Are you seeking adventure and change! Have you heard these common myths about pursuing your dreams and making a lifestyle change? Myth #1: It’s too risky to leave stability behind. Myth #2: It’s impossible to make a change with a family in tow. Myth #3: You have to be wealthy to make your dreams a reality. But don’t believe everything you hear! James and Kestra, from the Boundless Bronnekes, are here to share the truth and prove that it’s never too late to chase your dreams and create a life of excitement and fulfillment for your family.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Discover the pros and cons of embracing RV life alongside your family.
- Learn the amazing benefits of homeschooling while on the road.
- Grasp the crucial role of flexibility and adaptability in the RV lifestyle.
- Hear their smooth transition from a suburban existence to life on wheels.
- Find inspiration for pursuing your dreams and reinventing your family’s lifestyle.
My special guest are James & Kestra Bronneke
Meet James and Kestra Bronneke, from the Boundless Bronnekes, a couple with a love for adventure and a knack for sales who decided to make a major lifestyle change to prioritize family time. With their two kids and a cute mini Aussie Doodle puppy in tow, they’ve spent over a year and a half traveling across the United States in their RV. They’ve managed to turn their passion for DIY projects and their experience in sales into a successful social media content creation business that allows them to continue their journey as a tight-knit family while inspiring others to chase their dreams.
The resources mentioned in this episode are:
- Follow Boundless Bronnekes on Instagram for updates on their RV family adventures and cute puppy photos.
- Check out James and Kestra’s social media content creation services for companies and brands interested in partnering with them.
- Consider selling your house and hitting the road for a year or more with your family to experience the joys of full-time travel and quality time together.
- Take advantage of shoulder season travel to avoid crowds and enjoy more peaceful experiences at popular destinations.
- Embrace the entrepreneurial spirit and work for yourself to set your own hours and enjoy more flexibility in your lifestyle.
- Prioritize family time and consider making changes to your career.
Making Mistakes and Figuring It Out
Pursuing a new way of life is bound to entail some missteps and lessons learned along the way. It’s vital to remain open to change, adapt to new circumstances, and continuously learn and grow as you navigate unfamiliar territory. Taking a proactive and flexible approach to problem-solving can facilitate a smoother transition and enhance the overall experience. In their conversation with Kate, James and Kestra emphasized the importance of learning from mistakes, adapting, and moving forward. They were candid about the challenges faced and their process of figuring things out as they went along. Their openness and determination to make their chosen lifestyle work for them have served as an inspiring example for others contemplating a similar journey. By staying resilient and receptive to change, they have managed to overcome hurdles and fully embrace their new way of life.
Life on the Road with Kids
Traveling full-time with children presents its own unique set of challenges and rewards. Parents need to balance their kids’ educational and social needs while exploring new places and seeking out opportunities for growth. Integrating homeschooling into the daily routine can be a particular challenge, along with ensuring that children have a diverse range of interactions and experiences. James and Kestra’s children have flourished in the family’s nomadic lifestyle. Their daughter, in particular, has developed a greater sense of confidence and improved social skills through their travels. By encountering a wide range of people from various backgrounds, their children benefit from exposure to diverse perspectives and experiences. This reinforces the concept that a life on the road can be a rich, educational, and rewarding experience for children as well as adults.
Life on the Road with Kids
Traveling full-time with children presents its own unique set of challenges and rewards. Parents need to balance their kids’ educational and social needs while exploring new places and seeking out opportunities for growth. Integrating homeschooling into the daily routine can be a particular challenge, along with ensuring that children have a diverse range of interactions and experiences. James and Kestra’s children have flourished in the family’s nomadic lifestyle. Their daughter, in particular, has developed a greater sense of confidence and improved social skills through their travels. By encountering a wide range of people from various backgrounds, their children benefit from exposure to diverse perspectives and experiences. This reinforces the concept that a life on the road can be a rich, educational, and rewarding experience for children as well as adults.
Find The Boundless Bronnekes:
Website: https://www.boundlessbronnekes.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boundlessbronnekes/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boundlessbronnekes/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Boundlessbronnekes/
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Transcript from Ep 17 with Boundless Bronnekes:
00:00:00
There is no sense of doubt in their little hearts, in their little words. They are in love with life right now. Like, when we do our prayers and stuff, wesley’s always like, Dear God, thank you. We love this life. Can we please keep doing it?
00:00:12
I’m like, of course. We’re doing the right thing. Welcome to the More Sunsets Please podcast. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live debt free, sell it all and live small, travel the country full time or raising animals and growing your own food as a sustainable family? My name is Kate, and these are just some of the stories of those who have jumped outside the box and living life on their terms.
00:00:38
This is more sunsets. Please welcome Kestra and James. The more sunsets, please. Podcast. I’m so happy to have you guys.
00:00:48
Yeah, super excited. Can you guys just share? First of all, where are you right now? Where are we right now? We are in northern New Mexico for sure.
00:00:59
Quickly, lately, like a week at a time as we make our way back west to visit family for almost two months. I think we’ll be in Nevada. Yeah, we’ve had a few times lately where we’re like, wait, where are we? We’ve been on the road just over a year and a half, and I think this is our 77th campground that we’ve been to. So now that we’re on the move again, quite week trips, I’ll wake up in bed, I’m like, Where are we?
00:01:27
I have no idea. My son did it the other day. He walked out. He’s like, Where are we, dad? I’m like, I don’t know.
00:01:34
America.
00:01:38
Somewhere in America. Northern New Mexico. And it’s beautiful here. Yeah, we love it. We went and hiked and saw natural arch yesterday, and nobody knows.
00:01:51
It’s like a small area where it’s outside of Albuquerque and there’s just like, nobody’s at the national monuments. We went on a Sunday morning and we saw four people, and it was like the most I mean, it’s like an Arches arch in Moab and where you go to Arches and you’re waiting for 17 other families to come down so you can go up. And we went yesterday and we were like, Nobody’s here. It was nice. It was really shoulder season there.
00:02:21
I think it’s just because it’s so far out in the middle of New Mexico, and New Mexico is honestly, it’s like a very rural state, so there’s not a lot like, Albuquerque is close, which has a lot of people, but at the same time, it’s an hour. There’s not a lot of big cities in New Mexico. No, we only went through, I think two of them, and that was Roswell and Alamogordo before.
00:02:50
When we first started this trip, we on our way to Florida for the first time. We went to Alamogordo, stayed in Alamogordo so we could do White Sands. And then so far we’ve been to some pretty amazing zoos, but we hit the Alamogordo Zoo. Value wise, it was epic. All the animals came out first thing in the morning.
00:03:13
It’s a rescue zoo. And again, nobody was there. Yeah, it was just like, perfect. And I think it was like $3 a person.
00:03:25
It was cool. It was one of those, like, you don’t expect for stuff to be in a little tiny town like that. And yeah, it was all rescue. So some of the exhibits were empty because the snakes got too big. They had to be.
00:03:40
But yeah, it was a cute little Belmont. We liked that. That’s amazing. And then you obviously hit up White Sands. Did you happen to go to the Pistachio Winery?
00:03:50
We did not, no. What did we do? We did White Sands, and it was over Thanksgiving, too, when we were there, so it was kind of quiet. And that was when we first started, too. And we were only staying at places for like, four days.
00:04:07
We thought we had that mindset. We didn’t think we were going to be on the road as long as we are now. And so we thought in order to get across the United States, get all 50 states, we had to stay four days, five days. And that was it. Obviously not the case anymore.
00:04:21
Yeah. Now we try to stretch those out a little bit more. Right. I think everybody starts out just like that. Go fast, go, go.
00:04:29
Get it all done.
00:04:33
You see nothing but everything. It’s the weirdest experience to go that fast. Okay, you touched on a little bit there about a kid. So can you just share who all is part of the Boundless bronchies? Yes.
