We Thought We Were Setting Out to See America
Updated: Oct 5
Ten years ago, if someone had asked us what success looked like, we probably would have pointed to the life we had built. We had a beautiful home in Lake Placid, New York, careers we genuinely enjoyed, financial stability, family nearby, and a future that felt pretty secure. By almost any traditional measure, we were doing well.
And we were happy. That's an important part of this story because we weren't trying to escape anything. We weren't running from a life we hated or looking for some dramatic reset. In many ways, we had exactly the life we thought we wanted. We had worked hard for it, and we were proud of what we had built.
Yet there was this feeling that something was missing, even though at the time we couldn't have told you exactly what it was. Looking back now, we had many of the things we had been taught to work toward—possessions, stability, successful careers, a beautiful home—but our lives were still largely built around work and routine. We took vacations and had experiences, but then we came home and returned to the cycle. There was a sense of freedom, experience, and possibility that we didn't even realize we were craving until we saw someone else living it.
Seeing Another Possibility
We were no strangers to RVing. It had been part of our lives when we were younger, traveling and camping with my parents. But in our minds, an RV had always belonged to a particular category of life. It was something you took out for a weekend or used for a vacation. You packed it up, went somewhere, had an adventure, and then came home. The idea that an RV itself could actually be home—that someone could live in one full-time while traveling the country—wasn't something we had ever seriously considered. We aren't even sure we knew people were doing it.
That changed during the pandemic. We started noticing people who were working remotely while traveling in vans and RVs. At first, it was simply interesting. Then it became intriguing. Eventually, it became impossible to ignore. We weren't discovering RVing; we were discovering an entirely different way of using it. These weren't people taking an extended vacation and eventually returning to their "real lives." This was their real life.
Something about that arrived at exactly the right time for us. Maybe some of it simply comes with getting older. At some point, you begin to understand time differently. When you're younger, life can feel almost limitless. There will always be another year, another opportunity, another chance to do the things you've been putting off. Eventually, you begin to realize there are no pauses and no do-overs. You get one life, and however long it turns out to be, this is it.
That realization started changing the questions we were asking ourselves. We had spent years building a good life, but like so many people, much of that life revolved around work. You work to build the career, pay for the house, maintain the life you've created, save for the future, and hopefully carve out enough time in between to enjoy it. Then you take a vacation, experience a little bit of freedom, and return home to begin the cycle again.
For the first time, we started wondering whether it had to work that way.
What if instead of spending most of our lives working so that we could occasionally step away and experience the things we loved, we could build a life where those experiences were part of everyday living? What if work could support the life we wanted instead of life being structured primarily around work? What if we could still have careers, responsibilities, family, and all the things that mattered to us, but arrange them differently?
It wasn't that we suddenly decided the traditional path was wrong. We had lived that path for years, and it had given us a life we were genuinely grateful for. We simply began to understand that it wasn't the only path available to us.
Once you realize you have a choice, it's surprisingly difficult to stop thinking about it.
There was something else influencing those questions too. My mom passed away young, and both of Jon's parents passed away before they were able to experience many of the things they had hoped to do someday. Those losses weren't the reason we changed our lives, but they absolutely shaped how we thought about time. They made that growing realization that you only get one shot at this feel much less theoretical.
"Someday" started to feel like a dangerous thing to build a life around.
Eventually, curiosity turned into conversations, conversations turned into possibilities, and possibilities became a decision.
We sold nearly everything we owned and hit the road.
Starting Over When We Didn't Have To
People sometimes hear that part of the story and focus on the adventure. Sell everything. Buy an RV. Travel the country. It sounds exciting, and it was. What gets lost is just how scary it was to voluntarily step away from a life that was already working.
We had spent years building our careers and working our way up professionally. We had stability, a home we loved, possessions we'd accumulated over a lifetime, routines, friends, family nearby, and a pretty good idea of what the next several years of our lives would look like. We weren't leaving because any of it had fallen apart. We were choosing to dismantle much of it ourselves.
That distinction made the decision harder, not easier.
