just have a lot of time. We just didn't have the time. So we have the course and when we start having a problem with plumbing, we'll go to the course and refer to it. And how to fix things or something like that. Yeah, it's definitely, I think, beneficial just to have a basic understanding of the systems of the rv, what might help you repair things a little bit better too. So it's a thought. This is the one that we get a whole lot, probably the number two ask thing. Internet. So Pamela and Anna asked about, is internet a real problem on the road? And is a starlink a must for full-time? Yes. In our opinion, starlink is a must. I don't know what everybody, there's a lot of people have hanging up with Star Lake, but for us, because we work, remember we are on the computer working a regular job. So we have to have, we budgeted a whole lot for our internet. We needed a ba our first source, and we needed two levels of backup. And we have that. Starlink is our go-to, number one. The only time that starlink probably doesn't work is we have some sort of tree obstruction.
Speaker 8:Yeah, I had a guy ask me today here at the campground about starlink. We get a lot of those questions and in two plus years of doing this, how many times have we not been able to use starlink?
Speaker 10:I think once. Once.
Speaker 8:So that's really the bottom line is that I think if you. If you're retired, you don't need to work. The only reason you're on internet is maybe it'll stream movies or something like that. You could get a, you could probably get something else. You could do something else. But if you are gonna work full-time on the road, I starling's an absolute must and and if it's coming down to pennies, if you can't afford that versus another thing, I don't know that this lifestyle is, yeah,
Speaker 9:I mean there are some other things. There's other channels that promote other ones, but those third party ones. I've seen many come and go out of business. So you could lose that later on unless it's like super reputable. We weren't willing to go there. We got starlink really early. Now we are grandfathered into a plan that don't even offer anymore. So I don't know if that means we have better connectivity. I don't think so. But we get, we were in the High Mountains in Colorado. How many feet were we, you
Speaker 10:know? Oh yeah. 8,500. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And we've been in the middle of nowhere in the desert. We have been. All kinds of places in starlink has always worked. The next one is travel and planning. We got this from several different people. How many hours a day will you travel on move days? So two hours. I love, that's like a sweet spot to me, but four hours is usually like my, I look for the next place within four hours of where we're at. Occasionally. That doesn't happen because we need to be in another location and we only move on weekends. Remember, we only move, and that was another question we got. We only move on Saturdays and Sundays because we do work during the week.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So another thing to think about too is that we have a lot of stuff. We, we have, so to pack up and to set up. For us is an ordeal. Yeah. We don't like to do it very often and but to that point, it's like for us to pack up everything. That's why we tried to do it the night before, so on like a Friday night. If we're gonna leave on Saturday, we would always try to pack up at least most of it on Friday night, because if you wait until Saturday morning to pack everything up Yeah. And then you drive for four hours or more, and then you get there or, and then you set up. It is. Long day. Absolutely exhausting
Speaker 9:long. Yeah. If you have a really simple setup, this is totally like, you don't even know what we're talking about. But we choose this now, we stay at places usually two weeks at a time. So when we set up, we make home, yeah.
Speaker 8:We set up camp. We ain't leaving any time. I would say we're
Speaker 9:at the clamp. It's coming in. With all our crap, but that's how we roll. That's, we choose to be that way we could get rid of a lot of stuff and make it a little bit more simple if we wanted to. But right now we're okay with what we have. So yes, we only move on the weekends. Because we have to work. We try not to go more than four hours, but occasionally we have to go longer just to get, like I know we're heading to Santa Barbara to stay and visit a friend for Thanksgiving, and in order to make it all the way there from Colorado, we're going down to Arizona and we have to go all the way to Santa Barbara. We're gonna have to do a couple draw long drive days just to get there in time.
Speaker 8:So the good thing about long travel days. You have your bed with you, and I absolutely put that to you. I am a huge believer, at least for myself. If I get even remotely drowsy on the road, I can't recover from it. I can't like, just like, oh, I'm just gonna drink some coffee, or I'm gonna like, turn up loud music or something. I, it doesn't work for me. But what does work for me? Power nap. So we'll pull over to the side of the road, preferably a quiet rest stop would be great. Truck stops or? That's the bottom of the barrel, but you'll do it if you have to. And then I just go in the back. Crawling into in my bed and I'm out Like a light. I can, yeah. He
Speaker 9:has a, an unnatural ability. I'm a power napper
Speaker 8:supreme. I can. Can't
Speaker 9:sleep in two minutes.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And but I'm out 20, 30 minutes, get up, make myself a nice cup of hot coffee that I can make right here on my Keurig right here in the rig, and I'm back on the rope. I'm good as new.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So those are things that you can think about. That's how we do it. Some people prefer to only drive, like, what is it, the twos? Two, 200 miles to, I don't know, everybody has their different one. You'll figure out what's right for you based on how you like to travel. So don't worry about what everybody else thinks. Another question that kind of goes along with this the same question Cassandra had about how far ahead do you plan where you're going? That was my number one worry when we got going is I didn't know, how do I pick where I'm going? How do I, it's like, it is it's like the hardest thing when you've never done it before about full-time travel. I usually pick the big things. So if we need to be in a certain place to meet our daughter for spring break, you have things that are in your life that you know you need to be in certain places, put those in your calendar on your map. We use RV Life, the RV Life Trip Wizard. I couldn't function without that thing. It's my go-to for planning. But I'll put those big things in and then I'll just fill in the other places with fun adventures, places we haven't seen yet. So that's in a nutshell how I do the planning. And the second part of Cassandra's question was, are you guys gonna do another meetup? Now what she's talking about is we are going to actually another YouTube channel's event, ro it up with. The border hookups and it's a boondocking event, and we invited a lot of you guys to meet us there if you were into that and in that area, but a lot of you couldn't make it. I've been getting questions about, are you guys gonna do a meetup? I don't know.
Speaker 8:Yeah that's something it's tough for us to think about doing this. Those types of things just because we do work full-time or I have a full-time job and I can't like just take off a week just so I can do some sort of, sponsored event. As fun as that sounds
Speaker 9:we may eventually get there. We may be able to have like little like, meet at a certain brewery in a certain city and let you guys know really far in advance, maybe a night kind of thing. We are going to the Tampa RV show this year in January, and I'm pretty sure we'll try to do some sort of meetup there. So if you are interested. Interested, interested some sort of meetup, whether it's a camping kind of thing, or just a night, get together, talk, meet us meet. We would love to meet you guys. So go in the comments and let us know if you're interested in something like that. And then we will maybe see if we can put that together for you guys. Okay? This is probably our number one ask question. About full-time life, and especially because we boondock a lot, it's about mail, getting your mail and getting packages on the road. So I'm gonna start with how we, where our mail goes, basically. And I have to start with how we have a domicile address. So after the first year we were on the road. We rented out our house. We couldn't have any mail sent there. So we used Escapees as our mail service. Escapees is a club. They do a lot of really cool stuff and events, and you get all kinds of discounts as well. But their mail service is really cool. So they will give you a domicile address you can pick between South Dakota, Florida, and Texas. We were already residents of Florida, so it was really easy just to move over to the domicile, the address they gave us as our new home address, and that's what we put on all official documents, any government kind of thing. That's what's on our driver's license, but when it comes to mail. Getting our mail That's in Texas. So if you're gonna use a relatives address. Some people do that. We did not wanna burden our family with that. I didn't wanna have to deal with them getting my mail. Basically what we do is we pay extra for the scanning service. So they scan the front of the envelope and I can decide, okay, just put it in my mail bin. I'll tell you when I'm ready for that. Or scan the contents and send'em to me and you just pay like 50 cents for that or something. And then I can see the inside right away. So when you get official paperwork and things like that, that you really need right away, it's great because not only are you seeing it, they'll give you a PDF and you can download it.
Speaker 8:Packages on the other hand have, they're just a little bit more, it's just a little trickier. This requires more maintenance. So getting packages if you're at an RV park, that's cool. Some that doesn't charge you for them. And they're like, some of'em are just super easy, like, oh yeah,
Speaker 9:yeah. Just in here.
Speaker 8:Yeah. In fact, we actually were just at a KOA for a single night one
Speaker 9:night,
Speaker 8:and we were just cleaning all our stuff and then we went back out boondocking, but we asked them, said, Hey, we got a package that's not gonna be here until Tuesday. Is that cool? Or like.
Speaker 10:Yeah, fine.
Speaker 8:So they just, we just came back, picked it up. They didn't charge us anything. Now we have been to campgrounds. It charges per package. We have, we've been to campgrounds. It won't accept packages at all.
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 8:Like, like state parks.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So
Speaker 8:what the big thing that we can say with that regard is don't assume anything.
Speaker 10:Yeah you always just wanna ask,
Speaker 8:just call them. Don't just read their documentation on their website or anything. Just call and ask them. Be polite. But just say, Hey, will you guys accept packages for people who stay there? And they'll let you know if there's any cost to it or anything. Now sometimes you're gonna be in situations when you're boondocking, where you don't know where to send a package, and so you're gonna try to figure out. Where in the local town, maybe you could make it happen. And usually in that situation, you're gonna have to pay for it. But you can't really complain about that because you're
Speaker 9:doing something awesome in your boondocking in a cool location. Yeah. You're like, we were just in Buena Vista.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Gorgeous. You guys saw some of the videos. Gorgeous boondocking spot. They were the closest town, so we found a mailing. Shipping. Every
Speaker 8:town's got one of those little mail and ship places. Yeah. Those are, those places? No. Sometimes they're outrageously priced. Other time, not some, the Buena Vista call and
Speaker 9:ask.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I've been nickled and dived by some of those places a little bit. But just those places, that's the business that they're in. But then sometimes you don't even find those. The post office actually will receive packages sometimes.
