Friendship With Ron the Nomad: Solo Dad on the Road Finding Freedom | Community Spotlight

SPEAKER_01 0:04

So you know this conversation that kind of happened at an event quickly for me. Back in um January, we were at the Tampa show and there's an event called the Content Creators Event that Josh handed us on. It's kind of special because he brings all sorts of creators all over the place and RV Rufing Solutions Our Business is actually there doing what we do. That's where I actually met Ron. Josh would tell you the magic's in the actual meetup later and what that connection means. The thing that struck me the most about Ron was not anything but his business card. His business card is so different because he 3D prints them and they're fantastic and they look just like him. So if you ever get handed a business card by Ron, you know that you'll have him with you wherever you go. But the road life is a beautiful, unpredictable place. It's taken us this long to finally create this episode. But I'm finally delighted to welcome Ron the Nomad to the podcast today. We've featured a lot of solo travelers on the show before, men and women that bring the solo travel to their lifestyle. But you're even more different than that one. It's kind of extraordinary, actually, your story. But today's a first. So today's not just about a solo traveler, although you do it kind of solo as a parent. You're a solo dad. And so out here on the road with your kiddo, just the two of them, building a life that most people just kind of dream about. So let's let's dive right into that. What made you hit the road with your kid?

SPEAKER_02 1:25

It sort of happened organically in a way. Um, I have an adult daughter, she's in her 20s, late 20s now, and she's got her own family now. At the beginning of our travels in 2017, 2018, we were part-time. We bought a ring because she was moving to Arizona. We bought a ring so we could go visit them for longer periods of time. My job allowed me to work remote often. It was like a 75% remote kind of a situation. And so we would do a month in the summer, and we would go travel to Arizona. We went up to CC to Seattle to see my cousin. We did some of these like you know part-time jobs uh over the course of a year or so, a couple years to 17 to 19. And then we all know what happened in 19 and 20, so we're not gonna go into that, but that sort of just encouraged the whole idea of like, I'm just gonna take that rig to my home base, my parents' farm in Illinois, and we'll just live out there. We live the duration of this C thing for however long it goes, right? And so I set that rig up to be more full-time, and we made another trip to Arizona. We ended up upgrading the rig to a bigger rig at Class A, and more or less the rest is history at that point from 20 to 21. We traveled from Arizona through California, back up to Seattle, back to the Midwest. We did that cycle two or three times as we started our full-time line, and then we connected with full-time families, a traveling group that we all know and love. We've been connected with them in the 5,000 members they have for several years now.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

You know, and I think that most people don't know that we are 13 years full-time. I don't know how our kids have it connected in that way, because I still travel with teenage boys. I think it's just because of the nature of our business and everything that it makes it a little bit harder. But we do have to be intentional, especially with kids. My number for full-time families is actually 36. I was one of the first ones, so it's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

I just don't know how anything that founder of a member, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Um, and I might be one of the only ones left other than the man's that actually still travels with kids on the road. So that's kind of an interesting one, too. Before we go anywhere else, let's uh I want to go back to the beginning, not the RV beginning, but kind of, you know, who were you before you hit the road?

SPEAKER_02 3:19

I've been a technology person for 35 years. My career is based around technology. I grew up in a farm in uh rural Illinois, uh, went to school, got out of school, went into technology straight out. Let's say since 2013, 2014, it's when my son and I we lived in apartments, I went to work, I took him to school. My life was revolved around taking him to school, taking him to activities, visiting other family, and going to work. Majority of the time was the work. That was fine. It was a lifestyle that everybody lives, right? Um, there's a lot of solo dads, there's a lot of solo moms in that lifestyle and sticks and bricks. When I realized through the time period we lived in 2000 and 2004 or whatever, that's a life that I didn't want to go back to. I continued the remote work with the company I was at until a year ago, almost to the day. I went full freelance into technology, onto building my brand, into doing this lifestyle in a way that is not dependent on a nine to five rate, much more focused on what is what what do I own and what I can provide to somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