00:04:46
So obviously us. And then we have two kids. Our kids are nine and almost six, a son and a daughter. And we have an eight month old mini Aussie Doodle puppy. He actually has his own Instagram page.
00:05:01
It’s not as updated as it should. Be, but he’s very cute. And so, yes, we home school the kids and work from the road. That’s amazing. Can I ask what you guys do for a living?
00:05:12
How do you keep this going? Well, now we do social media content creation. Right. So originally when we first decided to sell our home, sell everything, I worked for the army for 18 years, and I had resigned as a fire captain in the fire department. And we were only going to do a year and a half, two years at the most, see how many states we could get, because I was just going to get plugged back in.
00:05:38
I had two meetings with two different fire chiefs in different states, and I was just going to get plugged back in so I could pick up my time and continue on. And she did fundraising for the largest hospital in Reno and kind of the same thing. We were just going to sell everything, figure out where we were going to end up and then get plugged back in our Maybury. But then along the line, we started doing rallies and a couple of other things and realized this is actually fun. And people at the rallies were making money doing stuff that they love doing.
00:06:10
And so we’re like, hey, let’s switch this up. And maybe for like a year, we try as hard as we can to start a social media business, basically documenting our RV family adventures. And then over the last six months, we had a pretty dedicated strategy to just building up our page. We pushed hard because we fell a little behind and then so now we are setting up long term contracts with companies and just doing content creation for them on a monthly basis. And it’s really fun because we look at stuff we use basically like, hey, what’s the stuff that we actually use that benefits us?
00:06:48
And James has a lot of experience in construction. His dad was a general contractor, and so he worked with him growing up, and so he’s really good at the DIY stuff. And we’ve renovated most of our trailer and I realized, oh, I did fundraising. And so it’s not that much of a transition for me to work with brands. It’s sales, in a sense.
00:07:10
That’s what we do now, and we’re fingers crossed going to keep going with that. Yeah, well, that’s exactly it. You’re so right that it is just a transition from one sales way of doing things to another sales way of doing things. And if you’re already a natural at it, that’s a pretty smooth transition. And it’s been fun to work for ourselves.
00:07:33
We’ve had that kind of entrepreneurial idea, but this is the first time where we’ve really been like, we get to set our own hours, and oftentimes we probably work more than we should, like most entrepreneurs. But then we also get to say, hey, it’s 02:00 on a Monday. Let’s go for a hike. And we go. I think one of the best parts about it is we’re still doing the same plan.
00:07:54
We’re still visiting all the states. We’ve slowed down quite a bit, but at the same time we’re doing the lifestyle we wanted to do, but now we have kind of an avenue to keep doing it much longer than we had originally anticipated. Yeah, so you said that you’re a year and a half in right now, so let’s go back to the very beginning. Let’s start at the very beginning. What got you on the road?
00:08:18
Oh, jeez. So, honestly, I think James always had a dream that we would do this someday. Like, he had a very I don’t know if vagabond is the right type of childhood. He moved around a lot as a kid. He actually lived in a school bus two different times that his dad had renovated.
00:08:38
But we were both adamant that we were like, our kids are not going to do that. I grew up in the same house from when I was three till I was 18. And he’s like, yeah, we want that solid structure for our kids and we’re going to just stay with that. And then COVID hit, which was kind of like, well, now I’m working from home anyway. And he was going to work and the kids were home.
00:08:59
And then in Reno, the housing market was going crazy with people moving in from California. And we’d always thought about like, oh, we want to get a piece of property. We had a travel trailer, like a tow behind, and we got to go out four times a year if we were lucky, because he worked every other weekend and I was a nine to five and it just or the weather was crap, which happens all the time. We got a letter in the mail from a Realtor, and it was a total marketing letter that was like, hey, here’s how much you get for your house. And we were like, that’s kind of a lot of money.
00:09:32
Like, we bought our house ten years ago, this might actually work out. And then we reached out to a Realtor we knew, and she’s like, oh, you can get way more than that. And so we were like, well, let’s just see. Let’s just have her come over and look at it. And that was April of 2021, and the big, I think, deciding factor, because we had kind of thought, okay, we’re going to have them come.
00:09:55
We’re going to see if this is actually legitimate, if we can list our house. Because we had always thought about, do we want to upgrade? Where are we at? And we were at that point where it was either, hey, we want to look at a new house, we have two kids now. And we were in a 1500 square foot house.
00:10:11
And it was fine. We had an acre, we had chickens and ducks and all the stuff and the two nice cars and the two grid careers, kind of everything that’s in that little American Dream box. And it was, okay, well, housing prices are going up so much, we think we maybe want to upgrade our home and get into something that’s like 2500 sqft. So do we sell our house and put all of it into another home that’s bigger and probably nicer and kind of in the same area? Or then it was like, well, what if we just do it?
00:10:44
What if we just take off? What if we just sell everything and see? And I feel like James was like, Will you sign that in blood? Because I’m ready to do it. And so it came down to us, like, we had the Realtor come over and we were like, walking down, we have a little hill on our property.
00:11:00
And I was like, Honey, so should we list the house? And he’s like, I think we could do it. I think it would work. And we sat there looking with this really nice view, and I was like, well, in a year will we regret it if we in one year look back and say, remember that time we almost sold our house? And we almost did that really cool thing with our kids while they were still young enough and we could do it all with them and we’re not taking them away from all their best friends.
00:11:26
But then we didn’t. Well, we regret that. And we were like, yeah, we got to do it. We got to see. Let’s try.
00:11:31
And then stuff pretty quickly fell into place after that. When we put our house on the market, we went camping for the weekend in our trailer, the one we ended up selling before we upgraded. And I mean, we had an offer over asking in two days. Wow. And so we’re like, yeah, this is meant to be.
00:11:51
And then we had a few reinforcing things that happened. I was going to go put in my notice at work on a Friday and Monday of that week. I ended up being part of a mass layoff of like 200 people. And so it was like, oh, I was going to quit on Friday. Instead, I got laid off.
00:12:10
And we were like, good thing we had this plan in place because I don’t have a job. So that was one of those, like, yes, you’re making the right decision. I worked a lot, too. I worked as a captain of the fire department, especially during the summer. We fought wildland fire all up and down California, Southern Oregon, and I was gone a lot.
00:12:29
And so this kind of putting it all together, we wanted a lot more family time, which we weren’t getting. I felt like our kids were at that age where I would go to work for a couple of days. Like I worked a 48 hours shift, just normal not being gone for two weeks during the summer. And I would come back and I felt like my kids were speaking more words. They were running faster, they were jumping off things higher.
00:12:48
I was missing it. I think it was just we kind of put everything together and it just happened to work out when our house sold for what it sold and we felt comfortable and we kind of had that in the back of our mind, like, hey, we’re only going to do this for a little bit. And being government, being army, it’s really easy for me to pick up a job again. So that’s kind of what we thought. So it was more for a break, but now it’s going to be now it’s long term.
00:13:12
Yeah, because we never got to spend time together. I think, like our honeymoon, we had an eight day honeymoon where we were together and then maternity leave, which is not a vacation. Anybody but we had never spent more than eight nights together in the same place because he always left for two days and then was home for two or three and then gone for two. And so, I mean, I literally I think it was last night I was like, I just love getting to sleep in the thing that is you every week. It really is the little things that turn into the big things.
00:13:47
Wow. Things that just rolled into place that were just affirming that you were making. The right decision, which is that’s absolutely true. Yeah, that just really affirms that you’re good, you’re heading in the right direction that you’re supposed to be, and then here you are a year and a half later and no end in sight. Love it.
00:14:08
And I feel like we’ve changed so much, which people say that, and I always felt like I would hear people and be like, oh, yeah, you’re different, whatever. But if somebody had asked me, let’s say, I guess probably three years ago, right before we had started any of this, like, hey, do you want to home school your kids? I’d be like, no way. Absolutely not. Do you want to be like a work from home or like a stay at home mom?
