After the Happily Ever After

I just watched another Van Life video featuring a slow pan from fresh sun-dappled sheets and stylish macrame wall hangings to a stunning window view of majestic snow-capped mountains. Cue the steaming-coffee-mug-raise. #vanlife #blessed 

Please. 

I mean, I like boho wall decor and fresh outdoor scenery as much as the next person, but I don’t know why I even watch these videos anymore. I live my own #RVLIfe. And to be honest, it looks nothing like that. For sure, we have those days. Minus the macrame. We have sun-dappled moments and even great coffee. But most of our views look like this. 

In the real world, RV Parks are generally plots of land where the owners try to slot as many folks in as possible to make that land profitable. I get it. They need to pay for those septic tanks and shower facilities somehow. I am learning to look ahead at this and getting better at booking sites. So, our most recent site in New Hampshire looks like this.

It is glorious. 

But the point is, as we all know, Instagram and TikTok videos are curated content. They are there for aesthetic and entertainment value. They don’t tell a real story. They are slices of life, artfully filmed, filtered, edited, cut, and spliced together—with music. 

Those videos helped me fall in love with the idea of our dream. 

They are the “happily” in happily ever after. 

But what about after the “happily ever after.” The truth? It’s not all sun-dappled dream sequences. Real RV living means having to struggle a bit on a lot of days. Just like real life. 

Now, let me be very clear. I love our life. Every day is a treat. I don’t regret a single thing about our decision to travel. I’m not here to convince anyone that my life is hard and they should feel sorry for me.

Rather, I am here to set the TikTok record straight because, yeah, we all know it’s bullshit. But for posterity and reality’s sake, I thought I would capture some of the things you don’t see on the other side of happily ever after. These are the things they don’t show you in those pretty vids.  

And I think it’s good to get these down. Because I know I wasn’t prepared for some of the little stresses. 

Like space. And time. There is no place in this RV that you can escape to. And I get very little time alone. I mean, there is outside, sure. But no real place that I can go inside and shut out the world completely. I can hear everyone breathing and chewing and every other thing a body does. And they can all hear me. 

It's beautiful, but as living spaces go, it's tiiiiny.

And what’s even more fun is that this RV rocks like a ship on the water when anyone walks, turns over, or adjusts their sitting position. No matter how well-chocked our tires are or how stabilized our stabilizers are, I always feel like we are adrift at sea. 

And did you know that 9-year-olds make noise, like, alll of the time? Constant noise. Singing noise and squealing noise and beeping, booping, nonsense noise. They. Are. Never. Quiet. At home, I never noticed just How. Much. Noise. So that’s fun. 

You can hear this picture, can't you?

And our girls fight all day long. They have no one else to play with or socialize with but each other. Or me. When they fight, everyone can hear them. I am always waiting for the knock on our door telling us to be quiet or that the local law enforcement is doing a wellness check because it sounds like someone is dying in here.

Or the very simple fact that we must find groceries in remote places. When I do find grocery stores, I have to figure out how to navigate them, and it takes me twice as long to buy anything because I don’t know where the hell anything is. How do people live so far away from a Target or a Costco? 

And driving our colossal truck is a stress. Driving our huge long-bed truck in the mountains is hard AF. Parking that damn truck sucks. Navigating tiny streets and narrow roads in that truck is a stress. Getting in and out of that truck without a ladder is a stress. Sure, that truck makes me look like a total badass. But damn, it demands a lot of attention. I am not a fan of vehicles that demand so much attention. 

And I haven’t seen a familiar face besides my kids and husband in six weeks. 

And some days, those familiar faces are cranky.

Some days, my girls don’t want to “do school,” and there is more whining than learning—from them and me. 

And we are still trying to figure things out in this rig, even after weeks. Trying to figure out how to operate your entire house is a stress. 

And dragging your whole entire house around with you over mountains and through valleys and onto tollways and around tight corners is a stress. I mean, it’s a whole entire house. 

And weirdly, being in remote places is a new stress for me, and I think it’s due to my age. I had a wee panic attack when we first got to this amazing site because we are so far up in the mountains that I realized I had no idea where the closest hospital is, and it may be a good hour away. So, hopefully, neither one of us has a heart attack. (Don’t worry. I just knocked on all the faux wood panels around me.)  

Trying to book RV Parks, Harvest Hosts, or HipCamp sites ahead of time so we have a place to go and finding out that there are none where I want them to be or that they are all booked is a stress.

Constantly worrying about booking ahead and not wanting to be locked in completely in case plans change or the weather happens is stressful. 