That's awesome. So, what was the moment that like shifted for you? So, I mean, like, okay, let me give you my backstory. I had gotten invited down.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

I was ready in 2017.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Oh, wow. So I so Frank was waiting for me. And so I had gone to a youth event. I we did youth ministry for a bunch of years. The pastor called me and said, Hey Jen, everybody wants you down here for senior weekend. My oldest daughter is 31 now, but back then she was 18. So we took her down with my two youngest and went down for the weekend, and I went looking for a job for Frank because he was finishing Bible college. It made perfect sense. We'd go back to Oceanside, go back to our little perfect lifestyle, and go back to where I wanted to be with my kids. And I came home from that weekend and I said to Frank, we're supposed to go full-time on the road and an RV. And he said, I've been waiting seven years for you to say that. And so the rest is history. He sold the TV the next morning, and we hit the road less than 90 days later, and it was crazy and it was nuts, and we're still doing it 13 years later. So, like, was there a defining moment for you like that, or was it like kind of kind of more gradual?

SPEAKER_02 5:15

It was definitely much more gradual. Or the defining moment I would say was that time where I had to make the decision of we was no reason to stay in St. Louis. We were living in St. Louis in an apartment. We didn't need to go to school and we didn't need to go to work physically. And so when we moved out to the farm in the motor home and let the lease expire on our apartment, that was the defining moment in a sense. It was sort of organically gonna happen at some point. I didn't know when. Nature just took its course, is the way I look at it, because I was already investigating uh RV lifestyle from 2016 till then, following several of the now still large creators in the space, some I've met in person, which has been fantastic to kind of like meet the person who inspired you and have a chance to talk with them. So, in a sense, I I want to be able to be that for somebody else, too. Like in not just the RV sense, but in life, how we live isn't necessarily just gonna happen. You have to be intentional about the actions you take. And if you have an idea and you want to do something, then you need to take an action on that idea, or you're just gonna sit out there with a bunch of ideas doing nothing. I'm much more than I was before. You have to understand what your intentions are and take action on those intentions, like right now. Do something today, tomorrow, next week to go in the direction that you want to go, even if it's tiny.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

But with kids on the road, like there's a whole nother layer. I think that we have to get out there and be intentional for them. I started out with toddlers to teenagers. My oldest son at the time was 13. And so we wanted to find friends for our oldest kid on the road. And so my oldest was 18 when we hit the road. She said, Love you, mean it, see ya, bye, I'm out. And so she did not want any part of this lifestyle. She'd come home a couple years later and travel with us for a couple years. My younger ones were like, you know, she had that choice. But my younger ones are like 15 months and three, two years old. You know, I had a five-year-old. I would say it was easy to find friends at the playground. There were other moms with toddlers or whatever, with kids that were playing together. And I feel like it was so much easier. As the kids have gotten older, I almost feel like it's harder for them to connect. So, what do you do with intentionality? I know you guys are headed to a rally. What does that look like for you being intentional?

SPEAKER_02 7:10

So two things. I think essentially three. One, I'm intentional, but only to a point. Like, I think he still has to want to, he still has to take his own actions. Like, I'll give him guidance and I'll give him coaching, and I'll be like, hey, so-and-so is over there. Or I know this other family has a kid who has these interests, right? And I'll share that with him. But he has to be the one to take the actions. I'll go back to the second part. So when we first started, we had like our first campground rally, not really rally, just campground where there were a bunch of other kids I knew at there. We put out that we're gonna play Monopoly tonight. We went to the event center at that campground and we sent the Monopoly board and we invited all the teenagers. I I sent it out, I said to like all the families that I knew in that campground. And I think we played Monopoly with 11 kids, ranging from 10 to 17. And you can't play Monopoly with 17 kids. There's not enough money, there's not enough tokens, it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

But we figured it out, and we all had a good game for that, just so you know.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Okay, okay. My kid was all into Monopoly at the time, and so Monopoly was like I could never engage here. And I thought, well, maybe there's at least two other players who want to play. But we we met several friends now. Um, some we stay close to, some we don't, from that one experience. But that wasn't an intentional action early on, they just got at spur, right? And we do that occasionally now, not as often. Um, maybe we could or should. Um, but now it's it's he's found a group that he likes to game with. And so to like to this week when we just arrived here yesterday, I said the goal for you is to add more people to your network. Tell me at the end of the rally, because I'm gonna ask you what are the four people you might consider adding to your network of friends that you're gonna look for, talk to on a regular basis. I'm not expecting like best friend status, I'm just like, who do you think you could add to your network of somebody who you would like to spend time with sometimes? Because that helps us design travel plans. Because we used to design travel plans around theme parks and we go to Six Flags, we go to Bush Gardens, or we go to SeaWorld. Like, where's the theme park that he wants to ride roller coasters at? If you have to pay for the actual ticket prices, it's expensive. But when you buy memberships nowadays, you can kind of just go around and go whenever you want.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

We actually tooled our reservations and and our education around that too, because we actually studied roller coasters that year on purpose. So velocity and all the things that went with that.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Okay, yeah, yeah. That's a good trade, a good classroom, a good band. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

You know, an education anywhere is a great tool. But you know, when you're doing it at a theme park, you can find all sorts of things from how fast are you spinning on the teacups to how fast do you have to go down the roller coaster. Right. So it's it's a great tool. You know, people don't realize how much education is actually at a theme park.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Every every opportunity when you go somewhere, there is a piece of information to share that's educational. That's why I love national parks, I love museums, I love going to zoos. We spent only a full year 21, 2021, every time we landed in a city, we'd find the local zoo and whatever it was, and we would go. Because it was like 20 bucks, right? And the local zoos are so inexpensive. And if you add to the idea that you can get the membership cards that help give you 50% off a lot of other zoos, those are all things that the average six and bricks human doesn't even know exist.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

So, at what point did you guys know that this was a lifestyle for you?

SPEAKER_02 10:07

For me, it was sitting at Angel Point, New Mexico, south of four corners, about two miles off grid for three days, still doing my job. I had solar, I had internet, I had my job that was nine to five at the time still. And and we sat there virtually in the middle of the desert, overlooking this grand piece of nature, and I'm still able to function. There's no reason to go back to any office ever. I mean, I I love people in offices, don't get me wrong. That's what I do. I don't have to be in an office to do that all the time.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

You can love what you do and still be where you are, and they can love what they do and go to their nine to five if that's their dream, you know, and and I think that's okay for everybody. I I think so many people wait. I think that those of us that didn't wait, we get judged for it sometimes. The truth is, when my 16-year-old was born, his grandpa died a week later in my house. My dad had cancer. He was 61. My dad never retired. And so for me, I don't know that that weighed on my heart the same way it did years later when I said yes. But I'm sure it had some of that impact in the decision-making process finally of you know, don't wait. You know, you're not promised tomorrow, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Exactly. So by the way, you can hear squawking in the background on the audio. That's my parrot. We travel with two parrots.

unknown 11:19

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

So I don't know if you can hear that in the mind.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Because I love birds. We actually lost one of our birds on the road. She flew out the window after she had made photos with a local bird, and that was in Ohio a couple years ago. So I haven't replaced any of the birds. But yes, I love having birds on the road. We now just have frogs. That's a half a Frenchie, half a pug, looks like a potato and runs around. What would you say you have learned or watched your son learn about being out here that you don't think he would have gotten in a traditional type of education?

SPEAKER_02 11:52

He may not realize it yet, but I think what he's learning that I know I never did is the fans of the culture of America. You can go from one town to another town. Sometimes you have to be the same town. If you live there, you wouldn't notice it because it's just how you live. When you drive through some towns, you can see the culture shift. So we lived in rural Illinois. Like St. Louis was the biggest city that we had, and that's where we lived most of his young life. But if we had stayed there, he would only understand St. Louis. He wouldn't understand LA. He wouldn't understand San Francisco, he wouldn't understand Austin or Dallas. And we've been to those major cities. We've done things in those cities, Orlando. He can navigate visually Orlando now because we've been there so often. As we drive around, we talk about why this building looks that way or why these people are walking instead of riding the transit bus or riding transit bus instead of driving a car. Because we've driven and been through those areas of the country. When you go into a store and you have to seek someone out who speaks a different language to speak your language, that's a different that's not something you're gonna experience, at least not today, anyway, and say, Look, when you're in some of these other cities and states, you experience Hispanic culture differently, you experience Cuban culture differently, you experience Mexican culture differently, and that's all great. You don't experience that in St. Louis. If we were saying St. Louis, you wouldn't have you wouldn't have those experiences. He's picking up, and I think over time he's gonna realize he does need to know multiple languages. I mean, I was told that in school. You should learn Spanish, you should learn French. Oh, French Canadians is another one. When you pull into an RV park sometimes in the winter, you might have 12 French Canadians next to you, and they don't speak English at all. How they survive down here, I don't know sometimes, but they do. It's two things. It brings experience, a layer of experience that they would not get anywhere else. But it also brings willing to be patient with people and slow down and be passionately helpful. They're helping you, you're helping them, you're figuring things out. It layers in a layer of resourcefulness that I think if you stay comfortable in your quote unquote house, stay comfortable in your job, you don't experience some of that at the level that we do when we're traveling up road.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

I would totally agree with that. You know, people don't realize, like culturally, just how different kids become. And I've talked about this before for us. Our first year we went back to where we bought a house. And so we bought a house in Yucca Valley the year after Frank retired, and we moved out to a place that we thought we wanted to stay forever. And a year later we hit the road and then we put the house up on the market, and we found a renter that wanted to rent to own it, and we ended up selling the house in 2017. But the first year we went back, all the kids were like, My friends have changed. And as I watched those interactions, I realized that their friends hadn't changed at all. Their friends were still from that town, and that was normal. They had changed, they had been exposed to more, they had experienced more, they had met more people, they had looked broader than their original horizon. And so, even as a homeschooled family, which we always homeschooled, my kids were never in public school, but they were always homeschooled kids, but they were never sheltered, kind of like some homeschooled kids. And it's okay if you do shelter your kids. Like I think every family has to make a decision that's right for them. But we realized very quickly that it was us that had changed, not anybody else. One of the questions everybody asks, ready for this one, is how do you make money on the road? And you kind of touched it on it a little bit, but let's dive into how you do right now make money on the road. Because I think people want to know is this life doable? Can I make money on the road? What does that look like for Ron?

SPEAKER_02 15:14

It's doable. It's always a little bit challenging unless you've got something that you're focusing on. And I think that's where I do actually have some struggles, is I have a very I've learned I think I have an adult ADHD. So I make money on three or four different things. And I think that's a common denominator with several travel families. There are some that focus on there might be people who are travel nurses. There might be people who are entrepreneurs that got a business at home and they travel on the road and they go back to their business every now and again. I see several of those. For me, I run what I do here with us in the ring. The main money maker we have right now has been 3D printing. We do social media. I've built in the last year 5,000 followers on TikTok, and we're doing social media there with our own branding as well as the 3D printing branding. I've been working in the AI space, layering that on top of my automation and operations space that I've needed as a career. So I have 35 years in technology and healthcare 15, the operational excellence from healthcare to a mainstream America. We're working on an AI agency to work with businesses, both nomadic as well as in-person businesses as we travel to help them layer up their technology. What they do with technology today, even if they do anything, and a lot of them still don't do anything, they need to level up, or they're going to get either bought out, put out of business, or lost a lot of business. Unfortunately, there's a lot of retirement businesses, and the newcomers in are bringing some of their own technology stack with them. But some of the newcomers in are the buyers. If they were bringing in, I just want to buy it and buy another business and buy another business and then just own those. And the operations will not change that much except to just level up the cash flow. You need to have a strategy with innovation as an essential business in mainstream America. That's a direction kind of working through for now for what we've been doing last year, has been building a personal brand, carrying forward my technology background, leveling up with AI, 3D printing, and a side business, if you will, small community researching genealogy. I have 25 years of researching my own genealogy. I bring that to the table not as a professional, but as another researcher who's just done the experience and saying, if you want to participate in a community and learn about how to use the tools that we have available to us today, which are crazy awesome, uh, to research your family, let's do that together in this community. That's another thing that raises money. So I'm also part of a group of other traveling influencers where we have opportunities to connect and get video done for a campground or video done for a business. So that's uh another area where we're working on revenue. I keep my fingers in a lot of sub.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah, well, actually, that was one thing that Frank and I learned. Our first year on the road, we went on the road with just his retirement. And if you know anything at all about the Marine Corps and being enlisted, we did that with six kids. And so halfway through almost every month, we were eating beans and rice for dinner for a week. No doubt it was gonna happen. But we wanted the freedom of that. When we fell into RV roofing, Frank actually worked for a different RV roofing company, but he told the owner of that company, You need me, I don't need you. And the owner looked at him and said, Yeah, we're done here, and walked away. And if you get to know my husband, he's very sarcastic. He was raised in upstate New York and then spent 20 years in the Marine Corps. He's got a little bit of dark humor to him, and people either get him or they don't. But at the same time, he only meant that we owned our camper, we owned our van that pulled the camper, we had healthcare coverage, and we didn't have any payments. So we were just looking for some extra funding. Basically, the owner came back about 30 minutes later after talking to some other people and said, You're right, I need you. And so he worked for them till 2020 when we would get involved with RV roofing solutions. And what we knew then was we needed something in the industry that would help other people make money on the road. And so that was our heart in that. When I got learned RV last year, that's a whole nother level. Learned RV was not a moneymaker, it was not even really monetized. Like we're building it and bringing it back to life every day. So, you know, that community, it's not about me, it's about all of you guys that come on and support the community for me. It's such a neat opportunity to be able to highlight everyone else. You know, as somebody that has been doing this a long time, that never wanted to be an influencer, if you will. It's a great way for me to just kind of give back to the community that I love so much. Let's take a short twist on this one if you're open to it. I'd love to talk about kind of faith and gathering of nomads, because you know, you and I are both members of that community as well. That plays a role in your life. Um, Shane's a great guy and he's building something very real and authentic there. What drew you to that?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

Sort of that. I mean, the real and authentic piece of it. I've enjoyed conversations with Shane and other traveling nomads who are part of the group. Being connected to faith on the road just aligns us with the faith that we had in our Stitch and Bricks. I didn't have faith involved in my life until I was an adult, until I was actually well into my adulthood by 2000. So I was involved in Sticks and Bricks Church in early 2000s. That was my first real involvement with faith. Really, it was a good thing. And then it was a falling out.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

Um and church splits are terrible and horrible. And community splits within the RV community can feel equally as horrible.

SPEAKER_02 20:03

So I was away from it for a long time until my son and putting him in private school with a Lutheran church, getting me engaged there, meeting some new pastors, some new urban people, renewing something that I had lost for a while. And then when we hit the road, we separated from that church and that school because we weren't in St. Louis anymore. Basically, just allowing myself to be in the presence of other faith-minded people is why I wanted to stay connected to Chain and Gathering Nomads. Because then I can have a common thread of connection when I meet another nomad on the road who's part of the group, right? We can sit down, we have faith conversations, we can have spiritual conversations, we can go deeper comfortably because we start at a foundation.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah, and in 2026, that's so important because I think that you don't start there so many times because you're afraid you're gonna put someone off. I'll never forget. First year on the road, we had there were 13 families in Thousand Trails Orlando. We're Thousand Trails members, we have been since 2013. But there were 13 families, and some of those families were like Margie Lundy. So the Lundy Five was there, and we were there, and there's not a lot of them left that travel with their kids still. Some of their kids have grown up and grown out like my older kids have. And my friend Mellie came to me and she said thanks. And I'm like, For what? She goes, just for never turning me into a project. And it absolutely destroyed me that she said that because I don't ever want to be that Christian that turns people into a project. I just want to love people where they're at. And it was such a moment for me that it defined who we would become on the road. And that's probably why we do it that way. That's one of the things I love about Shane is that he loves on everybody, he'll pray for anybody, he won't judge you for who you are. I think we need more of that as Christians in the world. I think if we did that, you know, the world would be a better place if we could just let people be wherever they are in their journey spiritually, but still just love them for who they are. Sorry, I don't usually get sappy.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