Selling nearly everything also meant there wasn't going to be an easy reset button if we discovered six months later that we'd made a terrible mistake. The house would belong to someone else. Most of what had filled it would be gone. We didn't know exactly what would happen to our careers once we left or how difficult it might be to step back into that world if we needed to. If this lifestyle didn't work for us, we couldn't simply return to the life we'd had. We would have to build another one.
That was terrifying.
It was also one of the hardest parts of the decision for some people around us to understand. Why give up a beautiful home, successful careers, financial stability, and a life we genuinely liked for something we couldn't possibly know would work? We understood the question because we asked it ourselves. There were moments when what we were about to do sounded a little crazy even to us.
Some people understood what we were doing, or at least said they did. Others seemed to think we had simply decided to go on one very long vacation. But neither description really captured what it felt like from our side. This wasn't a sabbatical with our old life sitting there waiting for us when we were finished. We weren't taking a break from our lives.
We were changing them.
There was enormous excitement in that, but there was also a kind of vulnerability we hadn't experienced before. For most of our adult lives, progress had meant building—building careers, building financial security, building a home, accumulating the things that made life feel increasingly established. Suddenly, moving forward meant letting much of that go without knowing exactly what would replace it.
I think that's something we've come to understand differently over the last four years. Courage doesn't necessarily mean being confident that something will work. We certainly weren't. Sometimes it means understanding exactly how much could go wrong and deciding that never finding out frightens you more.
When the RV Became Home
One of the first surprises was how quickly the RV felt like home. Even today, that still amazes us a little. It's a relatively small space, yet somehow it contains everything we need and feels completely comfortable to us. Whether we're parked beside the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by mountains, camped in the deserts of Nevada, or sitting beneath the stars in Arizona, we walk through that door and we're home.
The scenery changes. Home comes with us.
But only a few months after hitting the road, something happened that we hadn't anticipated. Despite feeling completely at home in the RV and loving the lifestyle, we began feeling a strange emptiness around the fact that there was no longer a physical place that belonged to us. It wasn't that we wanted another traditional house, and it certainly wasn't that we wanted to stop traveling. It was more basic than that: for the first time in our lives, there was nowhere to return to if everything went wrong.
That bothered us more than we expected.
We didn't set out looking for land to solve that feeling. We had simply fallen in love with Arizona, and during our first year on the road we stumbled across the property that would eventually become Crimson Sky Ranch. When we bought it, something changed. That underlying fear of having nowhere to go disappeared.
What's interesting is that even now, we don't really consider the ranch our home. If someone asks where we live, our answer is still the RV. The ranch is something different. It's our anchor and our basecamp. It's a place that is uniquely ours, where we're slowly building something and where we know we can always return.
Oddly enough, having that anchor has made it easier to leave. We love being there. We love the projects, the peace, the neighbors, the sunsets, and the feeling of walking outside the cabin and looking across the high desert. But eventually we start getting restless. We want to move again. We want to know what's around the next corner. Right now, if we stayed at the ranch for six months straight, we'd probably start feeling stuck.
That may change someday. For now, the road is still where we want to be.
Learning to Let Go of the Plan
The road also changed something in us that we never really expected, especially in me.
I'm a planner. Before we started traveling, I had much of our first year mapped out. I knew where we were going, had a pace in mind, and had routes and destinations planned. In retrospect, I think all that planning gave me a sense of control over a life change that contained very little certainty.
Then we actually started living on the road.
It didn't take long before the plan started becoming less important. We discovered places where we wanted to stay longer. Someone would tell us about somewhere we'd never considered. Weather changed. Opportunities came up. Sometimes something broke and decided our plans for us. And sometimes we simply weren't ready to leave. Gradually, we stopped trying to dictate every part of the journey and became much more comfortable allowing it to unfold.
We still plan, of course. There are big rocks on the calendar—family visits, reservations that have to be made well in advance, time at the ranch, events and places we know we want to experience. But there's a lot more empty space between those things now, and we've learned to value that empty space rather than immediately trying to fill it.
Some of our favorite experiences have happened because there wasn't a plan. We've stayed longer in places we expected to pass through, changed direction because someone told us about something worth seeing, and ended up somewhere entirely different from where we thought we'd be. Not every change of plans turns into some incredible adventure, of course. Sometimes a change of plans is just inconvenient. But we've gotten much better at not treating every deviation from the plan as though something has gone wrong.
