March 12, 2026
PNW RVing, Weekend Camping & Podcasting with Brooks Smothers | Community Spotlight
Send a text Sponsored by RV Roofing Solutions How can you be an RVing family if your partner's firmly against it? Brooks Smothers, host of the RV Out West and See America podcasts, shares how a borrowed tent trailer changed his wife’s mind and how a busted slide taught him more than he wanted to know. Brooks and his family are weekend warriors from the Pacific Northwest. They upgraded to a bunkhouse in 2020. He's an RV show speaker, hosts two RV travel podcasts, and is one of the most knowled...
Sponsored by RV Roofing Solutions
How can you be an RVing family if your partner's firmly against it? Brooks Smothers, host of the RV Out West and See America podcasts, shares how a borrowed tent trailer changed his wife’s mind and how a busted slide taught him more than he wanted to know.
Brooks and his family are weekend warriors from the Pacific Northwest. They upgraded to a bunkhouse in 2020. He's an RV show speaker, hosts two RV travel podcasts, and is one of the most knowledgeable voices on RVing the PNW and Canada.
If you’ve ever wondered if weekend RVing is worth all the effort or dreamed of exploring the PNW but don’t know where to start, here's your inside scoop.
Learn How:
• A loaner RV can turn a reluctant camper into an enthusiast
• To navigate part-timer burnout
• RVing Canada differs from the U.S.
• To build a 10-day PNW loop in 5 days
• A vintage VW Westfalia rental can get you into the wilderness
• To find the best local food & hidden gems wherever you camp
Links & Resources:
🎤 Brooks Smothers:
• RV Out West podcast & website
• See America podcast, part of the RV Miles Network of Podcasts
• Instagram & Facebook: @RV_Out_West
🚐 Mentioned Here:
• Peace Vans — Vintage VW camper rentals, Seattle
• RV renting across the U.S. blog
• RV Roofing Solutions (episode sponsor)
🏕️ RV Resources:
🎤 Our Podcast Website: learntorvthepodcast.com
👥 Join For Free on Facebook: Learn to RV: The Podcast Community
📸 Follow Our Adventures: @LearnToRV
👉 More RV Life Resources: learntorv.com
📺 Watch on YouTube: Learn To RV Channel
💛 Support the Podcast:
• Patreon (Join the Campfire Crew for bonus content, early access, exclusive episodes, + swag)
• Buy Me a Coffee (drop us a tip ☕)
💬 Weekender or full-timer, share your biggest RV challenge in our Facebook community!
✨ Love this? Subscribe, share, & leave a review.
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Welcome back to Learn to RV.
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Today we're starting another one of our community spotlight series, and we're here with Brooks Mothers of RV outwest.
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And I'm just so excited to have you on because the Pacific Northwest, we've only done it for one season.
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And I've been listening to your podcast for the last couple of weeks just to because we're trying to figure out who we want to invite on and how to expand our reach in terms of like people to share their journey so that our readers and listeners can find you.
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So tell us a little bit about how you got started doing podcasts and traveling in an RV.
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Sure.
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Well, first off, thank you so much for having me on the show.
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I'm excited to uh have this conversation and be a part of the show.
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So thank you.
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Um, our RV journey is actually a really funny story.
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So I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.
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I spent about a decade away from my mid-20s to my late 30s, and I returned back to the Northwest.
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And um I was married at when I returned.
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I wasn't when I left, and I came back married.
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My wife grew up from the burbs of Philadelphia, and she was not really ever a big camper.
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And so when she started dating me, we were camping, tent camping.
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We did a a couple of short backpacking trips and whatever.
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And uh we were now fast forward in life.
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We're now in our early 40s and we're at a friend's house at a barbecue, and they had just upgraded from a tent trailer to a travel trailer.
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And I said to them, I go, Oh, what are you guys doing with the tent trailer?
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And they're like, We're gonna sell it.
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Why?
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Do you guys want to buy it?