That's okay. That's a good story.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Let's talk and shift about friendship, which is equally sappy. How does that look like for you as a single dad?

SPEAKER_02 21:57

It's challenging sometimes, especially early on when we personally The road and even still sometimes because you don't have the pair of family members and counterbalance what you think in your head. So there's a lot of head play in figuring out conversations. I've found a great community of guys that I'm able to connect with and family members, regardless of whether male or female, to connect with. It's unfortunate, but I've had to be extraordinarily intentional with that intention of reaching out where it's uncomfortable. I'm much more of an introverted person, so I'm a person who can just sit here and just keep working all day long if nobody interrupts. And so I have to be intentionally interrupting myself and going and finding activities to engage myself in that might have other adult humans involved. And I'm a teenager who drags my other time elsewhere. And so if it's not involving him and it's not involving me and my mind doing my work, then I've got to make sure I'm using that time to engage with other adults. That sometimes is is it's hard for me because I'm also a high-performing worker and I want to stay focused on what I'm working on. It's hard for me to distract myself, if that makes sense, from what I'm working on as a passion project or a work project to go out and quote unquote make friends. I don't want to be there either.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

How this whole thing came up about friendship was Tasha and I were like, let's do an episode on friendship. Brought out so many things, and we brought on Joni and she just launched her own podcast and we wanted to share kind of what that looked like. And halfway through Tasha's and my episode, we were talking about the ladies connecting and how hard and how catty it can be. And you know, I'm super authentic and very real. And so if if somebody says something, I'm gonna call them out on it. But that doesn't always work well in a friendship situation. At the same time, I'm the person that I would want you to tell me where I where I'm struggling and be honest with me because that's just who I am. And I have much better relationships a lot of times with guys than I do girls because guys are very real, they're very open and they're gonna be more honest with you. Hey, that that's offensive. Don't say that. You know, they'll just come back at me like that. Where women will like bite their tongue, but then they'll talk about you later. And so on the road. Yeah, I think that on the road that presents its own set of challenges. But we're halfway through that episode and Tasha goes, Well, what about the guys? How are we gonna talk about the guys connecting? And I was like, I know just the person to do a community spotlight with to start off this episode because I think it's an amazing opportunity to talk about both sides of that coin, but you have a unique situation. My husband has a unique situation, but there's a lot of military guys out there, he speaks Marine Corps. So, like when we would go to church, people would come to me and say, What did he say? And I'd be like, No, he's telling you what his his job was. It's called his MOS. But I had to do that translation. So even in a group of real people, he sometimes has a hard time communicating because they don't understand his language unless those guys are all veterans, in which case, well, then he'll open right up, even though he's an introvert.

SPEAKER_02 24:39

Some don't, so so that's still rare. I think I talked to a lot of veterans, younger veterans are more open, but older veterans are much more closed off. You have to really be rational about your question to get them to start talking about something. Being in the genealogy space, I I talk to a lot of veterans at times trying to get them to open up about their history or their background, and it's really hard sometimes because they don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Frank doesn't talk about it with everybody, especially right away. So I I'd say he has to be comfortable around you to get to that space. We have a friend, Jason and Simpson. They're from the Simpson Six, they're one of the first families we met on the road. But Jason is a super extrovert like me. So Jason will take his cup of coffee and walk behind palm trees from one to the other to get your attention. He's a lot of fun to be around. But the reality is that he knows Frank really well. And so that friendship is very special for us because when we are together, we're all both all in it, if that makes sense. It's one of those things where it works out for us. But it sometimes takes Frank longer to meet someone. But I think that's true. I think that one of the things that we don't talk about enough is it's often not the first meeting on the road that you make that connection, it's the second or third, especially because teenagers don't want to invest in that friendship until they know that that friend is going to be there more than once. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

