 Hey, everybody, it's Robin with Creativity RV. If you already follow my channel, then you know I live full-time in my class CRV. I've been on the road for two years. And when I look back at it, I did make some really bad rookie moves when I first started out on the road. You know, when you imagine this life, it's a lot different than actually going out and doing it. So I'm gonna give you my top 10, but please, audience participation for all the people that are already on the road or going on the road, please put down what your rookie moves were or what you're afraid of and let's help each other out in the comments section. So these are my top 10 in no particular order, rookie moves that I made or the biggest things I learned while I was on the road. The first thing is that moving day takes all day. Now, full-timers, I'm sure you will agree with this. It's a lot different than traveling in a car. When you travel in an RV, before you leave in the morning, you need to check your tires or check all your bins, make sure that everything is latched down. Then it can be more difficult to get where you're going and you might say, oh yeah, seven hours, no problem, three hours, no problem. But you have to remember that you probably, in between your locations, have to get gas and propane and dump your tanks and find water and do laundry and all of those things might be in different places. And any of those things might not be there. Like Google said it was when you searched it in the first place. So you have to do a lot of errands, usually a moving day. Then it can just be a little bit tougher to drive depending on the weather, what kind of a rig you have. You know, as a Rook, I used to say, yeah, no problem, three hours, I'll be at that new spot and then I'll have all afternoon to work on that project or I'll sit down and have a campfire and that is not what happens. Usually you get to your spot, you're exhausted, you eat something cold out of the fridge and go to bed. At least that's what happens for me. And then the next day I get on with whatever tasks I had to do. Oh, it's starting to rain on me. The second rookie move I made is to think that I could store or drink anything without a lid on it. Just four days ago, I made this rookie mistake again and I had about four cups of white rice that was in a plastic bag, you know, and I just twisted the top and shoved it up in a corner and I thought, oh, it's in there, it's not gonna go anywhere. I'll just remember when I open up the door to be careful. Well, I open up the door and four cups of dry rice goes everywhere and it gets all under the slide and in every little crevice that you can't seem to get it out of in an RV. So I reminded myself, Tupperware, jars with lids, all good things, even if you close stuff up in the original box. I know some people are scared of bugs. Just don't leave things loose because in a house, they're not gonna fall over, but when you're going down the road, everything shifts in the overhead compartment and when you open the door, it will fall on you. And everything is, no matter how careful I was with beverages, they get knocked over. Even if you're just sitting, camping, you're in a very small space in an RV and if you have like a hundred square feet and you reach to get something, you are gonna knock your coffee cup on the ground, believe me. So I never have a beverage without a top on it. I knock them over still all the time, but at least just a little bit goes out of the mouth hole and not the whole thing, getting underneath the slide like it did when I was a rookie. Okay, number three on my list of rookie moves is that I thought that food would last in an RV fridge just like it lasts in a regular refrigerator. And look, it's really similar, but you have to think about this. Your refrigerator in your house has temperature around it that is constant. And in RV, your fridge is right up against the outside of your rig. So if you're in really high temperatures and the sun is beating down on that side of your RV, you might even hear it starting to work harder and you're gonna see water dripping in the back. And then all of a sudden the temperatures dive at night, let's say, and you open up the fridge and everything is sealed and nice. So you just have to be prepared for that and you have to get your good food storage game on if you want to eat anything healthy, which I'm on a mission for right now. I learned that it's a good thing to have a refrigerator temperature gauge just to make sure that your food stays safe. And if you want to use your freezer, at least in my experience in two rigs, eat that stuff in the freezer in like the week or two that you get it. It's not the kind of freezer where you can put things in for six months and expect them to be okay. And it's raining again. So I'm gonna finish this inside. Okay, I'm back. It's been raining where I am in Utah for three days and I was really getting cabin fever and I was excited to go outside and then it rained. So I'm inside now, but I'm back in the nest with the boy and I'm gonna continue with my top 10 rookie moves. Number four, you're not necessarily gonna be happy because you plan to be a nomad and then all of a sudden you're a nomad and you achieved your dream and you're thinking, yes, once I get to that place, I'm gonna be happy. Look, I have a chapter on this in the book. I've done a video on this before. There's a certain like wave that happens to your happiness when you go and do something new. But when I had time to reflect about what I thought stuff was gonna be like as a rookie, I knew that. But my good friend Carol says that you do what you practice and when you practice planning, planning, planning, planning and then you go out to live, you're not used to the living. You're used to the planning and the anxiety and it took me almost my whole first two years to learn how to relax out here. You know, I planned for four years so the fact that I'm getting into like actually the living part in two years, I'm okay with that. It didn't take me four years to figure that out. When you pull out of the driveway, it doesn't mean all of a sudden all your worries are gone and everything's gonna be great. You