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And I said yes, and my wife said no at the exact same time.
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And I looked at her and I go, What do you mean, no?
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And she was like, Well, that's not really camping.
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Um, and we had a young, we had two young children, like a five-year-old and a two-year-old with us.
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And uh, our friend goes, you know, we're gonna be going out of town for the whole summer.
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They were all school teachers, so like we're off.
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We're gonna go travel in our new trailer.
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Why don't you guys just borrow the tent trailer from us?
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And when we get back from our trip, we'll figure it out.
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You can either give it back to us, we're, you know, whatever.
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And all it took was taking my wife camping in that thing one night and not sleeping on the ground.
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And she goes, Yeah, we're buying this.
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So we bought the tent trailer from them, and we had the tent trailer for about two years, leading up to so we bought it in like 2018.
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So this was kind of leading into not knowing what the world was going to look like come, you know, March 2020.
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And so, um, we had already been thinking about wanting to get a larger trailer.
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Our kids were now getting a little bit bigger, something with air conditioning and our own bathroom and that kind of thing.
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And then so the whole COVID pandemic just kind of expedited our plans.
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And so, right in the very early days of the pandemic, we bought a uh 26-foot travel trailer, you know, bunkhouse with the kids and a slide and and the whole nine.
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And I've been going nonstop ever since.
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So are you guys full-time or part-time?
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We are weekenders.
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We own a house and we both have normal nine to five office jobs and that kind of thing.
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So no.
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And there's even a discrepancy about what future would look like in that situation between the two of us, anyways.
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No, we are not full-timers.
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We will do, you know, kind of a longer multi-day trip in the summer, and then we are heavy weekenders.
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Nice.
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I mean, I just winterized up here in the northwest.
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You know, it's right now it's mid-40s and dumping rain, and I winterized about two weeks ago, and we'll pull it out in March.
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And I'm an avid snowboarder and a seasons pass holder, so my son and I are up in the mountains snowboarding every weekend here, starting soon, hopefully.
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Keep doing our snow dances.
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So yeah, we have actually friends that own a campground up in South Fork, Colorado, and they loved it so much being full-time that they actually bought a campground up there, and they do all year round camping for people that love to snowboard snowboard and ski up there.
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Yeah, it's crazy.
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Yeah, no, it's very cool.
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Our local mountain up here is called the one that I go to is called Stevens Pass, and they have a lot that has electric hookups, doesn't have water or sewer.
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And so you can tow, and I've done that, I've towed my trailer up to them into the mountains and done a ski in, ski out from my trailer in the dead of winter, and it's been that's a blast.
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Well, that sounds like lots of fun.
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So, I mean, obviously you love the Pacific Northwest, and I'm guessing you stay kind of close to home.
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But I also saw on Facebook this morning that you're appearing other places this year.
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Tell us a little bit about those appearances.
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Sure.
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So in 2024, let me start there.
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So in 2024, I uh was a seminar speaker at the Seattle RV show.
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I did a couple of seminar presentations, one kind of like an Rving 101.
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It was called So You Want to R V.
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And uh the other one was kind of like how to work a multi-day trip and and the functionalities and tips and tricks for doing multi-day groceries and laundry and travel and you know that kind of thing.
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And while I was there, I met RV Miles because Jason and Abby were there as the the headliners for the seminars.
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Yep.
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I know them.
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Yeah.
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So my wife and I went out to dinner with them, and we have become friends with them as well.
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And I um also now am the host of the See America podcast, which is now part of the R well, I re-brought life back into it.
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RV Miles had kind of just ran out of bandwidth, and so they had to pause that show.
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And so I'm now, as of last season, the new voice for the See America podcast as well.
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And so through chatting with them, they introduced me to Valerie, who puts on the Kansas City RV show.
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And so this year I'm the headlining seminar speaker at the Kansas City RV show at Barter Hall in Kansas City, Missouri.
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I'm giving three seminars there.
