Today marks our first anniversary as full-time RVers, or our One Year Nomadiversary so to speak. As we look back at our travel log for the year, we reflect on all the miles we’ve traveled, all the sites we visited, and all the people we’ve met.
We started out our new live as full-time RVers in St. Petersburg, Florida. My job changed from having to work in a corporate office to telecommuting. Robert and I decided it was time to sell most everything we had in our rented house in Florida, equip our RV with a mobile office, and make the transition to life on the road. My job also requires me to travel to company satellite offices, so being mobile and flexible is a perfect fit.
Our first three months were spent in Largo, Florida at Lee’s Travel Park. The park is on a busy street, but most places in Pinellas County are too busy for our liking. We seemed to be the troublemakers of the park because two or three times, we’d either get a call or a note on our door that our dogs were too loud. I guess they (mainly Tucker) were either whining or barking while we were gone. We found that we get fewer complaints if we would put them in their kennels with a blanket on top and keep the radio on loud. By now the dogs are much more accustomed to RV life and since leaving Lee’s, we haven’t had a single complaint. Either the dogs are much quieter and calmer than they used to be, or neighbors at other parks aren’t nearly as picky.
We left Florida in January to visit family and take the remaining of our keepsakes that we couldn’t bear to sell to our storage building in Missouri. Our trip
went well for the most part, except when we had forgotten to add fuel treatment. As we traveled north to colder weather, our fuel began to gel. We ended up being stranded for several hours in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Robert was smart as he pulled over and parked down the street from a shop with a Freightliner sign. Turned out it was the repair shop our roadside assistance called to help us out and we simply had to wait until they opened.
After our visit with family in Missouri, we were intending to go back to Florida to warmer weather. It turned out that my job took us to Colorado. Spending the winter in Color
ado was challenging, but we made it fun. Our pipes would sometimes freeze, luckily not for days on end. It turned out to be a minor inconvenience as we had jugs of water in the RV that I’d boil on the stove to clean up with. The heater core went out in the Jeep, so the drives into the office were freezing. Robert has an inverter in the Jeep, so we ended up buying a tiny heater to plug in. At least it helped with the frost on the window. We also warmed up rice socks to have in our laps to keep us warmer. We come to love our long johns and wool socks. None of that cold weather seemed to get us down. We were laughing through most of it and had a blast seeing the sites of Colorado on our days off.
Just as it was warming up in Colorado, work was leading us to Alabama. We headed out of Colorado at the end of April and went back to Missouri to visit family for a bit. By mid-May we called Tanner, Alabama home for two months. The only major thing that we had to take care 
of was getting our refrigerator repaired. It was giving us trouble in Missouri when we boondocked for a couple of days, then stopped completely on our drive to Alabama. Luckily, we found an RV repairman to come to us.
Alabama was good to us. We loved the people, food, and our weekend drives. The heat did get to us a bit, but at least our air conditioning was working just fine
. Mosquitos seemed to be bad this year as we seemed to bathe in deet.
In July, our next stop was back to Florida. Robert hoped to surprise his drummer friend, Pug, on his birthday. We parked in front of our friends’, Hippy and Blonde’s, house. We were able to catch up with all our friends, get some work done and make some plans for our future. The only drawback was the heat…Florida in the summer is brutal.
By mid-August, we set out to return to Missouri for family activities, i.e. wedding and baby shower. We didn’t need to be in Missouri until the first of October, so we decided to take the long way, by going up the east coast as far as we thought we should go, then make our way west. We wanted to see parts of the country that we’ve never seen before and do some experimenting with working and traveling versus staying in one spot for months at a time. 
We ended up traveling up the east coast through North Carolina’s outer banks, through Maryland and New Jersey to spend some time in Vermont. Then we made our way west visiting Niagara Falls and Chicago before we made it to Springfield, Missouri, by September 23rd where we’ll call home for a while.
Over this past year, we have been quite the road warriors. We know that this coming year we will have a significant change in work assignments, and most likely have to stay in one spot for longer periods, so we took advantage this year in doing all the traveling we could. We’ve been very fortunate not to have any major catastrophes. It seems just our refrigerator keeps giving us fits. Starting in Alabama, then fixing again in Vermont, and again going out somewhere in New York. As it stands now, we are convinced there is something wrong with it working on LP for long amounts of time. We hope to get it resolved within the next couple of weeks. We have the mini-refrigerator in the basement of the coach, so in our opinion all in all, we’ve been very lucky being catastrophe free our first year of being full-timers.
We look back over our first year and realize we have learned a lot. Instead of being in Colorado in winter and Florida in summer, if we have our way next year,
we will follow mild weather. Our goal is to be able to boondock more and we are planning improvements to our internet connection, solar, batteries, etc. to do so. We’ve learned a lot about organizing our workday so that we can make sure to be productive and accomplish what must be done, then go out and see what we want to see. At times it seems we are always on the go, but it has been well worth it. Another goal for next year is to do a better job at keeping up our blogging. We enjoy blogging, but time seems to get away from us. So far we haven’t tired of the RV life and look forward to seeing where our adventures take us and who we’ll meet in the coming years.
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A Few Stats:
Traveled 8,562 miles
Used 1,075.47 gallons of fuel
Spent $4,152.91 on fuel
Overall Average 7.96 mpg
Spent an Average of $3.87/gal
Cheapest fuel was $3.46/gal (6/26/12 in Jasper, TN)
Highest Priced fuel was $4.30/gal (9/14/12 Johnsonville, NY)
Visited 25 States
(New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming)