Welcome to Eighteen Short Years! The blog that chronicles our family of four’s RV travels, outdoor adventures, and the money and time saving tips we’re learning along the way.  We’re glad you’re here to join us, and we hope our stories will help and inspire your family to pack up the RV and head out for adventure – whether down the road, or across the country!

So, who are we?  Mike and I (Rachel) are both teachers who love running, cycling, traveling, and live music.  So we got married.  And we had all kinds of adventures, like running lots of marathons, training for and completing the Lake Placid Ironman triathlon together, and regularly enjoying “tour de breakfasts”  (This is where you watch a stage of the Tour de France, but turn it off somewhere around the last 10k.  Then you pick somewhere to eat breakfast.  And you bike there.  And you eat.  And you bike home and watch the last 10K.  It is a hoot of an idea that I highly recommend).

We filled our home with lots of stray cats we’d both taken in during our single years, played a lot of Rock Band on the XBox, and listened to lots of Grateful Dead, John Prine, and Pink Floyd.

And then we had two awesome boys.  And they like all sorts of things, joined in on all of our adventures, and added all sorts of new fun.  With the boys came the addition of a Burley Bee and Bob to our bikes, a steady supply of Nutella and waffles to our diet, Imagine Dragons to our kitchen music playlist, and a deep knowledge of all things Junie B. Jones and Harry Potter.

After years of tent camping, and hours upon hours of window shopping, we bought our first travel trailer – a 30′ Grand Design Transcend Xplor travel trailer with a bunkhouse, in March 2020.  And with only one camping trip under our belts – to a quaint family campground about 30 miles from home – we hitched up our RV to our Ram 1500 in June 2020 and headed 1,600 miles west to South Dakota.  The rest is history that we are happily still writing one RV trip and adventure at a time.

Our boys are their own people and totally unique in their own way, but they have both been fantastic travel companions since day one.  They’re growing up so fast – too fast for this mom’s liking.  I can’t imagine having viewed 18 years as a short period of time before I became their mom, but I am realizing more and more with every year that flies by, that they will be grown and flown in a blink.  And so we’re going to fill these crazy fast years with all of the fun, adventure, and joy we can pack in.