still have the same stresses as you would in normal everyday life unless your nomadic life, you know, takes you away from a terrible boss or a relationship or something like that. You know, where your circumstances are greatly improved on the road. Otherwise, you are who you are. And for me, I've just been repeating like this mantra to myself, which is what was it all for anyway? What was it all for anyway? Number six on my rookie moves list is that you can camp a lot more places than you think you can camp. And look, you know that I have an arsenal of different ways to camp and I have been collecting my top 10 list, by the way. The next top 10 list you're going to see is my top 10 camping spots that'll be out in like two weeks. I'll also have a blog post under that same name. So go to creativityRV.com and subscribe if you like, if you wanna see that with all the links and everything. But you have a lot more options than you think you do. The problem is that they're not all necessarily in one place. So you might have to go to a few different websites, apps, resources to find the kind of place that you wanna stay or places you wanna stay along your route. But one thing that I did not know as a rookie is that there are so many options. I knew there were a lot of options already. They're about double the amount of camping options than I thought that there were. Now, with that being said, some of the camping options I thought I was gonna have, I don't take advantage of. For example, the first one that comes to mind is I would see these BLM or dispersed camping sites maybe within half an hour of a town that I knew. In my rookie brain, that means you can go camping in those spots and run into town. And that is not what happens at least in a Class C. I don't have a tow car. So first of all, I'm not running into town. I usually stay in my campsite for two weeks and then I visit places in between my spots. Lately I've been really trying to find spots that I can take my e-bike out and see more of the country since I don't have a tow car. But just know that it's not like if you're close to a town, you're gonna go actually see that town maybe. And personally, I've given up camping that close to a town because those are the campsites that I don't enjoy as much. When you get to campsites close to a town, a lot of times there's a lot of broken glass and cigarette butts and graffiti. And if it's on the weekend, then a lot of people will come up to party there from the town on the weekend. And it's not the vibe that I'm going for. So I have found that I like to go into towns to get my supplies and then go a little bit further out to do my own camping. And by the way, I have found that if you just go a few more miles past those places, they're fine. They're great, they're quiet. Nobody's there. People from town just don't wanna go that far, I guess. The next thing on my rookie move list is not understanding that I was gonna get hurt a lot. And I mean, if you live in an RV or a van, you know, you get hurt. The first week I was on the road, I crawled across something on my knee and tore something in my knee. Just like last month, I was hammering something. Look, what had happened was, I got this camp chair that would get sand in the gears and it would stick and it wouldn't close up. And so I was trying to get it to unstick and somehow the mechanism fell down on my thumb and took off about half my thumbnail. So that was gnarly and I was closing up camp because I had to drive and so that was not fun either. You know, I've had giant flashlights fall out of overhead compartments and land on my foot. I found that I am the kind of person that can shut my hand in a door and then drive and just keep it moving and keep a good attitude and don't let the little injuries get you down. There is almost no way to avoid them. I am super careful since I usually travel solo and I'm farther away from services. I really am careful when I get up on a ladder or something like that, but there are just some things that you can't avoid. You're just more active when you live in an RV. I mean, just think about hooking up and taking off your hoses or, you know, assembling and disassembling camping gear or whatever. You're gonna nick yourself, you're gonna cut yourself, things are gonna hurt you and you just have to be prepared for that. I just did not know how much as a Rook. The next thing is that when I was a Rookie, I really did not understand my battery usage and why the batteries would drain so much overnight. I did a bunch of research and watched videos on what reading your batteries should be at and if it goes under 12.2, you're in trouble, which by the way, isn't necessarily true. It depends on what kind of batteries you have and how many are put together and that changes that. But, you know, I used to go by these rules and my battery would be, let's say 12.4 and I'd go to bed and I'd wake up and it would be at 11.9. Well, first of all, I didn't understand as a Rookie that the batteries just go down over time even when they're not getting a lot of use and that that reading isn't necessarily true. You have to get a little solar on there, you have to have a little electric or a generator running for a while and then you'll get a true reading. It just seems to go up fast in the beginning, which is not a true reading or go down fast, but you have to actually be using it to actually see what the real battery reading is. It'll give you a good gauge, but the other thing is just turn off everything you can, like your water pump and your inverter. And if you look at your gauge, for me personally, let's say I'm at 12.4. I turn on one light, I'm at 12.3. I turn on another light, I'm at 12.2. You get the idea. So, when I was thinking about going on the road, yeah, I knew that, you know, it was gonna be solar power and I'd have to conserve energy and but you don't really understand until you see it in action that you at night, especially if you have solar and you're used to that during the day, at night, you really have to conserve, you have to have a lot of backup power if you don't wanna use your batteries, your house batteries and you don't wanna run your generator. Oh, this