If they're single, that's a little bit true for adults too. I think that's a little bit true for uh at least maybe it's just me. Maybe that's my perspective. I think we we do move a lot, and unless I'm intentional about keeping up with somebody, I don't know where they're gone or with yes, or where I might be going because my change might be just as often as they do. So we have to really like we want to be a really close friend with someone, you have to make it an intentional friendship and be clear about that to make it work. Otherwise, you're very easily going to go off in your different directions and only reconnect again annually when you're happening to be in the same campground again and say, Oh, hey, how are you doing? And you have to pass the how you doing stage to what's happening in your life? How can we help? What's the grand thing? You know, we're working on right now. That's another great one for guys. It's like because they're always working on most of us, they're always working on something. It may not be our career, but I mean hobby, but we're always working on something. So I think it's intentionally being part of and engaging and bringing value to the friendship as opposed to just saying hi and they have to do it.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

No, I would agree with that. But single parenting is stretched my stretch my extrovert muscle. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. You know, I I I don't ever say that I was a single parent, but I did do deployments without my husband a lot. And so we have seven children. A lot of those years are solo years, and I think there's something to that, but it's its own category, single parenting on the road. And I know a handful of single moms that do it, but it's hard. And so, you know, we try to come alongside any one of those single moms. You and I met originally at the content creator event. My life is stupid busy lately, it never started out that way. But you know, at some point I would love to get our teenagers together because I think they probably have a few things in common based on what I know about you. And but how do you make sure Ron is okay on the road? You personally, like not the kid, you know, not making sure that they've found the friends or are at an event. How do you take time for you? I mean, what what fills your cup?

SPEAKER_02 27:33

I've always engaged in positive content. So I listen and I receive mentorship from some online people that I follow that are always meeting positivity. So it's not meditation for much so much as it is just listening to positive quotes, reading positive things, writing down and journaling what it is that was good today, and not so much focusing on what was not working so well. There are times where that doesn't work, as it's just life, right? You can't go through life in a positive state 100% of the time. That's just not realistic. Because even if you are, there's there's still piece you can pick apart if you really were to analyze your life a little bit. And so you just have to start to learn to be okay with realizing that that's okay. That thing that didn't work out the way you wanted it to worked out that way for a reason, and you learn something from it, then the next thing will go better. You start again tomorrow. If it didn't go well today, you got tomorrow to try again.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

