 Here's the big question. Do I get lonely traveling solo on the road? How do I handle missing my friends and family and my scared and what do I do about all the people out there that are negative about my lifestyle? Today, I'm going to go over all of it in an all-new Sunday morning view cue. Happy Sunday birdwatchers. It's Robin with Creativity RV. I hope you're all doing well out there. Today I'm answering all your questions about the emotions of traveling as a nomad either full or part-time solo or in a couple or a family. It seems like everybody has the same emotional concerns, and so today I'm going to go through your best questions. Now really quick before I answer the viewer questions, I want to tell you something that really helped me with the emotional ups and downs of living as a nomad on the road. About 23 years ago, I lived in Costa Rica. I was teaching at a university and another professor there told me about a sociological study called the ex-patriot scale. Now, I've done videos on this in the past, but I want to tell you about it again really quick. For those people that think that going on the road is going to change everything and they're going to have this amazing life and it's all going to be like a movie or they're new on the road, like let's say six months in and everything is hard and they're exhausted and they think this is the worst mistake I ever made in my life. You need this information. So in a nutshell, you can go Google it or look back in my prior videos. This is how it works. Most people have their own standard level of happiness. Let's say yours is here. Now, when you start to dream about some new adventure or a new job or a new relationship or going out in an RV, it goes up a little bit. People report that they get a little bit happier with the dream, with the planning, right? So let's say here you go out on the road. Your happiness goes up a little bit because you're actually doing it, right? And then it takes and at about six months, your normal happiness is here and you're down here. You're crying. You don't know what's wrong. Everything's hard. Nothing makes sense and you think it's a terrible mistake. Well, that's because when you start something new, you have to learn all new things. Like you have to figure out how to hook up. You have to figure out how to get places. You have to figure out your power system. And yeah, in an RV, you're in these beautiful places, but you're also having to learn a lot and that can be tiring, right? It takes an emotional toll because you feel like you don't know anything. In your old life, you know how to do all kinds of things, right? You don't feel like a dummy, but when you go out on the road in the beginning, you start to really doubt yourself because everything seems really hard. Here's the good news. Again, you start here. You go up during the planning, you dive and then you go back to your normal level of happiness. Now being a nomad will likely not make you a happier person because we all have our level of happiness, right? But for me, at least I can tell you and a lot of people I know, it removed a lot of the stressors. So I don't have a boss that yells at me. My boss is pretty rad. I'm not stuck in traffic. I'm not in a cubicle all day dreaming of something else I could be doing or sitting on the couch at night wishing that I had done something else. By the way, if you guys haven't seen my TED Talk on this, I'll link that down below for you, but there are still stressors in this life. They're just different kinds of stressors and for me it was the best thing I ever did. So if you're thinking about it or going through it, I wanted to tell you about that because it was really helpful for me. Okay, let me get to your questions. The first two were kind of similar, so I'm going to read them together. Nancy said, and she's one of my patrons. That's why it looks a little bit different because she put it on the Patreon website. Robin, how does your immediate family handle your nomadic lifestyle? Would love to hear about their mental journey as you took off. Great question. How do you handle the emotions, yours and your family members, of missing all the minor family gatherings, baby showers, wedding showers, birthdays? My family had never heard of this lifestyle. We did not grow up RVing. I had never been in an RV until I bought one and started living in it. I started doing this because it was a way that I could write full-time and get away from the corporate world in order to do that. And when I told my family, they thought I was nuts. Come on, Mom. You're watching right now. You know that's true. They didn't get it. They thought maybe it was unsafe. They didn't know that there were so many of us out here doing this. So my mom has gone through a big journey with me on the road. After I did it for a while and I showed her, she became incredibly supportive, and I find this to be true for a lot of people on the road, that their friends and family, once they show them their positive lives, they say, God, I wish I was doing that. I'm so happy for you. What a great adventure. Now, there are a couple of strategies that I've employed with my family that make this go a lot better for them. And if my mother was here and here's us at Christmas, she would say the same thing. First of all, I'm always home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's a promise that I made to her when I went on the road. So I make sure that that happens. And I talk to her more now than I did before I went on the road. Here's what we did. We use Amazon to talk to each other. So I got them a little Amazon screen device. So all they have to say is, you know, you know who call Robin and it rings. And in my case, back in the bedroom, we'll show you a picture of it. I removed the really heavy TV and I put in an Amazon Echo. I have to tell you guys, I'm shaking my head because I have this on airplane mode and somehow you know who, you know, the Amazon one, that one. She thinks I'm trying to make a phone call. So I think maybe I'm trying to call my mom right now because all I have to do is go, you know who called you know who I digress. Anyway, in the bedroom, I took out the big, heavy TV and instead I put in an echo, a you know who echo, right? It's a flat screen that looks like a TV and the fire stick so I can stream on my shows is built in. It went on the same arm. It was lighter. And all I have to do is say, you know who call you know who and I can sit in the bed and we chat. I video chat with my mom every