00:14:32
I’d be like, that is not my thing. I like going to work. I put on my heels, I do my hair, I take people out to like, my job was taking people out to lunch and asking them for money, basically. But I had joked with James at one point where we were like, man, what if? Like, I would love to be a stay at home mom if you could also be a stay at home dad?
00:14:50
And then we were like, that could never happen. Or what if we could do some job where we just remodel our house and somebody pays us to do it and then we’re like, we’re kind of doing that now. We’re stay at home parents. I mean, our house moves all over the place, but we’re stay at home parents. And a lot of the work that we do is with companies who want to see us upgrade and remodel and do projects on our RV.
00:15:17
And so we’re stay at home remodeling social media, parents homeschooling on and we. Love homeschooling now, too. Like homeschooling is actually now that we kind of got our rhythm down. Like, when we first started homeschooling, it was like in our mind they had to go to school for 8 hours a day. We had to start with the Pledge of Allegiance.
00:15:37
It was very scheduled. And once you realize that that’s not how homeschooling roadschooling works and you get back into an actual routine where half of the stuff we do on a daily basis is out wandering and going through and learning all kinds of different stuff, that’s where a majority of our schooling comes from. And going up the east coast where we did the Civil War and American Revolution. Like history. We were going to Ben Franklin’s home, abraham Lincoln’s home, george Washington’s house.
00:16:07
They’re actually seeing real world stuff that we read in our social studies books. They’re experiencing that firsthand. Yeah, I love it. And that’s 100% the best part about road schooling, unschooling, whatever you want to call it, whatever title. Rather than just reading and seeing the pictures and the books at school, you get to really feel and touch and experience what is just in the textbook, which is totally a different level of learning.
00:16:35
And they’re going to remember it way better than they would have ever remembered just reading the words and seeing pictures.
00:16:43
The different places that we visited in the landscapes and where Nevada is, high desert, beautiful mountains, and there’s a lot of outdoor activities. But then we went and we spent a couple of months in Florida and they snorkeled and we’ve never seen a Portuguese man of war. All these different animals. And the biology that you learn and the ways that they actually get to use their bodies and develop that body awareness and just become these very confident little people. And there’s always that stigma where people are like, oh, your kids are home school kids.
00:17:19
They’re probably weird. They probably don’t want to talk to anybody like our daughter. After we went and did the hike to the arch yesterday, we were walking down and we stopped and told one person that was walking up because they were kind of looking at the arch and we said, oh, there’s another trail you can take. It’s way better than the little trail that goes up. You should check it out.
00:17:36
The next three people that we ran into, our five year old daughter goes, hi, excuse me. If you’d like, there’s a trail just up there and you can take it right up to the arch. It’s not too hard. And I was like, she’s more confident. And like half the adults.
00:17:51
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s so awesome because so many kids are just comfortable learning and experiencing other kids their age. And this is a whole other they don’t just get kids their age for 8 hours a day. They get every person of every walk of life, of every age, of every background. And it’s true social.
00:18:17
We’ve had so many people tell us, like, man, your kid’s handshake is better than many adults. And it’s our five year old daughter. I mean, she’s got a death greeting. She’s working on that sales from a very young age.
00:18:32
That’s amazing. Oh my goodness. So you guys have kind of learned the whole gamut in this last year and a half of the unschooling, the living different, the working for yourselves. Let’s touch a little bit on the travel side. So you guys took off from where and where all have you gone in the last year and a half?
00:18:56
I got this one. So we started in Reno, Nevada, and our original plan was to go into California and go south and hit all the parks. But COVID restrictions were really high in California. So we changed our thought process up a little bit, kind of did Northern California back through Nevada, through Utah, Colorado, Arizona, then into New Mexico, southern New Mexico before we went to Texas, all the way down to South Texas. We stayed on the San Padre Island for two weeks out on a beach boondocking.
00:19:29
And then from there we went Louisiana, Arkansas, across through Tennessee into Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, all the way down to the Kestra. And then we went from the Kestra all the way up to East Coast, hitting every major city all the way up to Maine. And then we started getting picked up by a couple of companies that wanted to sponsor us with some product and we were doing some contracts with them. So we shot across the north to Indiana, elkhart, Indiana, did some stuff with them and then we worked our way south back to Florida. And now we’re working across the south.
00:20:02
We just left Texas. We’re in New Mexico. And the plan right now is to do the upper Northwest. Yeah, we’re going to go from here to Arizona, Utah, back into Nevada before we do the Northwest this summer. So we’ll then hit all the Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, come back down.
00:20:20
So I think we’re at 36 states. New states, we’ve been through a few of them double. Yeah. The east coast though, really checks off. Those states, especially New England.
00:20:34
A couple of hours you’re through New Jersey or Connecticut, even though we try to stay in every single state. That’s one of our tickets to get the picture on our map is that we got to stay, do something significant in one of those states. But yeah, when you’re up in that northeast section, you fly through that little area. I think Rhode Island, we might have had dinner because I mean, it’s very small. I was going to say I don’t even know where you’d stay in Rhode Island.
00:21:02
It was like literally where our campground was at was like 20 minutes from Rhode Island. So we drove in, spent a lot of time in Rhode Island and then came right back out. I would think that counts. I think that counts there. That’s good enough.
00:21:18
Pretty spectacular beaches. Oh my goodness, you’ve explored so many places. You still have like the whole inland part, right? Yeah, we’ve been to places like we’ve been to Oregon, Idaho, but we’re not checking them off until we’ve done it as a family. And in our fifth wheel we got quite a bit of states.
00:21:39
That’s why and we slowed down because we were supposed to hit all 50 states with one flight to Hawaii in a year and a half, two years. And now we slow down to like right now we’re doing one week stays just to get back home for graduations. But after that, we’ll slow back down to two weeks a month stays. And that was the other thing as our beards, like, full time r beards. I can’t believe the difference between, like, a one week stay or a daily stay versus a one month.
00:22:05
One month typically, especially like what we found in Florida. Those are almost I mean, a week. Like, you would pay for yeah, one. Week is what you would pay for a month, typically. Wow.
00:22:16
So we’re slow down to a month now. Yeah. We learned that when we were in Texas. We stayed at a Jelly Stone for three weeks. Right at the very beginning, we needed a little break from school because we were at the RV school there.
00:22:27
So we went to a Jelly Stone great summer vacation. Let’s go for three weeks. If we stayed that one more week, we would have saved about half the cost that we paid, which is just wild. They have all the really cool amenities, and yeah, they’re $700 a month for a lot of them, where you’re like, Wait a minute, these are $90 a night? Yeah, it’s crazy.
00:22:53
That’s always one of my first tips to just about anybody, and I’m sure you guys will do the same now.
00:23:02
Yeah, because it changes everything. When we were going fast, a lot of ours was boondocking, though, so it didn’t really cost us anything. We do so much content. We have pretty decent mobile Internet, but there’s a lot of places on the West Coast. When we get back to where I know there’s no reception now that we’re doing so much content, we do stay at RV parks mostly.
00:23:26
Yeah. We love boondocking. That’s all we ever grew up with. Say that again. Boondocking is all we ever grew up with.
00:23:34
We miss it just because in Nevada, northern Nevada, where we’re from, there was no RV parks. We grew up our whole lives ten camping in the back of the truck, like, just in a sleeping bag on a sleeping pad. That’s all we grew up with. So that’s all I knew until we started doing this. And when we got to Texas and we stayed at a Jelly Stone outside of Kerrville, and we were mentioning, hey, we’re going to Florida, and people were always asking us, well, where are you staying?
00:24:03
Where are you booked? I’m like, we’re not booked yet. And they’re like, you’re going to Florida and you haven’t booked yet? Yeah, we got laughed at. We got laughed at quite a bit.