For someone who once wanted to know what the first year looked like before we'd even started it, that's a pretty significant change. Maybe what I've actually learned isn't how to stop planning. I'm probably never going to be that person. I t's that a plan can give us direction without having to dictate the experience.
The road has taught us that uncertainty isn't always something that needs to be solved. Sometimes it's where the interesting stuff happens.
The Part We Never Expected
When we imagined traveling full-time, we imagined the places. National parks. Mountains. Deserts. Coastlines. Small towns. Cities. Places we'd seen in photographs and places we'd never heard of before. We wanted meaningful experiences, and the road absolutely gave us those.
What we didn't anticipate was how much of the story would eventually become about people.
We had community before we left Lake Placid. We had family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and people who were part of our lives. We don't want to rewrite our past and pretend we were isolated, because we weren't. That's part of what makes the community we've found on the road so difficult for us to explain.
Somehow, it feels different.
The first time we really experienced it was at an Xscapers rally. We went into that first rally not knowing what to expect. We hoped we'd meet some people and maybe make a few friends. What happened instead caught us completely off guard. We felt welcomed and accepted almost immediately—almost to a ridiculous level—and there was this sense of belonging that neither of us expected to feel so quickly.
Even after four years, we're not sure we can completely explain why some of the friendships we've made through this lifestyle feel as deep as they do. Maybe it's because of shared experience. Maybe it's because everyone has taken some version of a risk to live differently. Maybe it's because maintaining a friendship when you're hundreds or thousands of miles apart requires both people to actively choose it. It's probably a combination of all of those things.
What makes it even more interesting is how different many of us are. We come from different places and different backgrounds. We have different beliefs, different life experiences, different careers, different personalities, and different ideas about plenty of things. Some of these are people whose paths probably never would have crossed ours in our previous life.
Yet somehow it works.
We've traveled with some of these friends, shared campfires and meals, helped each other when things went wrong, celebrated milestones together, and then watched our routes split off in completely different directions. Months can pass without being in the same state, yet we still text, talk, have Zoom calls, and eventually find our way back together somewhere down the road.
We call them our road family.
We had community before. What we discovered on the road was another kind of community, one that wasn't dependent on geography. It taught us that belonging doesn't necessarily come from living near someone. Sometimes it comes from being understood.
When Our Assumptions Started Falling Apart
The longer we've traveled, the more we've realized how different a place can feel once you're actually standing in it.
Before we started traveling full-time, we had assumptions about different parts of the country. Some came from things we'd heard, some from what we'd seen in the news, and some were simply ideas we'd picked up over the years without giving them much thought. There were places we expected to love and others we weren't particularly excited about visiting.
Again and again, the reality has been more complicated.
We've fallen in love with places we barely knew anything about before arriving. We've been disappointed by places we'd built up in our minds. We've discovered that you can't really know a town from a headline, a state from its politics, or a community from its reputation.
That same lesson has applied to people.
Before we started traveling full-time, we thought America was incredibly divided. In many ways, it is. Turn on the news or spend enough time on social media and it can sometimes seem as though people with different backgrounds, beliefs, or politics have almost nothing in common.
Then we went out and started meeting them.
We've also become more aware of how easily labels can become shorthand for entire groups of people. Liberal. Conservative. Gay. Straight. Religious. Atheist. Rural. Urban. Red state. Blue state. The list is endless. Those labels may describe something real about a person, but they leave an enormous amount out.
We've always believed people are more complicated than any single label, but four years of meeting people across the country has given us countless opportunities to see that play out firsthand. We've met people whose politics, backgrounds, beliefs, and lives are very different from ours, and none of those things alone has reliably told us whether we'd enjoy their company, whether they'd show us kindness, whether we'd find common ground, or whether a real friendship might develop.
The differences are still there, of course. There are beliefs and values we care deeply about, just as there are things other people care deeply about. Getting to know someone doesn't require pretending those differences don't exist or that they never matter. There are things we believe strongly, things we disagree with strongly, and lines each of us draws based on our own values. But disagreement and difference don't automatically tell us everything else we need to know about another person.
