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We bought a house.
Like a real house, not a home on wheels.
After six amazing years of travel and RV adventures, Heath and I now have our first ever permanent address here in southwestern Colorado.
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We said back in 2014 that one of our goals as we traveled across all fifty states was to find a place to live. A place where we could see ourselves raising kids, building businesses, and going on adventures. But we never found that place where settling down felt right and we loved traveling as much as we could.
So we kept traveling full-time with the idea of settling down farrrrr in the back of our minds. We loved full-timing and traveling the world with Ellie.
But 2020 was the first time that we started feeling rootless in a negative way.
In the spring when everything was on lockdown, we were in a tiny not-so-nice RV park in rural Alabama. Ellie was learning to walk and eat gravel and we didn’t feel like we could get back to our families because of travel restrictions. We felt isolated and bored and craved our own space.
So while we searched for a campground to buy, we started thinking about buying a home too.
And then this summer, Campground Booking got an investment here in Colorado with the stipulation that we move to rural Colorado…which basically means we HAD to move to the mountains (twist my arm).
The whole idea of buying a house always seemed to overwhelm us (one place? for years?!?!), but now that it’s done, we feel so happy knowing this was the right move for us right now. We love seeing mountains everywhere we turn. We love being 20 minutes from a National park and even closer to BLM and National Forest lands.
Our families are a little rightfully bummed we’ve chosen a state so far from Texas, but Colorado has always been a place we’ve dreamed of living since before we met. We’re so excited to raise Ellie in a state that’s filled with so many great outdoor activities.
Our travels aren’t over (we’ve been trying to plan a way to get abroad again in 2021), but this was a good quality of life decision for our family this year.
We haven’t given up on our campground dream either (we hope to have an update on that in January!) but decided to prioritize a home base first. The more parks we toured this year, we quickly decided we did NOT want to live on site like many owner-operators do. Which meant we needed land to park an RV…and also we needed to then buy an RV, since we were borrowing the Forza from Winnebago this year…or a house.
We chose house 🏡
Or home base as we like to call it.
We’ve talked for the past few years—basically as soon as we went to New Zealand in 2018—about how we wanted a home base. Some place to come back to where we loved being, but that also allowed us to keep going on adventures all over the world. This feels a lot like we finally found that balance. A place to come home to with adventures right outside our door.