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Well, the first seminar is called Banff Bound, and it's all about RVing up to Banff, what you need to know, crossing the border with your RV, Parks Canada, making campground reservations in Canada is dramatically different than how it works here in the United States.
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So I'm gonna kind of share what that process is and what that looks like, as well as of course all the fun stuff, you know, um the tea house hikes and going to Lake Louise and where to find the best poutine or, you know, whatever it all might be.
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So we're gonna kind of talk about all things Canada and Banff, the hot springs.
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The other one I'm gonna do is all about RVing the Oregon coast and kind of going up and down along from, say, like Astoria down to Brookings and kind of what you can again, where to camp, what to see, what things you need to know, suggestions and those kind of tips.
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And then the last one, I realized those first two, for somebody in the greater kind of Kansas City area, those are really big monster trips because getting from Kansas City to Astoria is a three to six day drive, depending on how hard you want to drive to get out there and how much time you have, you know.
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So adding three to six days to get out there and then three to six days to get back, and then however much time you want to spend out there, that's a two-week trip, probably at bare minimum, and not everybody can necessarily take that time.
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So the other one I'm gonna do is what if you fly into Seattle and either rent an RV or there's a really cool company called Peace Vans in Seattle that does old school V dub Westfalia rentals.
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And so you could pick up an old Westie, an 80s boxy westie, and rent from them and kind of do the whole V Dub thing in the Northwest.
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You'll fit right in, you know, but that in Subaros, I don't know, you'll be fine.
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But we actually did a whole way to rent across the country on Learn to RV several months ago.
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And so there's a whole article on all the different companies out there, and that was the one that I picked for Seattle just out of the blue because they were when I spoke with them, they were just the most accommodating, I feel like, you know, for the people who are in the world.
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Harvey's been on the show.
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Yeah.
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I've had Harvey on my show, and he's fantastic.
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And what they're doing there is really cool.
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So this last one would be like a 10-day itinerary.
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So if you only take five days off from work and you book in the weekends and you fly into Seattle, rent a van, I've got a whole really cool loop that takes you up through the North Cascades.
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Um, so you can get to North Cascades National Park and then go into the Metau Valley and see Winthrop.
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Beautiful.
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Come around to Lake Shallan and kind of wine country in the lake, and then come through Leavenworth, which is like this faux Bavaria mountain town, and back to Seattle.
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And so there's a 10-day loop you could do for somebody, you know, who can only take five days off from work.
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So those are kind of the three seminars.
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Yeah, that's fair.
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Like when we did it, we did a whole summer up there, and we got up there end of May when it was so raining.
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And you know, owning a company that counts on the weather, we knew that and we told our friends that, but we spent the whole summer up there, and it was just an amazing summer.
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I can't imagine trying to, you know, fit all of that into such a short trip.
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But I mean, it totally can be done.
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It can be done.
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And it's a 10-day loop.
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You could, you know, a couple days here, a couple days there, a couple days there, a couple days there, and you're home, you know.
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Right.
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And and the knowledge base that you bring to it is is amazing.
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What inspired you to start sharing your RV journey publicly?
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I'm a very creative person.
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I work in the creative industry and have been professionally within graphic design, marketing, visual journalism, storytelling, all of that has been the span of my career.
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So during the pandemic and the lockdown, you know, we were trying to remote school with our kids.
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My wife was trying to remote work as a middle school counselor.
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I'm doing my job.
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And then, of course, yes, like everybody else at the time, we're also doing a remodel.
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And so I needed a creative outlet.
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And so I just decided to just start talking about it.
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And it was kind of like a, is this thing on?
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Yeah.
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And people started listening.
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And, you know, it so it's just been a great and I just I just love the Pacific Northwest.
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It's a really special place.
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The summers here are absolutely gorgeous.
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For anybody who is retired or, you know, can take vacation at a different time that's outside of the school year.
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September is the absolute best time to visit the Pacific Northwest.