You know, the longer we're on the road, the more complacent we can get in that way. I know winter went way too fast, and you know, we were down in Florida and I didn't do enough intentionality, even though I'm an extrovert and the kids are not, so I dragged the the boys out. I know I didn't do enough of that because you know the day was long, we recorded four sessions, something got busy, the business was happening, we had a rally, whatever. Taking the time to hang out with other people is critical for me. And so for me personally, I fill my cup with other people because I just like being around other people. But like that means for me, it means I'm probably going to the grocery store if you don't want to talk to me at night because there's somebody there that'll talk to me. I'm the I'm the girl that goes out to dinner so that we can talk to the waitress, so I don't have to have a conversation with my spouse unless we're going out with another, you know, other people. Because he's he's done. He's he's an introvert. He's filled his cup by a certain time of the day. And that's okay. If there's a single parent out there today that is on the fence of can I do this, what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Take the small actions and get comfortable with those and then do the next small action and see you can do it. That's what you want to do. Just go take some action toward doing it. There's a lot of fears, like there's stuff they would never come up with a conversation like you and I are having or any any of my other conversations that were fears in the background of my head when we went and said we're gonna do this full time. Those things are just in your head. Let them stay there and let them leave because they're not real. That's your imagination just screwing through head to make you think you can't do it. And it's a lot of that a lot of that in real life, but it's especially when you're trying to make a hard decision like this. Because it is kind of hard. Because you have to figure out what am I gonna do with all this property? What am I gonna do with all this stuff that I have in a house? What am I gonna do when my relative calls me out and says, why are you traveling when you see a career in a house? All these things that just roll over in your head all the time, they're not real. More than likely, the people who would ever say something like that aren't going to because they're too uncomfortable to say it. They're actually gonna be strongly in favor of you doing what you want to do, and you just don't realize that they're gonna be in favor of it. They're more supportive than you think. Your friends, your family, you'd be surprised how supportive they are once they realize their why. That's actually the key point. And I probably should have brought that up. Understanding why you want to do something, whether it's traveling full-time or anything else in life, understanding the why it's important to you, so you can vocalize that back to someone else when they ask you why are you doing that dumb thing, because that's what they think, then you can you can clearly say this is why. Well, that makes sense. Okay, let's do I can support that. That's one of the first things I would recommend is figure out why you want to do this and and clearly define that for yourself, and then clearly speak that back to somebody else, and you'd be surprised how many unsupportive people are.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Yeah, and I think the other side of that coin is sometimes it takes people a little while to come around. I know for my mom, the first year, she was like, I don't know, that's a good idea. She came on the road with us for two years. She decided to go back to a house because this life wasn't for her. She also saw how we were thriving. I think that sometimes you just have to wait for your parents or your your aunts, your uncles, your sister, your brother to come around and see that this is a good lifestyle for you. Doesn't mean it's going to be their lifestyle, it just means it fits you.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

One last thing on that. I think two reasons why we have this. We have it because we watch other people who travel. Because if you're thinking about being in travel, you're probably watching YouTube or Instagram or of some other traveling family or some other traveling person. The reality is there's a lot of traveling influencers, a lot of traveling families that are on YouTube or on Instagram, and they're showing a lot of what looks to be a perfect lifestyle. And I'm just gonna tell you straight up, it's not that perfect. There's a lot of challenges, there's a lot of great things, but there's a lot of challenges. It's not any different from that standpoint as a sticks and bricks house. When you go into a sticks and bricks house, you move from St. Louis to LA or Chicago, and you have to sort of rebuild your house, the water's not gonna work, the heater might not work in the house, the air conditioner might not work, the roof might have a leak. All these things happen whether you're a travel family or your own house family. It just happens differently. There is not a perfect. You have to again come back to why do you want to do this and be okay with life that way and go forward? So I just wanted to be clear about the don't believe all the perfection you see out on social media, but bring that perfection is some things that they just don't go right that day, and that's okay. They just don't want to talk about that. Some do, they do, there are some that do.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

Well, Ron, this has been an amazing conversation, and I think that we could talk about having you back again for a different episode for sure. But where can our listeners find you and follow along your journey?

SPEAKER_02 32:27

I'm gonna be much more active on YouTube soon, so that's coming up in the next month or so. I have a pillar account, pillar.io slash ron.m. is the way to find like everything that we're doing. And anything that I'm I'm doing that's new will get posted there first as probably the best place. Also, TikTok is probably the first social media place I would send somebody to because that's where I spend most of my energy right now. But that's also listed in the pillar.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Well, thank you so much for coming on today. If you're interested in Ron's story, make sure you like and subscribe to him. I know he's got a YouTube channel launching soon. Ultimately, at the end of the day, Learn to RV is about this community. If you're out there and you're thinking, I want a community that I can be involved in, learn to RV could be that community. Last year we started adding writers and YouTubers to our team. And so it's really easy to get involved that way once every two months. You just do some content for us and we share that content. And so if you can grow your audience, we'll grow your audience with you. And so it's just one more way that this community can make that connection. And learn to RV can be about you, the person out there behind the screen. So I love that we get to bring people to you. Um and I'm fortunate that we know so many, but ultimately at the end of the day, I'd much rather just hang out with you around again. See you next time. Thanks for joining us on Learn to RV.