Speaker 9:General delivery is what it's called.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And you, but again, you must call and ask. Sometimes it's a pain'cause they don't answer the phone. You might have to, you might
Speaker 9:have to go in,
Speaker 8:physically go in there and just say, look, if I want something shipped from Amazon here that I don't know where it's coming from. I don't know if FedEx, you know how Amazon is. They don't. FedEx might deliver it,
Speaker 9:you might deliver it, and just say,
Speaker 8:is that cool? Oh, and tell them what you want to have shipped. Because lemme tell you if it's a battery or some kind of chemical or something like that. Look, liquids
Speaker 9:sometimes
Speaker 8:they may be like, Nope we can't accept. They may see the sticker
Speaker 9:on the box and reject it as soon as they see it. So you just have to ask a lot of questions. I've found that about 50% of the post offices will even do it. Yeah. And we had a huge fiasco with that one time, so I. We're a little sensitive. That's our last resort. Another thing you might try, our UPS and FedEx stores they usually charge at least$5 a package, which is really tricky because when you order Amazon, you order it all at one time and it comes in four packages. So you could really end up. Getting screwed on that, but sometimes you just need something you can't get at a store. It happens. So those are the, probably the go-tos. Another one we will try with Amazon or Amazon lock boxes.
Speaker 8:Amazon Lockers.
Speaker 9:Lockers, sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Lockers. Yeah. And they're really cool. You gotta do it at least once because it'll opens with your. They gave you this little barcode and you go and it just magically opens sesame. It's,
Speaker 9:yeah, they're pretty cool, but they're not everywhere. Like right now, we're in some remote areas of Colorado. There are no lockers. But you'll go to other places, especially some of the cities. It can be easier to do the lockers. You just have to look. When you go to check out and you pick an address, there'll be a selection for an Amazon locker and you can look and see if they're anywhere near you. But just like the post office, they a lot of times won't take big packages, weird size things, liquids, it'll tell you when you try to put it in the locker that if it will or were not delivered to that location. So it's a crap shoot. But that is how. We juggle getting mail and sh packages on the road. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 8:lot more, problematic. We still make it happen, but
Speaker 9:it's, it can be challenging. It can be a pain. Yeah. We work it out though. So the next one is from Deb. And Deb is worried about. Grocery shopping. And she has a different situation where she gets paid once a month and she's trying to, she doesn't really like Walmarts, so she was asking about the small towns and the small town groceries versus, what's really available out there. This is a great question because we just came from an area where it's like the small town groceries were really close. But they were super expensive. Lemme
Speaker 8:give you an example. I'll never forget, so she has me go stop. We're running out of coffee, which that's an emergency in our house, put outta coffee. So I, we buy Starbucks, Sumatra expensive coffee and she's like, Hey, just stop at that little store there in Buena Vista. I went there and one of those little bitty bags, just the little ones. 14 bucks and then the following and I just begrudgingly paid it. And then the following week we went to Walmart in the other town for the big bag of the same stuff. 12 bucks.
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So so that gives you an idea that Yeah, it can be pricey. We keep moving'cause we're running out of daylight. We,
Speaker 9:we moving over, the sun keeps moving over. So this is the realities of
Speaker 8:now we got Hugo in the background.
Speaker 9:You too. Yeah. And he is like not happy that he's not right here at our feet. These are the things that we do. So let's let's finish talking about that. Small town versus the big Walmarts, you are just gonna pay more if you don't like, because you're gonna get in areas where all you're gonna have is like one grocery, maybe two. It really depends how you camp, and it's totally by location. If you're near a city, you're not gonna, you'll have your pick. It won't be an issue. We have a tendency to lean towards Walmarts. Just because we can get everything we need at one place and it's usually pretty reasonably priced. Mary asked a billion questions there's one that was really good and that is, do you have everything you own with you? Or do you store some seasonally somewhere? Is it worth having storage?
Speaker 8:So we had, we struggled with that question when we first started out, just to answer your question directly. Keepsakes. Things like Darlene's wedding dress and the kids'
Speaker 9:little drawings and pictures, mementos, all those kinds of deals.
Speaker 8:Yes, we do have those. We were actually ended up, we put them in storage at first, but then we ended up working out a deal with her mom. Now they're at her sister's house in Indiana. It's, they're fine and we don't have to pay for it but. But I'm pretty passionate about this particular topic, which is things that you like, physical, things that you think that you're going to need at some later point. Like we had all the, like this is a brand new rig when we bought it, and then we have two patios and we had stairs that go off these patios. We don't, we'd had no intention of using them. We certainly didn't wanna pack'em around. But we thought maybe if we sell the RV years later, the people are gonna want those stairs. So we made a stupid decision, frankly, of we were paying, we actually split a unit with a friend of ours, and we're paying 50 bucks a month. And I thought after six months I thought I paid$300 already to store these stupid things. So we ended up going back to Sarasota to our, where we were from, and took'em outta storage. Took'em straight to the dump and threw'em away and got rid
Speaker 9:of them. Nobody wanted them. And we had like the dinette. My mom actually took the dinette. But those, all, these little, the stairs that went to the bunk in the garage were terrible. Nobody wants those. So after a while, you just have to let things go. So that's all for today and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 12:Thanks for tuning in to the like, there's No Tomorrow podcast. I'm Barry Nicholson, along with Darlene, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave us a five star review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps others find our show and allows us to keep creating this content. Visit like theres no tomorrow.net to join our free community and learn more about our going full-time RV course. Until next time, we encourage you to get out there and explore like there's no tomorrow.