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Our schools here start right after Labor Day weekend.
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So by that first week of September, all of the families are kind of getting back into the routine, settling into school life, and it's sunny and 72 and gorgeous.
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It's perfect.
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No humidity.
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September's a gorgeous month.
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Just be out by October 15th.
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Right.
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So we were actually in uh we started out in Oregon.
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Okay.
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And we were near uh where is it?
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The Shining.
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We were in that area near.
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Oh, Timberline.
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Timberline Ridge up by Mount Hood, yeah.
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And so um we actually went up there and it snowed, it was still snowing up there when we arrived that year.
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Up there, not down where we were.
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But um we went up there and Frank's like, watch where you step.
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The next thing we knew, he was up to his hip in a snow because he fell right through a spot that looked like it was packed well.
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There's things that you don't know if you don't live in that area.
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Like even though we grew up in the northeast, it were we were really out of practice when we did that trip.
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That's funny.
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Um what about challenges?
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Have you faced any challenges with either RV Outlet West or on the road where you know you had to overcome something?
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Yeah, I've had a few uh challenges.
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We were on a five-week cross-country, 10,000 mile loop around the United States in the summer of 2023, I think it was.
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And uh our first day, we got up, we left, and we made it to Deer Lodge, Montana.
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And I need to preface with we are not mourning people at all.
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So our second day on the road, we wanted to try to get as close as we could out to Teddy Roosevelt National Park out there in North Dakota.
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So I woke up at six.
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I don't get up at six, even for a work day.
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And I was up at six, and I'm getting stuff, coffee pot fired up, and the kids are kind of still sleeping.
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I'm getting camp ready.
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Great.
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Oh my gosh, my wife's up, the kids are up, everybody's in the truck.
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I can't believe it.
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We're actually gonna get out of here on time.
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And my wife goes to bring the slide in, and our slide starts to crab and it won't come in all the way.
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So a few swear words later, little fists to the sky, because I got up at six to do something right.
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And six hours later, I had figured out how to manually bring the slide in.
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So we brought the slide in.
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I am so glad before we left on that trip too.
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I did one final trip to Harbor Freight, and they had an air ratchet on sale for like 20 bucks.
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And I was like, if I got a change of tire, that'd be kind of handy.
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So it was a total impulse buy.
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I bought an air ratchet and threw it in the truck.
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And if I didn't have that air ratchet with me, I think I would still be manually bringing the slide in with a ratchet today.
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Yeah, that that is a job for that was brutal.
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So we finally brought the slide in enough that we could get on the road.
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And of course, we're like driving down the road, and people in Montana are so nice, and they're like rolling their windows down, yelling at us on the freeway, saying, Your slide's out because it wasn't fully seated, right?
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It still was kind of sticking out like six inches.
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So we're like, Yeah, yeah, we know.
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But in the meantime, my wife is like on the phone calling people, you know, down the road, saying, Hey, we have this issue.
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Can you look at our RV?
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And we finally found an RV tech in Bismarck who was like, Yep.
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And most everybody else we had called were like, Yeah, I can get to you in like six months, right?
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Because that's just the nature of the beast.
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And I was like, No, no, no.
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I need somebody to see me, please, in the next day or two.
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So we rolled into Bismarck and I felt like I was a NASCAR pit crew because these three guys came out with like the crawlers and a jack, and they jacked up the trailer and they went underneath it, and an hour later our slide was fixed.
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And a bolt had basically sheared on the the slide, and so it wasn't sitting right.
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So whatever.
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$800 later for a bolt, we were back on the road.
00:14:09.679 --> 00:14:12.320
But but that's the nature of R Ving, unfortunately.
00:14:12.639 --> 00:14:14.639
Sometimes that was the challenge.
00:14:14.879 --> 00:14:25.840
Well, and I love your your storytelling style with your podcasts, and I loved the episode on struggling with RV burnout, and I think it's something that a lot of people don't talk about.
