About Us

We are Dan & Jenn, two thirty-somethings trying to escape the rat race. We sold our home in 2006 and have been living in our 33′ fifth wheel trailer ever since. We left our former home, Boulder, CO in May 2007 to start

traveling the country and we are loving it! If you want to contact us, feel free to email us with questions or comments.
What led us to this lifestyle you might ask? Well, we are both college educated professionals and had been working hard at our careers; Jenn in accounting, Dan in structural engineering. While we both enjoyed our jobs, we REALLY enjoyed our all too brief vacations. We have always enjoyed the outdoors; hiking, biking, running, scuba diving and hockey being among our passions. Jamming all of our “fun” in around ever increasing work schedules just wasn’t making us happy so we started looking for other options. We honestly can’t remember how we first came up with Fulltiming as one of those options, however, once we started researching the idea, we were amazed at how easily we could see ourselves doing it. Don’t get us wrong, there were some anxious moments, but at some point, it became a matter of asking ourselves what we had to lose by going for it. If it didn’t work out, we knew we could always go back to a traditional lifestyle. If it did, we had an opportunity to define what we wanted our life to look like. Either way, we would learn a lot from the experience. How could we go wrong?

How the heck did we do this so young? Probably the major reason…no kids. We’ve also been lucky to have simple tastes. We never felt the need to spend money on new cars, fancy meals, the latest fashions, a big house, TV or other debt producers. This meant we were able to save a substantial amount of our income which gave us options to do something different a bit younger than most folks. We’re not rich by most standards, but we have everything we need and a nice cushion to keep us from worrying (well, we still worry, but don’t need to.)
Our original plan was to save enough money to live comfortably off the income from our investments with supplementary income from Workamping in campgrounds or wherever. The unexpected, and wonderful, thing is that I (Dan) am still working for my company (JVA, Incorporated) as a structural engineer on a part-time basis. I never expected that to be an option, but they were all for it and it has worked out wonderfully. This has allowed us to continue earning most of the money we need with no need to touch our investments. That’s pretty great in itself, but even better that I get to keep doing what I love and have invested a lot of time getting good at.

Jenn has been enjoying her retirement so far, but keeps busy running the household (trailerhold?). She is the Webmaster in the house, although the master part is going to take a while.

Aren’t you bored out of your mind? Funny, that’s the main concern some people had when they heard our plans. We’re happy to say that we haven’t been bored for a moment. Between playing outdoors, working, upgrading the trailer, regular maintenance, laundry, cooking, reading, and all the other mundane chores that have to be done we feel plenty busy. Besides, we’ve always been slow travelers, wanting to spend weeks in every place we go to really see all there is to see and still get some time to relax.

I (Dan) like to get all the history books on the area and read them in the evenings. Naturally, we then want to go see all those places and get a real feel for that history. We can literally spend hours in a museum, at an old mine site or in a beautiful old downtown. I don’t know why we’re that way, but we are always amazed when folks can go to a place over a weekend and feel like they’ve done everything there is to do. That’s just beyond our comprehension.
We’ve also discovered the joys of birdwatching which can take up pretty much any spare time you have. Just identifying one bird is often an hours long process. We think we’ll be a lot faster if we keep at it for another 30 years.
You’re doing this for a year right? I don’t know where doing this for a year got lodged in our culture but the majority of folks we talk to assume one year is all you get for these crazy schemes. Regardless, we sure don’t think a year is anywhere near long enough. With the turtle like pace of our travel, we’d barely get out of the states surrounding Colorado in a year and the intent is to escape the rat race, not step off the wheel for a bit. So we’ve done everything we can to ensure that the only reason we have to stop fulltiming is due to health or because we’re tired of it. Those steps include buying a high quality truck and trailer, learning how to maintain all their systems ourselves, saving every dime we could, and most importantly, continuing to live a simple low cost life.

Other esoteric reasons for doing this? WARNING – Potentially offensive ranting starting here.
We are troubled by the massive population growth around the world and the devastating effect it is having on the planet. Every year there is less land accessible for recreation and more folks crammed into what’s left. The desire for bigger houses, bigger cars, and more “stuff” is destroying the very areas we all love to escape to. A direct effect of this is the need to keep earning more to keep up and thus being in a constant state of rushing from one thing to the next. We ride each other’s tails, cut each other off, work ungodly hours and are generally stressed out in that endless chase after that next “thing” we have to have. I don’t think many folks would disagree that this is a real problem, but most don’t seem willing to make the hard choices it’s going to take to change this.

There isn’t much we can do about other people’s choices, but we are trying a different approach. Thus, we sold our house (actually only an 800 square foot condo) and moved into our relatively tiny trailer. Heating and cooling costs are perhaps a 10th of a typical home. We have a solar system that generates just about all the power we use. We have a diesel pickup truck, which gets pretty decent mileage and gets even better mileage when we aren’t driving while we enjoy an area for weeks. We still use water but have to be very efficient due to the small amount we can carry on-board. We generally use about 75 gallons per week for both of us. Again, a tiny fraction of what a typical household uses. Short of living in a cave in the forest, which we aren’t willing to do, we think we have reduced our footprint about as much as we can. We understand how great some of the material things you can buy these days are (we own some of them) but hope we can inspire others to look at their options and perhaps make some different choices. If nothing else, we feel good about it and we’re having a ton of fun!