morning, pretty much. Sometimes if the signal is not good enough, we don't do the video. We just do an audio call. But I talk to her more now than I did before. The other thing that helped her is that I share my location I use Google Maps. Listen, if you don't do anything else that you hear in my videos, please do this, it's free. If you go into, in my case, if this is what you use Google Maps and you press your finger into the screen, it drops a pin. Down below, it's going to say a bunch of things, including share. Then it's going to say, do you want to share your location for an hour or until I turn it off? You want to say until I turn it off and they can see your location as long as you have a signal. And if you don't have a signal, the last place you were when you had a signal until you turn them off, I shared my location with like seven people, friends and family, so they can see where I am. I do this so they feel better and I do it for my own safety. I see stories all the time in RV groups or van life groups where family members are saying, can you help us find our person because we haven't heard from them and nobody knows where they are. And sometimes people have died of natural causes, let's say, and they're out in the forest for a while and nobody knows where they are. Please share your location with people. It is super important. It's easy to do and it's free because I do that and I talk to her every morning and I'm home on the holidays. My mom has actually been, OK, as time goes by and she gets a little older, sorry, mom, she does want me to come home more. She sometimes wants me to go part time and I don't know what's going to happen. I say all the time, RV life should work for you, camp like you. Don't camp like anybody else. If my mom needs me, I'm going to be home in a heartbeat. And I'm sure that's true with all of you as well. So because she knows that she feels much better about it. And I'll tell you guys, like I said, my mom had never been RVing. She'd never been camping. And one time I picked her up in Phoenix and I took her out boondocking in Aaramburg in the middle of nowhere. And she was like a little freaked out. I mean, as one would be. I took her out to have a morning fire and she didn't get it. Like she thought campfires were at night. But you guys know I love a morning campfire. I like to wake up at the dawn, think about my day, put my feet on the ground. The next morning. I hear the door to the fifth wheel slam and I look out the window. It's Don, my mom, who's in her probably late seventies at this point, is running around outside like a child with a huge grin on her face. I mean, running and she's bending over. And I open the window and I say, what are you doing? But she said, getting kindling for the fire. She was so excited. She got what I'm doing because I gave her that example. And if I need to go part-time someday because I want to be closer to my parents, that's OK. And you figure out what it is that you need to do. So if you have weddings, funerals, baby showers, things that you need to get to, I would just keep an eye on how far you are from home, how long it takes you to get there. Have a strategy for where to stay when you get there. And everything's going to be fine. Besides that, if you talk to them and you tell them why you love this life, I think they're going to be OK. What do you guys think? How have your families reacted? Please, let's all share it in the comments below. OK, the next one is a big one, and I'm going to do a whole video on this soon because I get asked this question a lot. And I've kind of changed my opinion on this. Udron, I think says, I find loneliness to not be an issue if I'm in nature alone, ding, ding. But then when there's lots of strangers around, like in a city or national park, do I feel lonely? Have you experienced that? Oh, my gosh, absolutely. What Udron said is exactly right for me. If I'm traveling and I'm out in nature or I'm driving through new places, I don't feel lonely at all. I think, like I've said before, there's something that happens in your brain. I could be having a terrible day, you know, be kind of down. And if I get in the car and start driving to a new place, everything seems OK. I think because you're not stuck in your own brain, in your own problems, the whole world opens up. And you know that your problems are small and the world is big. And when I'm doing that, I don't feel lonely at all. But when I'm trapped inside, like I was recently, when I was in Colorado for the winter for almost three months in this little tin can, I did get lonely. So I really just, you know, ramped up my social life, went out and did stuff like constantly. But I affirmed Colorado, so I knew a lot of people. And even then, you know, I felt kind of lonely. And I'll tell you this. I was camping with a couple recently, who full time in a beautiful, big class A, their biggest issue was loneliness. And they are together. Now, that might be surprising to a lot of people, but they said it was because they want to see so much and they were still working, but they go, go, go, go, go. And then they're together, but they weren't socializing with other people like other nomads or friends on the road. When I was first going on the road, I didn't know soul that did this. I didn't belong to any groups. I wasn't in any forums and I was a little bit worried about it. But I was surprised at how easy it was to make nomadic friends. And now I've got many friends on the road who live the same life I do. We share our locations on the map so we can see our little faces going around the country. And we'll say, oh, my God, you're an hour for me and we'll get together every year. Like you saw in that funny Beal and Nightmare video that I did recently. I have a meetup with my patrons from Patreon and I know that those women make friends at my meetups that they will have for the rest of my life. And I have met friends at my own meetups that I will have for the rest of my life. And then I meet friends through other people. Now, if you don't have that, there are a ton of social groups. Again, in my book, Be a Nomad, Change Your Life, I have an entire section on this, but a couple of groups that you might consider is escapees. They have a social group and they have different social groups for different age ranges and they have national get-togethers and regional get-togethers and theme parties. I know a bunch of people that do that. You can meet other nomads. There's also a group if you're a woman called RVing Women. I ran