00:24:10
So then once we realized, like, snowbirds from Canada and all the northern states filter down to Texas and Arizona, Florida, we’re like, Holy cow. We got to start making our reservations with places. So now we’re booked out a lot further in advance. You guys hit the road. Was there a special process that you guys did to sell everything, to get everything out to actually make that transition to get on the road.
00:24:37
When we realized we were going to sell everything, we literally went hard every single day. We started doing immediately on that day when we’re like, are we going to regret this? When we said, yes, this is what we’re doing, we immediately got on with our phones and started taking pictures of everything we had. Like, we wanted to keep some family heirlooms, and I did construction with my dad, so tools and photos. After that, we literally went on More Sunsets Please and listed everything we had on More Sunsets Please, from small tools all the way up to our camper trailer, like, everything.
00:25:12
We had a couple of yard sales, like a big community garage sale. We did that. We actually included quite a bit of our stuff with our home sale. The couple that bought our home was a young couple, and they’d been living in a loft above their parents garage or hit one of their parents garage for like a year or so. And so when they came, we had told the realtor, like, hey, if whoever looks the house wants to buy anything.
00:25:38
And so then when they came, they were like, well, do you also want to sell this and this? And we were like, yes, add it on. So we did, like, a separate little contract, and I was really glad because we had a huge bedroom set that was really nice. But we were like, what are we going to do with this? Number one, when we moved that dresser in, it was like, it came fully assembled, solid, I don’t know what kind of wood.
00:26:01
We were barely able to move it in together. And so I was like, Honey, I do not want to move that dresser out. And so they wanted to buy the whole bedroom set, and we were like. And we had chickens and ducks, and they even took the chickens and ducks. I left a closet full of clothes.
00:26:17
I had all my professional clothes. And the girl I mean, I say she’s a girl, she’s like 23, so she’s young, and she had just gotten a new job in an office. And I was like, do you think all these clothes would fit you? Because I’d be happy to leave them because I’m not going to take them, and what am I going to put them in? And she was like, absolutely.
00:26:41
They got a new house and a new wardrobe and some livestock.
00:26:47
They literally bought your lives. They bought your past lives. Actually, that was a big part, too, because we were in the house for ten years, and it’s where we brought both of our kids home to where we got our dogs, everything. James proposed to me in that house. And so actually, the couple that bought our house, they were dating when they bought it together.
00:27:12
And then I saw on Facebook that they got engaged, and I was like, oh, honey, look. You proposed to me in the dining room, but they just got engaged and. He proposed right there in the living room. It was such a good feeling knowing that there’s a lot of investors out buying homes, and then they flip them or they do whatever, and we were like, oh, but it’s like a whole new story for our house. It did so good.
00:27:36
That’s so amazing. And that gives that closure of that aspect of your life, that season of your life, so much better. It totally did because we put so much in it. Yeah, and we did. We completely remodeled it.
00:27:48
We did the whole front yard. Like, there was so much memories in the house. And you’re right, it totally brought it closure when we knew we were giving it to somebody where we didn’t have to worry about the things. Even though it wasn’t up to us anymore, we knew they were going to take care of it really well. It lets you move on so much better.
00:28:03
Oh, that’s amazing. What a great transition.
00:28:09
I think at the end, we were like, donate that, donate that, donate that. When you look back, there was probably some fears and challenges along the way. What were some of them that you guys faced and how did you get through them? I think in the very beginning, we were just, like, so excited, I would say. But day one, we hit our first big challenge.
00:28:30
So we took off and we only went a couple of hours away. We went just across the border into Northern California, and we’re like, we’ll just stay here our very, like, two nights, I think, because we hadn’t spent a night in our fifth quilt yet. We bought it and we had it on the property. We we had everything moved into. We did some painting.
00:28:46
We started remodeling, but we hadn’t actually stayed in it because we had so much we had to do at the house too. So we got up to our campsite. I think we went and got dinner, and we came back and we were like, there’s a weird smell. I don’t know what’s going on. And then we were thinking, well, maybe it’s the sewer.
00:29:01
Like, the person who had it before us, he hadn’t used it for a long time. Maybe there was something in the tank that we put water in it and it wasn’t clean or I don’t know. And we just were like, this is really weird. So I think we went did we go through the night or was it the night? Through the night.
00:29:18
And then it was just like it wouldn’t go away. So we start looking stuff up. We’re googling we’re on all this stuff and we can’t figure it out. And then finally James is outside and he’s like, Honey, you come outside. Are you okay?
00:29:28
And I was like, yeah, I kind of have a headache, but I’m cooking. It’s really hot and he’s like, yeah, it’s sulfuric acid. Because our battery is literally like a science project boiling over in the bath. Yeah. And it was venting out.
00:29:42
And where the vent went out, the smell was rising. And then we had the air conditioners on. So we’re pulling in all that bad air from the batteries right into the trailer. And we were just all getting lightheaded and like, yeah, that was our first day. That was a day one.
00:29:58
So we went to RV life, right? We got a new battery. And then we were like, okay, we are good. We’re going to hit the road. And so we took off from there to go into Northern California to stay.
00:30:15
Our friends, their parents have a beautiful ranch. So we were going to boondock there for a few days. And then we were leaving the trailer there and going over to the coast because before we had even decided to sell our house, we had actually made reservations and had an airbnb with James’s family and our family, like his family, my in laws, and to go and stay. And we were like, well, we don’t have to cancel it. We’re going to be in California anyway.
00:30:40
So we’ll see if we can leave our house at the ranch and then drive over. So day three on the road, we’re like, okay, we are good to go. The battery things figured out and we’re driving on, I think it was 49 maybe, in California beautiful forest. It’s like 02:00 in the afternoon, the sun’s shining and we’re looking at each other. It’s like a movie, right?
00:31:01
Like we did.
00:31:04
And then off the side of the road, we see a black bear running up right in front of our tree. And I think both of us were just like, no, this is not happening. Because we’re on like a seven or 8% downhill grade. You can’t do really anything at that point. So thankfully, the bear went in between the truck and trailer.
00:31:27
It did hit the trailer, but not the wheels. So we didn’t go off the road or anything, but it ripped off quite a bit of our black tank piping. And I think we were able to actually pull over like 2 miles later because there’s no pull offs there. And so I’m like, honey, I should all run up there. I’ll run.
00:31:48
And he’s like, what? I was like, I’ll go see if the bear is okay. He’s like, well, what are you going to do? I said, Well, I don’t know. He’s like, what if it is okay?
00:31:57
Well, maybe you should go with me. And he’s like, so we should leave our kids here on the side of the road and you and I should go run up a seven mile grade 2 miles with no shoulder to see if a bear is possibly injured or not? And I was like, you’re right. Who should we call? And he’s like, Honey, I don’t even.
00:32:14
Know, we ended up calling, like, animal control, just to let him know what happened. There’s a bear in the road. So that was day three. Day three. But I think, honestly, that was probably the biggest hiccups we had.
00:32:28
I had a fear in the beginning a little bit. I had never towed a fifth wheel before, ever. So the very first time I had ever towed a fifth wheel was when we went and picked this thing up. And I think kind of overcoming that one. If you decide you’re going to go full time RV life and you know you’re going to be in a fifth wheel, you got to accept the fact that you’re going to be towing a fifth wheel.
00:32:49
So I was just like, let’s try to make the easiest routes possible for us, minus going up through the mountains and hitting a bear, because I got to learn how to do this. I’m probably like anybody else when it came to backing up. When they first started, we have a couple of videos. One of them went over like a million where it’s me just like, doing the 47 points, like backing up, pull forward, back up, pull forward. But now I’m good.
00:33:14
Now I could do it in my sleep, but that was a fear because I didn’t know what we were going to be doing or getting. And I also home, and it is our home. Like a trailer. I mean, it is still a trailer, but you live in all the times. It’s not like, oops, I backed into a tree.
00:33:29
Well, we’ll just go to our house while it gets fixed. No, that is our house.