Maybe that's what has become harder for us to ignore after four years on the road. So much of the world around us encourages us to sort people into groups and decide what those groups mean before we've ever met the individuals within them. Our actual experience has so often been the opposite. The closer we've gotten to people, the less useful those broad categories have become in explaining who they actually are.
A label can tell you something. It just can't tell you everything.
And maybe that's the danger of relying too heavily on them. They can make people seem much simpler from a distance than they almost always are up close.
Being gay is part of who we are, but it has never been the first thing we use to define ourselves. That's not something the road taught us; it's how we've approached our lives for as long as we've been together. We've never hidden who we are or felt that we should have to. At the same time, we've never expected being gay to be the thing that defines every interaction we have or every relationship we form. We're Jon and Rich. We're a couple. We're travelers, dog owners, grandparents, business owners, people who love national parks and sitting around campfires. Who we love is an important part of our story, but it isn't the entirety of who we are.
That approach has served us well throughout our lives, and traveling has reinforced it in ways we probably couldn't have anticipated. We've met people from backgrounds very different from ours, with beliefs and experiences that don't always align with our own. We don't enter those encounters expecting someone to think exactly as we do, just as we don't want someone deciding who we are based on a single label. We try to meet people first as people and allow the rest to unfold from there.
Before traveling, there were places we assumed we might not like or where we wondered whether we'd feel comfortable. T ime and time again, those assumptions were challenged. From remote rural communities to some of the largest cities in the country, we've overwhelmingly been welcomed simply as Jon and Rich.
We've also become close friends with people who don't necessarily believe everything we believe. Somehow that hasn't prevented us from caring about one another, traveling together, laughing together, helping one another, or forming real relationships.
We've sat around campfires with people whose lives look nothing like ours and with people who see the world differently than we do. We've shared meals, traveled together, helped each other through breakdowns, laughed until our sides hurt, and talked about families, fears, and plans for the future. Somewhere in all of that, we've been reminded again and again that a label may describe something about a person without coming close to describing the person.
That doesn't mean division isn't real. It doesn't mean discrimination doesn't exist, and we know there are people who have had very different experiences from ours. We would never dismiss that. But our experience traveling this country has taught us something we didn't expect: actual people are often far more complicated, interesting, kind, and open than the categories we're encouraged to put them into.
Maybe that's one of the biggest things travel has changed in us. We're slower to assume we already know what we're going to find.
The Things the Road Costs Us
For all the ways this lifestyle has enriched our lives, we don't want to romanticize it. Freedom comes with tradeoffs, and one of the hardest is being far away from family.
Holidays are probably when we feel it most. They just aren't the same when we're not with the people we love. There have been birthdays we've missed, gatherings we couldn't attend, and moments when we wished home—whatever that word means now—was only a short drive away rather than several states away. You can be sitting in an incredibly beautiful place and still wish you were somewhere else because that's where your family is.
Some members of our family also struggled with our decision in ways we didn't fully anticipate. To them, it sometimes felt like we were leaving or even abandoning them. We understand that. From their perspective, we had been nearby and then one day chose a life that might put us thousands of miles away.
From our perspective, though, it was never about leaving anyone. It was about recognizing that we get one shot at this life and feeling increasingly certain that we needed to live ours.
There isn't a perfect resolution to that. We miss people. They miss us. Sometimes holidays hurt. Sometimes we wish we could be in two places at once. Those are simply part of the price of choosing this life.
What has changed is how we approach the time we do have together. When we lived close to family, it was easy to believe there would always be another weekend, another dinner, another opportunity. But proximity doesn't necessarily create time. Everyone gets busy. Work happens. Routines take over. Weeks disappear.
Now, when we're with family, we try to make that time count. We stay longer. We do things together. We create experiences and memories. We try to be present rather than assuming there will always be another opportunity next week.
The distance hasn't made family less important to us. If anything, it has made time with them more precious.
