Our life on the road generates lots of questions. So I figured I’d answer a few of them here.
Q: Where is your home base? A: We don’t have one. We are what the RV industry calls “full-timers”. We live full time in our RV. We sold our house in Oklahoma and relocated our legal domicile to Sioux Falls, SD for tax purposes.
Q: Huh? What’s that legal domicile stuff? A: We have a mail service that serves as our address. It is a small office operated by a friendly fellow named Larry. He forwards our mail to us; and since the address is NOT a post office box, it serves as our “home address” for our drivers licenses, car tags, etc. And since SD doesn’t have a state income tax, it saves us some money, too. :-) Our vehicle insurance also dropped by over 2/3 when our address changed from Ok to SD. 
Q: How do you get your mail? A: When we want our mail we call or e-mail Larry and tell him where we are. Sometimes we have him send our mail to the campground we are at. Sometimes we have him send it to us care of General Delivery at the local Post Office. We have him send our mail once a week if we are somewhere for a month or more. Other wise, we have him send it to us “on demand”. For this fine service he charges $10 a month plus postage. Larry also very kindly tosses out all the flyers and other junk mail for us.
Q: Where do you store the stuff from your house? A: We don’t. Everything we own is here with us. We thought about storing things. But in thinking about it, we realized that over several years, we would literally be spending thousands to store things that cost hundreds. And if they were in storage, obviously we didn’t need them. So we gave things that had been passed down to us in the family to other family members. The rest went into garage sales. What didn’t sell either went to charity or the dump.
Q: How could you bear to part with your stuff? A: That’s just it. I realized that stuff is just stuff. Some of my more precious things are here with me. A mug I bought in Scotland. A plaque from my son. A set of spice jars from my mother. And it was a bit wrenching to part with some of the gew-gaws that had graced my shelves for years. But I honestly don’t miss them. We have everything we need here with us. The most important thing we have is each other.
Q: How do you decide where to go? A: Well, obviously — North in the summer, South in the winter. When we cross into a new state, we stop at the visitor center and get ALL of the pamphlets. Then we look through them for fun things to see and do. When we first hit the road, we wanted to see the corners of the country we hadn’t been to yet — the northeast, southeast and northwest. So last year we hit New England. This summer we are in Oregon. Last fall we had some issues with the motorhome and needed to take it back to the factory in Iowa. So we were in northern Iowa in November. 
Q: How do you pick campgrounds? Do you make reservations? A: We have several campground directories we carry with us. Once we decide whereabouts we want to go, we look at the listings in that area. We also look at campgrounds on the web. And other campers will be more than happy to give recommendations or tell you places to avoid. Sometimes (like in the high season) we make reservations a week or more in advance. But quite often, we just drive in.
Q: How far do you drive in a day? A: That depends on several different things. In general, we hit the road between 9 and 10 am and drive until 2 or 3 pm. Which is about 150 to 250 miles. But sometimes we have put in loooong days of 400 or more miles. Usually when we are trying to outrun a storm or need to be somewhere specific. Once we drove about 90 miles, saw an idyllic campground by a river and stopped there for a week.
Q: (Whispered, with a glance at Richard) Doesn’t he sometimes just drive ya nuts? A: Well, yes. But he’d do that in a house, anyway. And I make sure that I drive him nuts sometimes, too. Seriously, living in close quarters isn’t for everyone. Anyone contemplating living in an RV should remember that old adage: Everywhere you go, there you are. A person doesn’t change when their location changes. The way I see it, putting up with your spouse’s idiosyncrasies is just part of marriage.
Any other questions? Just ask.
mj