00:33:35
I think that was my biggest fear, outside of being the good parents that we are, that we like to think we are. I wanted our kids to really enjoy this lifestyle. We were basically taking them out of school, even though it was, what, second grade? And she wasn’t even in school. Yeah, because of COVID they weren’t in school.
00:33:53
I guess it was all computer stuff, but they still had the friends, we were still doing sports, we still had all that lifestyle kid things going on. And so I was a little worried. I was like, hey, we’re going to do this. Because my little boy, he was so in tune with everything we were doing. I was like, Listen, we’re going to go places, we’re going to be traveling, we’re going to see all these national parks, we’re going to go to Water Park to mix it up, make sure you have fun.
00:34:18
And we followed quite a bit of families before we did this, and I was constantly showing him videos, like, hey, here’s what these kids are doing. Here’s what they’re doing here. And he fell in love with it. But I still had that fear of, like, hopefully they love it. Our plan is to get a job in a year, so we’re just going to basically be in vacation mode for the next year, is what we were kind of thinking.
00:34:41
And I was just more worried about them. But once we figured out that they love this lifestyle and they actually enjoy and embrace the adventure, it’s amazing. And they meet so many people and you can stay so connected with your family still. When we were kids and the phone, you were happy that you had a cordless phone. Now they do video chats.
00:35:01
They call our parents, they call their cousins. We meet people out on the road and can stay in touch with them. And now we’re starting to where we’ve met people that we’ve become friends with, where we’re making plans to travel together in certain places or meet up somewhere or we’re going to be in the same area. And that’s the part where then right now, our son’s counting down the days until we meet one of the families like, oh, we’re going to see them in six days. And we’re like, yeah.
00:35:25
And that is the best part. When they make those connections, you divide off and you say, see you later, and then when you see them later, they’re super excited and they just pick up where they left off, which is awesome. And then they get to tell their stories of where each other were when they were apart. And it’s a lot of fun for those guys. And honestly, we find if you’re in a campground and somebody has Legos, they are all going to play together.
00:35:50
Yeah, that’s what our kids are doing today. They’re all playing Lego. Lego santa brought little RC cars for our kids this last Christmas. And so those are kind of fun to pull out and then that’s an instant friend maker. Maybe not with the campground staff.
00:36:13
That’s all right. It’s not totally who we’re trying to. Make friends with, but we’re conscientious, I think. So you guys had kind of a crazy start with all those things kind of happening in a row. Yeah, but it’s been pretty much smooth sailing since.
00:36:31
Or have you had any other crazy things happen? There’s been repairs. There’s been some big stuff that we’ve had to do. But you have that in a house, too. When we lived in our house, our swamp cooler went out or this went out.
00:36:45
We had to replace stuff. So we did have one of our front stabilizers broke when we were in Colorado. And thankfully we called Lippert just to get the right part number. And they sent us one, like three day old shipping at no charge. And we didn’t even have a brand new trailer.
00:37:06
We bought it used. But I think the stuff that it might be a lot for people who aren’t super handy, we joke with people, if you want to be full time in an RV, you either should be very wealthy or you need to be very handy because there’s going to be I mean, stuff breaks. Like it just does. And so, thankfully, James is really handy. I’m very good at calling customer service.
00:37:30
We work together really well because we can do those things. And so I think that was one of the repairs. We’ve replaced four cables on our slide system, so he’s a pro with that now. I mean, the first one, when it broke, I always go like, chicken Little. Worst case scenario that I’m like, it’s going to fall out.
00:37:52
The whole thing is going to fall. It’s not going to fall out. It’s fine. Said, yes, we need to replace it. And I’m like he’s like, what’s your biggest fear?
00:37:59
Like, when we were going up the east coast, I was like, I don’t know. I got to figure out our routing. I got to make sure everything’s good. And he’s like, what are you afraid of? And I said, I have this vision that we are driving towing, we’re going down a road, and then all of a sudden we’re on a cobblestone road and there’s a tunnel and we can’t fit through it and everything.
00:38:19
That’s not going to happen. Why? So I think that there’s been pieces where he’s been like, penny, we’re going to figure it out. And after probably six or eight months on the road, where I finally got on board with like, oh, we can figure everything out, and yeah, you do the YouTube video, you find the person who knows what they’re doing. We now love that we get to be a resource for other people who are going through stuff, and we’re like, oh, hey, don’t worry about that.
00:38:46
That’s fixable, right? You touched on something really important, that you either need to be able to fix it or pay for it. Because the biggest difference in living full time in an RV versus a house is you got to be able to keep going. Whereas in a house, you can put it off, you can leave things because the house isn’t going anywhere. You don’t need to keep up with whatever dates you have or plans you have.
00:39:11
Don’t get me wrong, you can change them and cancel them, but the whole point is to be able to keep moving. So you have to be able to fix these things in order to keep. Going or finding someone who can do it, because that’s like in a house, too, where if you have something in your house and they say, oh, we’ll come out and look at it in three weeks, then you go, okay, well, we won’t use that bathroom, right? If you’re in the house, we have one bathroom. If something happens with that bathroom, it needs to be figured out right away, right?
00:39:41
There’s no losing a bathroom. You don’t always have one accessible outside of your space either. Because even here, half the bathroom buildings. Are closed or they’re very far away, right? When you wake up in the morning, you don’t want to go for a run.
00:39:59
Not by choice like that, no. So you touched on some fears and hurdles. What then was one of the biggest wow moments you guys had that was just like reaffirming? Yes, this was the right decision. I can’t believe we’re doing this.
00:40:15
Oh, man. I think we’ve had a lot of them. I think yesterday was pretty cool. I was just going to say yesterday, but in yesterday, seeing the big arches going into some of these monuments in these valleys remind me of like when we were in the More Sunsets Please. We felt the same thing in Maine when we saw the ocean in Florida.
00:40:32
So it’s like these Niagara Falls during the made of the mist. Underneath Niagara Falls, there’s these moments where we kind of reevaluate everything and it just shows us our plan to get out here and do these things. We’re doing them now. And we would have never done this in our last life. 36 states, we never even traveled to the states around Nevada.
00:40:55
So to do what we’re doing and be in some of those places like New York City, to me, I didn’t think I was going to like New York City, but I loved it. Like seeing movies your whole life, going through 911, all of that, and then actually being in New York City. And fortunately for us, with all the craziness in the world going on, none of that was going on while we were there this summer. It was the perfect New York experience. New York City.
00:41:21
We walked up and down, saw so much cool stuff. Our kids were right there with us. One day we logged like 10 miles walking all over New York and just seeing stuff like that. The more you’re out here, I didn’t think we were going to get another wow moment coming through northern New Mexico. But then when you stick around and you stay somewhere for just a little bit longer and you can actually travel around the area, then you find those places and you’re like, wow, we would have never been here.
00:41:50
These parts of New Mexico, we would have never been here. You see places that weren’t even on your radar. And I think that sometimes it’s like these big wow moments, but also when you put it in perspective, where you’re like, what’s today? It’s Tuesday, it’s 10:00 a.m.. What would we have been doing if we had not decided to make this big change in our life?
00:42:15
We’re talking about Zam. I would have been sitting in my office in downtown Reno and I had this beautiful view. And sometimes at lunch I would sneak away and walk over and sit by the river for 15 minutes. And then I had to get back and then in my uncomfortable shoes, and I would go back. And I liked my job and like the people I worked with, but I didn’t have really any say in what I was doing.
00:42:35
And we love being outdoors. And that was one of the big things we now get to do that we get to be outside and spend that time. And it’s not like 15 minutes here and 20 minutes here, and is it going to be nice this weekend? And we’re like, Wait a minute, let’s look at the forecast and let’s work on the days when the weather sucks and go to the fun stuff when it’s nice. That’s my favorite thing to look at as well is, okay, it’s 10:00 a.m.