Booking five or six places ahead all at once is expensive. That is a stress. 

Our Internet is consistently shitty, and that’s a stress. We are constantly at the mercy of our internet for work and other things like planning our routes. Or watching the latest season of The Rings of Power. You know. The important things. 

And as soon as we figure out what the hell we are doing in a place, where to get groceries, how to park the truck, how to connect to the internet, it is time to pack up and leave. 

And at the end of every day, I’m exhausted from navigating new places and trying to figure out what we’re doing. By 6 pm, I have zero energy for anything but sighing a lot. Fun for the whole family! 

And okay, one more.  

I want to share this story, and I know this is already long, but I think this story illustrates the stress of being on the road, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

Trav drives our house, and I navigate. I use multiple apps to avoid getting our house stuck under a low-clearance bridge or on a narrow side street that can’t handle our rig. Trying to read maps like that on the fly is a bit overwhelming. 

During our move into the mountains, one of our girls needed a bathroom break. On the side of a mountain. There were no gas stations or rest stops for miles.

I looked frantically ahead and directed Trav to pull off at the next exit, thinking we could fit in the overlook parking lot I saw on the map. He whipped our entire 60-foot beastly set-up off the highway at the last minute, and when we saw the parking lot, it was clear that it wouldn’t work. 

So now were driving up the mountainside with no hope of turning around. I looked ahead again. A gas station just around the curve. Perfect. I told him to pull in. 

We came around the curve, and he yelled, “This one?” 

Just as he started to pull in, we both realized my mistake. There was not enough clearance beneath the gas station canopy for our rig, and the only lane without a canopy was currently occupied by a broken-down car. 

Too late. He had pulled off the mountain highway, and we were now stuck head-first in a dead end with no way out but to back up onto the mountain highway on a curve where folks were zipping around doing 60 with no cares in the world. 

We did the only sensible thing in the world. We started screaming at each other. 

Just then, the young woman from the broken-down car came over and asked if we had jumper cables. 

I could see the circuits in Trav’s brain shorting out. “No, sorry,” he said, rolling his window back up. 

I was sure we had jumper cables. How could we travel in this setup without cables? I looked out and watched her slump back to her car, all forlorn. I noticed her partner sitting on the curb, his head hung low between his legs, his cell phone dangling limply from his hands. 

My bandwidth was so low at that moment that I couldn’t process all that. All I knew was that their car was right where we needed to back up to turn our rig around and get out. 

After some more unproductive screaming, mostly from me as I suffered a mini existential crisis over my abject failure to navigate properly, and after we got our kid out and to the bathroom, we came up with a plan to execute the world’s tightest three-point back-up turn-around in the largest rig in history. 

We hopped on our cell phones so I could guide Trav to back up as close as possible to the broken-down car as he could without hitting it. 

He did it beautifully. He managed to turn that entire thing around in that tiny parking lot. It was amazing. 

I hopped in, and we were back on the road. 

Once we were sailing along safely again, I asked about the jumper cables.

“We don’t have cables, Jen. We have a portable charging station, but it’s buried somewhere in the back of the truck. If we had cables, how would we have gotten in any position to jump-start them anyway?”

“But we had a portable charging station? In the truck?”

“Yes, But it’s buried.”

“But we have one.” 

We just looked at each other. 

That night, I lay awake for hours thinking about that couple on the side of the mountain. We didn’t help them when we could have. And for all I know, they could still be there, waiting for jumper cables. Okay, probably not. Surely, they have been rescued by now.

But the point is that our stress levels are so high that we are not even operating in a place where we can help anyone else but ourselves. We can’t contribute to society right now. We can’t stop and lend a helping hand to others, which is so incredibly important to me. And that, to me, is a huge stress. 

So there it is—the truth. Nomadic RV Life is not always easy. We face new stresses daily—things we never even thought we would have to think about—big stresses and small ones. We are so thrown off balance that we are not quite ourselves. 

I know this will change. Soon enough, we will roll into town, and I will find that all grocery stores are laid out essentially the same. I will know what to look for when I book RV parks and figure out how to squeeze in more “me time.” We will stop and help folks when we can. This life will become normal—routine, even. 

For now, it’s stressful. 

And yet. 

A million times over. It is worth every single stress. 

I still roll my eyes at the #blessedvanlifelookatmyview videos. Our life is not a TikTok video clip. It is messy. 

But I wouldn’t trade my nomadic, stressful, chaotic, cramped life for anything. Not the constant rocking ship-at-sea motion and sleepless nights of worry. Not even the continuous beeb-boop nonsense noises. 

Not any single thing.

Because this.