into them once and interviewed a bunch of them and I met women in their 80s who had been RVing full-time since the 1970s, back before maps and cell phones and the internet. And when people probably really didn't understand what they were doing. So I give it to those women, but those are the women that started that organization. And so it's a nonprofit. You can join it in a local chapter and then you're welcome at all their events all over the country. There are lots of different groups you can find. If you fly fish, there's sisters on the fly. And actually, I made a list. If you want to meet other like-minded nomads, a great place to go is Facebook because they're all kinds of different groups. People on a budget, people that boondock. There's airheads for airstreams. There's Winnebago enthusiasts. You can go on Facebook or go into forums for the type of rig you have or the van you have or the school you have and you're going to find people. But there's also like full-time families. The National African American RVer Association. The Handicap Travel Club. The Rainbow RV Club for the LGBTQ community. There's even a National Square Dance Camping Association. Whatever you're into. There's a group out there and they all, all of these have meetups. Like you said, loneliness may not affect you. But if you find that it does and you need a fix, don't worry about it. You can find a group to travel with or you could be a part-timer. You could stay in an RV park part of the year. You could be a work camper and meet people. There are all kinds of things that you can do if you get lonely. Don't let that scare you. I think I would be lonelier if I still lived in a house. On the road, there's a community of like-minded people that I can socialize with when I want to and then I can go off on my own when I want to. So what do you guys think about loneliness? Have you experienced it? And is it when you're solo and traveling? Or is it when you're in a group? Let's talk to each other and learn from each other in the comments below. The last two questions are similar. So I'm going to read them and then I'm going to talk about what I think. Tell me what you think in the comments below. Question, has the solo nomad life changed for many that you met over the last several years? If so, how has it changed? And then Melody asks, do you feel people are losing interest in nomadic people? So many people are now losing their homes and forced into RVs and they're living and trashing Walmart's. I'm curious as I watch about the traveler community in Britain and the cultural negativity that surrounds them if American nomads are starting to experience that. First of all, yes, it's totally changed. When I first went on the road and I told my friends and family, like I said, what I was doing, I had never even heard the word nomad. I heard full-time RVer. People never heard of this. They thought I was nuts. Do you feel safe? How will you make money? What do you do if something happens? They think I'm alone out there. There are a million of us doing this in fact. If you go and look at the 2023 research that RV industry associations have done for the women out there, and I mean it's growing for all kinds of people, but women are the fastest growing demographic for solo travelers. It's not families and retirees like it used to be. It's a lot of solo people. A lot of them are working and so it's a thing. It's getting to be more accepted. Now, when I tell people what I do or how I travel or how I live, they know what I'm talking about. A lot of them because of Vanlife and Instagram and a lot of them say, oh my God, that's so cool. I wish I could do that. You can, some people can't, but a lot of us can. But I think it depends on what people are exposed to. If you see those cool posh kids on Instagram that have like music studios and their vans and the big floppy hats and the lanterns and everything is staged and everything looks perfect and they're all in bikinis, right? That's what you might think it's like. But if you live in a neighborhood where a bunch of people are living in broken down RVs along the street and people are Odine like the BLM nightmare that I was just in, you saw that video probably or there's trash everywhere, that's the paradigm that you know about. I would say do you and leave people a positive example. They're only gonna know if they see us out there. Most people are not familiar with solo boondocking travelers like me because we go into a town, spend our money, get our supplies and we go out to the middle of nowhere and we don't leave a trashed and then we go on our way and because they don't see that, they don't know about it as much. I have not experienced a lot of negativity for me. I've experienced a lot of positive things. A lot of people that are familiar, they wanna do it, communities on the road and especially with places like Harvest House. RVers are keeping businesses alive in these small towns. So in that way it's been very positive. Since I've been on the road, I know one person that has left. I've been on the road six and a half years and I know somebody that wrecked their RV in an accident and they didn't wanna go back and they didn't and now they're living in a house. For everybody else, they're all still on the road. So I keep seeing these like big eyeballs, shocked thumbnails, everybody's leaving. I did a spoof on that last year when I was at the Hershey RV show and I asked a bunch of people if RV life was over and they said, no, I don't know people that are leaving. I only know people that wanna do it or are doing it. Do what's right for you, leave a positive example and I think we don't have to worry about it. And on a final note, I'll tell you that more and more people email me or comment on my TED Talk, something like that, that the idea of nomadic life or living the nomadic life gave them a whole new adventure and a new positive way to live their life. I think more people are learning about that. So I think it's more positive now than it is negative. If you have a question for next month's view queue, please do put it in the comments below, put it up in caps so I can see that there's a question there and if you have something to add to this discussion, please do, it's important. I'll be doing a video soon just about loneliness and what I've experienced myself and what I'm hearing from others out there and how to combat that if it happens to you. I'll see you soon with an all new video next week. Until then, everybody out there, have happy travels and be free.