00:43:00
On a Tuesday, what would I have been doing? And look what I get to do. That is the most reassuring and reaffirming that this is the coolest way to. Live and it’s even good for people who don’t love change. I cannot highly recommend enough bringing your house with you because I like to have things in certain places and know where stuff is.
00:43:25
And I think we’ve stayed in a hotel one time when we had some upgrades done on our trailer. We stayed in a hotel in El Cart. And I remember packing my bag. I was like, Honey, I don’t even know what to put in this bag. I mean, we’re pretty minimal, but did we get toothbrushes?
00:43:37
Because you have everything, but you get to go to all the places and you get to sleep on your comfortable mattress every night and you know you have the things you need, and you don’t have to worry about all the little stuff of travel. Because before when we would take vacations in our old life, it was like, okay, we’re going to go somewhere and we’re going to be there for a week. So we’re either going to drive for a day to get to this beautiful place or we’re going to get on a plane with our kids, which is always and then you spend the first day like, oh, wait, they don’t have this thing. Or wait, there’s no air conditioner, the fan, and where are the kids going to sleep? And where are we going to sleep?
00:44:16
Especially when your kids are really little and then you finally go out and you try to do the three things that you can cram into your week vacation and then you drive home and you spend a day unpacking everything and doing all the laundry. And we have not had a case of the Monday scaries in a year and a half because we don’t know what day it is. We just work every day, all day. You just work so different. Yeah, it’s very different in the afternoon.
00:44:45
That’s the thing, is it’s not that you’re necessarily working less, but you get to decide when you do that work. And you get to decide where you go, right? And you can choose to stay longer. You can choose to leave early if you don’t like a spot or if you love a spot.
00:45:05
Changing flights to go back from somewhere nobody’s going to rarely do that. But we were the last place we stayed. We were like, yeah, we don’t love it here. We’ve done the thing there is to do. And it just wasn’t right for us.
00:45:17
And so we called the park we’re at now, and we’re like, hey, can we come two days early? They’re like, yeah, we got your spot. Yeah. That flexibility is amazing. So out of all the spots that you’ve been, then, what’s been your favorite so far?
00:45:32
Top one. Not even top three. What’s been your top one? Okay, I’m going to say this is not an RV park, but I think when we stayed on the beach, padre Island National Seashore outside of Corpus Christi, we boondocked for two weeks out there. And it was right before Christmas 2021 because we left in September.
00:45:54
We got there for two weeks at the beginning of December. And I feel like that was where we really felt like it was a big checkpoint for us. Number one of like, okay, we had that on our list that we were like, we’re going to camp on the beach in Texas, like on the ocean. And there was no cell service, no anything. We had to go a mile.
00:46:14
And we woke up every day to these beautiful sunrises. Our kids, we were out boogie boarding. We’d never been warm in December before. I mean, Reno in December is like it’s sunny, but it’s like it’s 30 degrees and it snows a bunch. And I was like, it is snowing back home right now.
00:46:34
And we are on the beach and we’re swimming, and nobody can tell us what to do. And I think honestly, we’ve stayed at some very nice RV resorts too. But I think that was probably that. Was a good one. I really liked Arches National Park because it was like the first time I felt like super small.
00:46:53
If you’ve hiked moab at all, you’re in these super high cliff areas and you walk through, down right through the middle of these monster cliffs. And I just remember being so awestruck thinking like, this seems so fake and it just looks so beautiful. That was my first one I really loved. But I think the beach was nice because not only was it like that point where you’re breaking away from the old life a little bit, but we had zero cell service. So it was like two weeks of like we came into Corpus a couple of times while we were there, but for the most part, there was no Internet, no movies, no nothing.
00:47:34
It was us in the beach, and it was the best. Oh, that’s amazing. That’s like the dreamett boondocking possible. It was awesome. It was great.
00:47:44
I can’t wait to do that one again. Yeah, that’s amazing. Is there any place, I don’t mean necessarily place that you stayed, but just places that you’ve been, you visited, what have you, that you would not go back to whether it was just something that wasn’t your cup of tea or it wasn’t as great as you thought it would be. The east coast. Yeah, well, not the whole East Coast.
00:48:06
But for East Coast. We’re from northern Nevada. So you go from one town or I guess Reno is a city, but you drive like an hour, 2 hours before you get to the how you see people again. Right. And we were just so inundated from that lifestyle to you went through states before there was a break in environment.
00:48:29
It was just one town messed with the next town, to the big city, to the fast paced driving, to the fast paced life. No hellos, no hides. And it was just different to us. We were just talking about this the other day. I was super excited that we did it because we’d never been on it.
00:48:46
Yeah, it was very fun. It was something that will cherish forever. But if we don’t have to go back to someplace, it would be the Northeast. I say like north of DC is probably it’s a little too much for us. And the people are kind of different.
00:49:04
I think I describe them as like there are still very nice people, but they’re not friendly in the same way. It’s just there’s so many people. They don’t say hi, they don’t make eye contact because there’s so many people. It’s not even their fault. It’s just like if they stopped and said hi to every single person, they thought they’d never even get to work or get anything done.
00:49:25
And especially with driving. I know James at one point was like, oh gosh, I think I might have cut that person off. They don’t even know that’s just how they drive here. Nobody notices when you cut them off. I think in New Jersey they say like you get into your vehicle but your soul stays outside and then you drive.
00:49:40
And then once you get out of your vehicle, your soul comes back in and you’re a person again. But there’s just so many people there. That’s kind of how you have to do it. That’s true. I’m sorry.
00:49:51
That’s really funny. I feel like that in Florida. Like the drivers in Florida are ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. I mean, any big city, I guess if you’re anywhere where there’s a lot of people but I don’t know if.
00:50:05
I could I’m the opposite. I don’t know if I could do the west coast. It’s just too much dirt. I love the green.
00:50:14
I think that one of the things I love too is going anywhere east. There’s not a lot of places. And I know West Virginia because we spent a lot of time in West Virginia and Tennessee and the mountains are really beautiful, Kentucky. But the mountains out here you could see like we’re right outside of almost a 12,000 foot mountain and you can see more 12,000 foot peaks in the background and it’s just like big open range. I do miss that.
00:50:41
But there is a lot of wind and there’s a lot of dirt. It’s beautiful. And we got disoriented in the south. We got not lost actually driving because we navigate really well. But we’re used to growing up with like, oh, that mountain is over there.
00:50:56
I know which direction I’m going. And you get out where there’s no mountains, and I’d be like, Wait, it’s that way. It makes sense. I don’t need that snort, okay. I told this way.
00:51:09
I’m the weirdo who learned to follow the sun, so I can know where I’m going by where the sun is because we don’t have to do that large things to track, like mountains or anything. We don’t even have what I call the More Sunsets Please of the east. So those are the More Sunsets Please, like the Smokies and stuff in the Appalachians, but the west. Those are the mountains. Those are legit mountains.
00:51:31
This side are More Sunsets Please. They’re like Hobbit mountains. Yeah, they’re beautiful. But yeah, you get out here and we grew up like More Sunsets Please in Reno are right there. And like the Rockies and the Tetons, I mean, those are like the beauty.
00:51:47
Yeah. Lord of the Ring stuff.
00:51:50
Yeah, they’re for the humans, not for the Hobbits.
00:51:58
We want those Elf Mountains. That’s right. Give me the good ones. It’s so funny and it’s so different to hear because people who are from the East Coast love the East Coast, but like to visit the West Coast. People who are from the West Coast love to visit the East Coast, but prefer the west.
00:52:17
So it’s just so interesting. It’s so interesting to see how different everybody chooses what their favorites are. And we thought we were going to get out east and be like we thought we’ll find somewhere in Tennessee that we want to eventually settle down. And we liked it. And I can’t say never that we wouldn’t want to be there at some point.