Building a Life We Couldn't Have Planned
There is another part of this transformation that we've only recently started to recognize. Once we gave ourselves permission to question one assumption about how life was supposed to look, we started questioning others too. Perhaps more importantly, we became more open to following ideas simply because they felt right, even when they weren't part of some larger plan.
Trail & Ember Candle Company might be one of the best examples of that. We didn't hit the road intending to start a candle company. It wasn't part of a business plan we had tucked away or another piece of the life we had carefully mapped out. The idea came organically one evening while we were sitting around a campfire.
We had spent so much time traveling to places that stayed with us long after we left, and we started talking about how strongly scent can bring you back to a particular place or memory. What if there were a way to share some of those experiences with other people through scent? That conversation eventually became Trail & Ember.
In some ways, the fact that the idea wasn't planned makes it fit this life even better. Running a candle company while traveling in an RV—and sometimes making candles from an off-grid ranch—isn't exactly the easiest or most obvious business model. But Trail & Ember was never about deciding we needed to start a business because that's what came next. It grew naturally from the journey itself, from something we loved, and from wanting to find another way to share a little piece of the places and experiences that had become meaningful to us.
Then there's YouTube.
We actually tried YouTube when we first started traveling. It didn't feel right, and we stopped. Looking back, that makes more sense to us now. At the time, we were still living the story. We knew we were seeing incredible places, but we didn't yet understand what the journey was doing to us or what we had to say about it.
Years later, we came back to it. This time feels different because now we understand that our story isn't simply about where we're going. Yes, we still love sharing the national parks, the campsites, the travel days, the breakdowns, the beautiful places, and the ridiculous things that happen along the way. Those are all part of our lives, but they're not the whole story.
For a long time, Instagram was where we shared much of our journey. It was perfect for beautiful landscapes, sunsets, campsites, and quick snapshots of where we were. We've pulled back from that somewhat recently, not because those things don't matter to us anymore, but because we've realized how difficult it is to tell the complete story that way.
A photograph can show you the sunset. It can't necessarily tell you what sitting beneath it made you realize about your life.
That's part of why returning to longer-form storytelling has started to feel right. After four years, we understand the journey differently than we did when we began. The places are still part of the story, but increasingly we're interested in what happens between them—the things we've learned, questioned, struggled with, laughed about, and discovered about ourselves along the way.
We've also started to understand why we want to share those things in the first place. We didn't start sharing our life because we wanted people to look at it and think, Wow, what a life. Before we started traveling, seeing other people living differently helped us realize that there were possibilities for our own lives we hadn't considered. It challenged an assumption we'd carried for years—that there was a fairly predictable way life was supposed to unfold, and that many of the things we really wanted to experience would have to wait until someday.
We know an RV isn't everyone's answer, nor should it be. What we've come to believe is simply that there isn't only one right way to build a life. If sharing ours causes someone to question an assumption about their own life, consider something they've been putting off, or imagine a possibility they hadn't considered before, then sharing it feels worthwhile.
And for people who can't—or don't want to—make some enormous life change, that's okay too. Maybe following along is simply a way to experience a national park they've always wanted to see, escape into someone else's adventure for a little while, or be reminded that there are still places and possibilities out there waiting to be discovered. That's enough too.
Maybe that's what we weren't ready to say when we first started.
The Risk We Rarely Talk About
We talk a lot about the risk of changing our lives. We talk much less about the risk of leaving them unchanged.
Had we stayed in Lake Placid, there's every reason to believe we would have continued having a good life. We probably would have kept advancing in our careers, continued working long hours, taken vacations when we could, spent time with family, and enjoyed the home we had worked hard to create. There is nothing tragic about that version of our lives.
But knowing ourselves now, we also believe something would have remained unfulfilled. Maybe we wouldn't have been able to name it. Maybe it would have remained that quiet feeling in the background that there was something we were supposed to do and never did.
Eventually, we might have wondered, "What if?"
What if we had tried? What if we had taken the chance? What if there really was another way to live?
We'll never know exactly what that other version of our lives would have looked like, and that's okay. What matters is that we no longer have to wonder what might have happened if we'd taken the chance.
What We Actually Found
Looking back, what surprises us most isn't how many places we've seen. It's how many assumptions we've let go of along the way.
