How it started
Bought used Tiffin.
Flew to Charlotte.
Forgot our luggage.
March 2017, spring break. We flew to Charlotte, spent the night in a hotel waiting to be picked up by the sellers the next morning. We signed the paperwork, then drove to Cookeville, Tennessee — and sat in the Holiday Inn Express looking out at a 35-foot motorhome in the overflow parking lot behind it, barely believing it was ours. When we'd gone back that morning to retrieve our forgotten luggage, we'd discovered the stairs wouldn't fully retract. We bungee-corded them together for the entire drive home.
That summer we took the shakedown trip. Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Mackinac Island, Wisconsin Dells on the 4th of July, Taliesin, Field of Dreams. Thirty-six days to find out if we could actually do this — $235 a day for a family of four. Eleven months later we left for 14 months, and the daily cost came down from there. Every dollar from that trip is in those guides.
"In Munising I started having what felt like a toothache. The dentist looked in my mouth and asked: Do you grind your teeth? I said not to my knowledge. He said: Well, you've started."
The pace was too high. That was the single biggest lesson — and it directly shaped how we planned the 14-month journey. Pacing is the part of RV travel that no one writes about honestly. It's what the guides are actually built around.