00:52:37
But once we got out of Texas and into even just New Mexico, which still is pretty far from where we’re from, we just were like, oh, this feels more familiar. There’s a lot to be said about that. Yeah, about wherever your roots were being drawn back to them. No matter how much you travel, you’re still drawn to where your roots are. Our parents are going to love that.
00:53:04
I mean, they were excited for us, but they’re like, eventually you’ll come back. Right? And when we left, we were like, no peace. We’re out. And now we’re like, well, maybe we’d want to settle down out here again.
00:53:15
And I know my mom’s just like. I think that’s all moms. Any pivotal point along your journey that really changed you guys? There was no going back. You’re a different person now.
00:53:28
I think our main pivotal point at this point was when we ended up at that nomad rally outside. Of Orlando, Florida, six months into our adventure, where we teamed up with like twelve other families. And three of the families that were there were really influential on starting social media. And so that’s where we decided because we were documenting our travels for family and for our own self on Instagram and Facebook. But once we did that nomad rally and we saw how people had been doing this for like seven, eight years with their families and being successful with it, we’re like, well, and then they came at us like, you guys would be really fun to follow and you should document your travel.
00:54:13
So we’re like, let’s give it a shot. Try it. It was on the end of that week where we created More Sunsets Please and over the next couple of weeks we really discussed and researched strategies and figured out how we were going to make our channel do it. And then once we came up with that strategy, that’s when we were like, okay, we’re transitioning from this vacation life to maybe doing this a little bit longer. If we tried the social media business out and document our RV travels with homeschooling, RV tips, repairs, everything else that we do.
00:54:49
And that changed everything because our outlook went from, hey, we’ve probably got like six months to a year left of traveling to, wait a minute, if we could make money doing this, then we should be doing this as a family. Kind of on a clock. We had set that timer for ourselves of like, okay, once we hit this checkpoint, we got to make sure we want to figure out where we want to be. You got to go in. We got to maybe set up some interviews.
00:55:11
We’re going to do a year or so. And then once we realized, well, maybe we don’t have to plug back in. We can just keep doing this. But then it was like, okay, well hold on. And that was also one of the points when we were like, we got to stay places a little bit longer because we’re not going to work from the road.
00:55:27
We’re not just going to have the, oh, what fun things can we do in a week? It’s okay, let’s stay now for at least two weeks so we can do a few fun things and then still work. And that’s a mind shift too, to get used to being in a beautiful place where you don’t go out and explore every day because you’re still living your life. Sometimes we’ll feel like, man, we didn’t really do a whole lot with our kids. We did their home school and we did this.
00:55:51
But then we worked and they just kind of played. And I was like, but we did that the house all the time because it’s still just life. Not every day is spectacular, but you can appreciate how much of the time if you choose to make it spectacular, it’s right there. You don’t have to plan a whole vacation, although you are basically planning a trip every week of your life. But that’s why we have RV trip wizards.
00:56:19
But like you said, you can be in a spot for a month and work, work, work till that two in the afternoon and then go explore. And then the next day you can choose to go explore in the morning and then work, work, work, and then go explore again. Or choose to just pound it all out in one rainy day and then go and explore on a good day. Yeah, or take a break. Like, we did that when we were in Florida.
00:56:43
We stayed near the Springs and we were like, we’re eight minutes from the Springs. So if we got up and we worked for a few hours, we were like, yeah, we could take 3 hours. We don’t need more than 3 hours to go down there, let the kids swim, have a great time, and then come back. And you get that family time every day and you get to take advantage of like I mean, I think all people, or most people are better. Between the hours of 09:00 A.m.
00:57:09
And 01:00 p.m.. We now get our kids during that time because before it was like, oh, I get to wake them up in the morning. We all cry on the way out the door because somebody didn’t eat their bagel or whatever it was. And then you take them to school or daycare, and then you pick them up and you basically get them ready for bed. And I realized our kids are really rad and we spent kindergarten and first grade sending our son to somebody else to get to hang out with them during those awesome hours, and now we get him for those hours.
00:57:41
It’s really cool. Yeah. Well, how has this impacted the kids? How do they feel about all of this? Our kids have grown so much in the last year and a half.
00:57:51
Sometimes I feel like the other night Wesley and us three were just watching videos, like funny videos, and he was telling us stuff. I was like, adults know that, but they’re just both so much more rounded. They communicate so much better, and they’re just experiencing life so much more. When we ask them, because I ask them all the time, like, are you happy? Are you guys liking this life?
00:58:17
Because all you got to do is tell us you’re not happy and we’ll make some changes. And I love hearing their reactions when they’re just all about this life. They want to go swimming again. They just want to hang out. We’re doing so much more.
00:58:31
When we were in Kentucky, I just thought about this because I looked over at my little girl. We went to this kangaroo farm where there was like 100 kangaroos and they literally were swarmed by little kangaroos wallabies, feed him and wallabies and they were just surrounded by these creatures and swimming with manatees in Florida. They’re experiencing stuff. And thankfully for social media now, when we were growing up, we didn’t have it, but we go through our reels and our videos all the time, reminding them, like, Remember this? Do you remember this?
00:59:00
And they do. So then when you start talking to them, like, what’s your favorite place? What was your favorite thing? Their mind just goes all over the place, and it’s something they would have never had before. And I think we instill into them, like, gratefulness and gratitude.
00:59:14
And the moment that they stop when we talk to them about how they love this life, it brings me so much joy because there is no sense of doubt in their little hearts, in their little words. They are in love with life right now. Like, when we do our prayers and stuff, wesley is always like, Dear God, thank you. We love this life. Can we please keep doing it?
00:59:36
I’m like, of course we’re doing the right thing. Yeah. Especially to get that confirmation from them just passing, and it’s not drawn out of them. They’re totally on board with, we love this. This is fantastic.
00:59:50
You are definitely content creating now, but you’re also creating little video memories, like a little video memory book for them as well. Of all the things that you guys. Have done, favorite one? Yeah, those are my favorite videos to go back as a family. Like, when we’re laying in bed at night, we’ll skip back, like, six, seven, eight months, a year ago, what we did, because those didn’t get a lot of views when we first started doing this.
01:00:12
Those family days, family little trips where it’s just what we want to see later on in life, those don’t get a lot of views, which I’m totally fine with, because when we’re laying there in bed and looking at them, it just reaffirms that what we did was the right choice. We love it. How about for you two? What has this done for your marriage? It’s been huge for our marriage.
01:00:31
We’ve always had a good marriage. We’re a couple that fought. We talked about stuff, but also we had that kind of time away. He would go to the fire department, and so if we had stuff that we disagreed on, usually we kind of let it go. It was like, It’s not that big of a deal.
01:00:47
He’d be at work for a couple of days, he’d come home and we would let stuff go, and it was totally fine. But when you live in a small space, you don’t have room for that. You don’t get to have that.
01:00:59
You deal with stuff, like, right there. The whole purpose of this podcast is to inspire someone who might be in the same situation as you guys were, looking for change, looking for something different. How would you inspire them to get out there? And do this. Yeah.
01:01:14
As far as inspiring people, I think everything is figureoutable if you really, really want to be out here and doing this, you can figure out a way to do it. There’s a bunch of jobs that you can do from the road. And I think everybody always thinks, oh, remote work. I have to do remote work. It doesn’t have to be remote work.
01:01:32
There’s a lot of work that you can do from the road that’s not remote. There’s work camping jobs all the time where you can go work somewhere and stay there. And maybe it’s a little bit longer, but you try that out, see if you like it. You could be an RV tech. You can do remote work, you can do stuff online, but there’s so many ways that you can figure out how to get out there, and it doesn’t have to be full time, or you could live somewhere for extended periods.
01:01:57
I mean, I know we see people who are like, oh yeah, we live in our RV and we stay somewhere for six months and then we go travel for two months and then we come back. Or you can figure out lots of ways to do it. It’s so worth it. You’re going to put in the work to make it work and make it happen. But I think the other thing, too, is you do have to want it because it is not a full time vacation and it is not easy.