is a big one, you guys. People will never see your full-time nomadic life like you see it. No matter how you imagined it or how you live it, they are gonna have some preconceived notion that they're gonna put on you and there's just nothing you can do about it. Look, being a full-timer in an RV is becoming more common but for a lot of people, it's kind of weird or they already have a preconceived notion of what that means. They come with their own knowledge base or they have confirmation bias and I'll tell you the top three things that I get. The first one I get is that people think you're a bum, like you don't work or you don't pay taxes or you're living off everybody else or you're a leech, you're gonna get this on social media a lot if you do anything social media in the RV community but just, I mean, regular people. I have gone camping to places and when I say, okay, I gotta run because I gotta work, people can't believe I work out here, I work full-time. They just think that a lot of people that live the RV or nomadic like van life lifestyle just do it to avoid work and that we're all lazy. So that's one thing. May have nothing to do with you, may not be the way you're living at all. It may be, but that's number one. People are gonna think that automatically when they know you live in an RV. The second thing you're gonna get is that you're crazy and people can either mean that like, oh my God, you're so crazy. You know, like it's a good thing or you're crazy. They think you're just checking out of society because maybe you can't handle it and look. A lot of people that live this life are introverts and yeah, it can be nice to not have the pressures of society and people all around you and people at work but it doesn't mean that you are running and hiding from something. People do have that perception of a lot of full-timers, especially if they're solo. And the third most common thing that people think about RV life in my experience is that if you live full-time in an RV and you are not retired, that you're a trust fund baby. They can't understand that you can't support yourself on the road. In fact, I had a lady write a comment the other day that there was no way I was supporting myself on the road and the Doug, my boyfriend, must be supporting me. Nope, he's back in Denver working his job. I'm working my job. Look, the only way people are gonna know more is by experiencing more. I mean, you can have a conversation with them but my philosophy lately has been, who cares? I'm out here doing it. If you have a problem with it, then, you know, do some research, don't do it yourself. It's fine. I guess as a rookie, I just thought that when I said I'm gonna live full-time in an RV and I'm gonna do this work, that people might not know a lot about it but I thought that I would explain it and they would see it the way I saw it or see the benefits or at least understand the motivation and what I found is, you know, friends and family, of course, mind do, mind get that but regular people on the street are gonna come with all of their own ideas about your life and maybe you'll change their mind and maybe you won't but just know that they're not gonna see it the way you see it. And the top 10 thing on my rookie move list is trying to take too many pictures when I first got out on the road and this is what I've learned. Life is not an Instagram photo and look, I was not big on Instagram, I'm not big on Instagram or Facebook, you guys, if you follow me know that but I think the thing is you spend so much time trying to explain to people what this life is that then when you get out there, either you're so excited for yourself and you wanna keep a log of everywhere you went or you want to take a picture of that deer that just went by or the welcome to Colorado sign or whatever it is that you spend your whole day taking these photos instead of really living and I know everybody's different but for me, I wanna sit outside and really experience nature and experience my life more than I wanna take a picture of it. That's probably why you guys don't see me doing a lot of travel things where I'm like I'm getting in the car now, I'm driving, I'm pulling into this town. I started to do that in the beginning if you go back and look, I did a little bit of that but then I found that I was just taking photos of my life instead of living my life. You know, I wasn't even doing it all the time. It was only a fraction of the time and even that was too much for me. I just wanna enjoy my life and really take in the places I go without having to have a camera in my hand. And the final thing that I was thinking when I was making my notes to do this video, it's not so much a rookie move, it's just something I learned over time and I'm really getting ahold of this now, which is nice. Just because you're a full-time nomad and you're a full-time traveler doesn't mean that you're traveling all the time. You're still living. You know, travel is part of it but living is most of it just like if you were in a normal house and sometimes you gotta take a step back and go, oh yeah, I live here. This just happens to be my backyard today. This is the National Forest in Utah and today that's my backyard but I live here, this is my house. And tomorrow morning I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna start up my house and take it down the road and that portion of my week will be traveling but then I'll get to a new spot and I'll be living again and I think it's important to not forget about the living part. I really am getting into a groove in my second year and I'm sure I'm gonna make a lot more mistakes. I make mistakes constantly. Like I'm sure a lot of you do. Tell us below what your biggest rookie moves were or the biggest things that you learned and hey, you guys, I'm in a groove now, you know? I am just now really starting to feel a good vibe on the road and I know what I'm doing and I love it and I don't see myself stopping this for a long time. So I hope to see all of you out here someday on the road or just see you here through YouTube even if you don't travel, I enjoy having you here. So everybody have happy travels out there and be free.