We thought home was a place, and learned that it could move. We thought community was largely about geography, and discovered that some of our closest relationships could stretch across thousands of miles. We thought we knew which parts of the country we'd love and which we wouldn't, only to be surprised again and again. We thought America was more divided than connected, and then we went out and met people. We thought we needed a plan, and learned to leave room for the unexpected.
Perhaps most importantly, we thought we were setting out to see America.
What we didn't realize was that somewhere along the way, seeing America would change the way we saw ourselves.
We started this journey because we wanted experiences. We wanted to stand in places we'd only seen in photographs, explore national parks, drive roads we'd never traveled, and have the freedom to decide where we wanted to go next. We found all of that, but we also found so much that we weren't looking for.
We found community and a road family. We found confidence in our ability to handle things that once would have overwhelmed us. We became more vulnerable and more willing to put ourselves out there. We discovered that we could build businesses, friendships, a home, and a life in ways that didn't look anything like what we once assumed they should.
We also discovered that freedom and connection don't have to compete with each other. Maybe that's part of what was missing before. We had connection, stability, and community, but we craved more freedom and experience. In the earliest days on the road, we suddenly had an enormous amount of freedom and experience, but we hadn't yet discovered what community would look like in this new life.
Over time, somehow, those pieces came together.
Four Years Later
Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that we no longer feel like we're searching for something.
There is still an enormous amount we want to do. There are national parks we haven't visited, roads we haven't traveled, places we want to return to, projects waiting for us at the ranch, things we want to build, and stories we haven't told yet. Sometimes it's difficult to believe we're already in our fourth year of living this way.
But wanting more experiences is different from feeling incomplete.
In our previous life, we had everything we thought we wanted, yet there was this quiet feeling that something was missing. Today, our lives are less predictable. We own fewer things. We're often far away from family. We deal with breakdowns, uncertainty, weather, changing plans, and all the complications that come from taking your home everywhere you go.
Somehow, we feel more whole.
We're at peace, not because we've figured everything out—we certainly haven't—or because every decision we've made has been perfect. This lifestyle isn't always easy. We're at peace because this life feels like ours.
There is no part of us that wishes we had stayed. That's not a rejection of the life we had before. We loved that life, and it helped make us the people we are today. But it was one chapter.
This is another.
For most of our lives, we thought home was a place. Today, we're not sure it can be defined that simply. Part of home is our RV. Part of it is the ranch waiting for us in Arizona. Part of it is our family, regardless of how many miles separate us. Part of it is our road family scattered across the country. Part of it is the freedom to wake up and know that the life we're living is one we consciously chose.
Maybe home is less about where you are and more about feeling that your life aligns with who you are.
If we could sit down with ourselves from ten years ago, we wouldn't tell them to sell the house. We wouldn't tell them to buy an RV. We wouldn't hand them our route or tell them to recreate the life we have now.
We'd tell them to pay attention to that little voice asking whether there might be another way.
Maybe that's part of why sharing this journey matters to us now. Someone else's life once showed us a possibility we hadn't considered. We don't expect our answer to be anyone else's, but perhaps our story can remind someone that there may be more possibilities for their own life than they once imagined.
We thought we were setting out to see America.
We did.
But somewhere between the national parks, travel days, breakdowns, campfires, unexpected friendships, family visits, wrong turns, changing plans, and thousands upon thousands of miles, the journey became about something much bigger than the places we were seeing.
It changed what we thought home could be. It changed what we thought community could look like. It challenged things we thought we knew about people, about the country, and about ourselves. Most of all, it showed us that there were more possibilities for our lives than we had once imagined.
We still don't know where this road ultimately leads. We don't know how long we'll live this way, what the next chapter will look like, or what our lives will look like ten years from now.
Strangely, we don't need to know anymore.
Four years ago, we left a life we loved because there was a question we couldn't stop
asking:
What if?
We could have spent the rest of our lives wondering.
Instead, we took the chance.
We found out.
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We Thought We Were Setting Out to See America is part of Stories, our collection of personal writing about life on the road and everything we're learning along the way.
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