01:02:23
It’s just different challenges than you have in a house. But if you really like it, then it so worth it. We had one of my friends when we first were taking off, she said, oh, man, I don’t think that I could spend that much time with my husband. And I was like, yeah, I couldn’t spend that much time with your husband either. But this guy I could hang out with all the time.
01:02:42
So you have to know what your personality is because it’s not for everybody. There are a lot of my close friends who I know, if they lived through our normal week, they’d be like, no thanks. That is not for me, and that’s okay. What do you think? I think to piggyback on what I’ve learned, I didn’t think there was other jobs out here.
01:03:04
So knowing what I know now, if I was going to influence somebody, especially another dad or somebody like that, I would just tell them, what’s the most important thing to you? Because to me, working a job where I didn’t feel welcomed anymore and missing out on my family, being with them, being with our kids every single day, that meant the world to me. Like, I did not want to be away from our kids anymore, and so I didn’t care what was going to happen, honestly. So now knowing that there are so many jobs out here, most of the work camping jobs that I’ve seen too typically, we’ve been offered jobs. One was at a jelly stone.
01:03:41
One was at another place in Tennessee where some of them, they pay for your whole entire site. All of your utilities give you a monthly stipend for the laundry room, and then they pay you an hourly wage on top of that. So it’s completely doable. And in a lot of cases, it’s more money than probably a lot of people are making in their careers right now. Every single day you’re with your family, you get days off.
01:04:06
A lot of those are like, work three days, work four days, they have three days off, and you get to go explore. But then, like she was saying, once you’re done, if you don’t like that area, some of them are for three months, some of them are for six months. You just pick up a different pick up the phone and call a different work camping area in a different state and say, let’s go try that. Or look at your current skill set, look at the things you’re already good at, and then think about, well, how could I do something different with that? Or, how could I take this job and translate it to something else?
01:04:35
Or do I just have something else completely? Like, we’ve had people who have said to us, like, well, it sounds great that you guys do that, but I’m a career firefighter, so I could never do that. That was actually a comment that we got from somebody, and I was like, yeah, James literally worked for the Department of Defense for almost 20 years. You can’t get much more career than that. And if you really want it, sometimes you just got to take a chance.
01:04:58
That’s what. You figure it out as you go. You make a mistake. Oops, okay, change it. Do something else.
01:05:07
Exactly. Even just the way that you decided to start, you guys started with going really fast. You went, oops, no mistake. Let’s slow it down. Right?
01:05:17
It doesn’t mean and there are others who they hit the road, and after a year, they’re like, you know what? I really love this, but maybe not full time. So then they get a home, and then they do extended travel. So make it work for you. Whatever you want, it’ll work.
01:05:33
That’s great advice. What does the future look like for you guys? What’s next? Well, I think so, we launched our website, Belmosbronickies.com. So we’re working on that.
01:05:47
We’re working on a couple of ebooks and guides for people for all kinds of different stuff. Just more traveling and more getting out there, hitting up the rest of the national parks, hopefully. Yeah, we want to make this life work. So I think developing some long term relationships with the companies we’re working for so that we don’t have to worry about constantly reaching out to people anymore like we did when we first started, and then just doing that, hitting the states and just really living life. It sounds a little cliche because you hear it your whole life.
01:06:17
You got one life to live. But it’s true. One. It is true. But I think stepping away from the lifestyle that we used to live, I don’t think I thought that very often, like, oh, we only got one life to live, because we were so inundated by their career, the school, the sports, the one weekend off a month that you don’t think about, you got one life to live.
01:06:40
Now that we’re out here on the road and you separate yourself from that old life, you realize, wow, you could really be living a life. I feel like what we’re doing right now, becoming these entrepreneurs and living out here on the road is something they should be teaching in school. But then I realize then everybody would be free thinkers because that’s what we’re out here doing. You got one life, everybody has an hourglass, and you got to live it the best you can. And I think that’s what we’re doing now, take advantage of it.
01:07:09
Like, I know Idaho, their tourism board did that great campaign, 18 summers, right? And they talk about summers with your kids. And we still think that, except that I’m like but we get well, not 18 years. Now our son’s nine, where we at least have those nine years or however long we decide to do this, where it’s not just the summer. Because even if you have 18 summers, if you’re working full time, you get two weeks of that summer.
01:07:33
And so just kind of flipping the importance of what you hold up in your life, too. Like you were saying with the kids, what could be more important than that? And that was one of the biggest probably one of the only arguments that we had in our old life was when one of the kids was sick or there was a school holiday, figuring out who was going to take the day off. And then we both felt like garbage because we were like, these are our kids. There’s nobody we want to spend time with more.
01:07:57
Yet we’re feeling this burden because of how our lives are set up that it just didn’t make sense. So to take advantage of it because, yeah, you do get one life. I know. Like, I’m going to throw it out. There one of our big goals.
01:08:08
We’re getting closer and closer to 40. And this year our goal is we’re both going to have six pack ABS. Because we never had them before. It’s going to happen. 40 is the new what, 30, 20?
01:08:20
I don’t know. It’s the new 40 is the new 40. Yeah, six pack. That’s pretty awesome goals. I’m going to hold you to that.
01:08:31
Do it. Do we have a goal, like, by December, before you by August. August? Yeah. Okay.
01:08:40
All right. So I will call you back on my anniversary and say, did you bring me six packs?
01:08:49
We do.
01:08:53
I won’t have six pack ABS by then because we will call you and make sure, like, you guys.
01:09:01
That’S fair. But, you know.
01:09:06
Motivate. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, no, I don’t need six pack ABS. I just could go back to what I was when we first started this travel.
01:09:14
That’d be great.
01:09:18
Food out there. It is. And it’s so easy to fall into vacation life with this and not into routine, structured life that we’re so used to, because it is all freedom, right? It’s all freedom. You can do whatever you want, right?
01:09:31
Yeah. But fall into vacation mode very easily. And I don’t mean dining out or whatever. I just mean, like, chilling or I’m just going to go for a walk, or instead of I need to work out. I need to do this, I need to do that.
01:09:44
Right. But August, I’m watching you guys. Yeah. Thank you. Keep your eyes out.
01:09:49
Get ready. Yes. Bring on the six packs. Bring on the travel. Hold the beer.
01:09:58
So if anybody’s looking to connect with you guys, where all can they find you? So everything is boundless, bronickies. So there’s boundlessbronickies.com. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re on YouTube, and James is on the BNW trailer hitches website because he’s officially a model now. Yeah.
01:10:19
Everything is boundless, bronickies. Nice. So that’s what the ads are for. Yes. B and w hitch people.
01:10:25
Right? We’re exploring all avenues to make money. So if modeling is a thing.
01:10:32
So you were a firefighter, right? You just say that. Wasn’t there, like, a firefighter calendar? So you guys could totally bank off of that and have your own More Sunsets Please. That’s funny you say that, because we have thought about reaching out to a bunch of friends, like doing there’s no physical requirement.
01:10:52
Requirement. You have a body as long as. You got a body. We want to do, like, RV related stuff, like around our calendar. Yeah.
01:10:59
Oh, my gosh. That would be amazing. That would be amazing. Yeah. Look for it soon.
01:11:03
On balancemonicutes.com. Well, this will air like, I think it’s June is when this one airs, so you got a little bit of time. Perfect.
01:11:16
This is amazing. I appreciate this conversation so much, you guys. This has been just wonderful. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much.
01:11:23
This has been fun. Thank you for listening. If you’re enjoying these stories, please leave us a review as it helps our podcast reach more listeners. For more information about this podcast with show notes, links, and more, please go to our website, More sunsets. s.com.
01:11:41
If you know of someone with a great story, send an email to info@moresunsetsplease.com, and I’ll be sure to get back to you. Until next time, keep taking time to enjoy more sunsets, please.