00:14:25.919 --> 00:14:35.200
And you know, you can have burnout as a full-timer for sure, like we are, but even as a weekender, taking that time to refresh and regroup, I loved how you addressed that.
00:14:35.360 --> 00:14:42.799
Um you know, what would you tell people today that haven't listened to that podcast on how to handle and navigate burnout when you're traveling?
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Because I mean, a serious situation like you encountered out there could have caused serious distress.
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And looking at the silver lining of life is super important in most cases, especially in RV life.
00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:54.080
Right.
00:14:54.320 --> 00:14:54.960
Well, thank you.
00:14:55.120 --> 00:14:57.440
Burnout is hard, burnout is real.
00:14:57.600 --> 00:15:10.320
And when I did that episode, it like as much as I talk about that challenge of like the bolt breaking and trying to figure out and that being stressful and kind of upsetting because I'm, you know, wanting to be on the road, that's just part of it.
00:15:10.399 --> 00:15:14.240
And and I accept that and realize that and know that that's part of it, right?
00:15:14.320 --> 00:15:17.600
It's that rolling earthquake metaphor that we all reference.
00:15:17.840 --> 00:15:29.840
But uh I think the RV burnout for us as non-full-timers was just the amount of work it takes to get out of the house for just a weekend with the RV is a lot.
00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:34.000
And it's hard, it's challenging, and it's a lot of work to pack up the groceries.
00:15:34.080 --> 00:15:50.000
And I mean, our RV is, well, it's winterized right now, but when it's not winterized, I mean the beds are made and there's sheets in the bed, and so it's really just kind of grabbing an extra set of clothes and placing a Walmart pickup order to pick up with the trailer to get, you know, s'mores fixings and hot dogs and whatever.
00:15:50.080 --> 00:15:56.000
But then it's all the cleaning on Sunday to clean the RV and to dump the tanks and get it all ready to go.
00:15:56.159 --> 00:15:58.080
We can't store our RV at home.
00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:00.080
We don't have a space, we live in a city.
00:16:00.320 --> 00:16:05.120
So then it's, you know, driving out and the storage where we store it is 20 minutes, half hour away.
00:16:05.279 --> 00:16:10.559
So there's just all of those kind of logistical stuff that you're like, I'm doing this all for two nights.
00:16:10.639 --> 00:16:14.480
And Friday night is kind of a wash because I'm gonna get out there, set up camp.
00:16:14.639 --> 00:16:17.919
Maybe I'm gonna have a bourbon by a campfire, and then I'm gonna go to bed.
00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:18.159
Right.
00:16:18.320 --> 00:16:20.159
You know, so I basically it's for Saturday.
00:16:20.320 --> 00:16:23.440
Now, do you guys camp with friends a lot in that situation?
00:16:23.840 --> 00:16:24.159
Okay.
00:16:24.559 --> 00:16:25.120
We do.
00:16:25.279 --> 00:16:30.480
We we have a crew of friends that we camp with, and you know, a lot of the and that's the thing with the burnout too.
00:16:30.559 --> 00:16:33.360
I like places I'll find that are 20 minutes away from home.
00:16:33.440 --> 00:16:34.000
They're close.
00:16:34.159 --> 00:16:42.240
So, you know, if a kid, like some of our friends, their kids are like on select baseball, and so they'll leave the campground Saturday because the kids got a baseball game.
00:16:42.320 --> 00:16:45.840
So they'll take the kid off to go to the baseball game and then come back to the campground.
00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:49.919
Well, right, because life doesn't stop happening just because you're out there camping.
00:16:50.159 --> 00:16:53.200
I mean, especially because you live in a house year round.
00:16:53.360 --> 00:16:55.360
There's different, definitely different challenges.
00:16:55.519 --> 00:16:56.960
I'm always amazed, actually.
00:16:57.039 --> 00:17:09.519
We have friends that we met our first year on the road that are still weekend campers, and I'm always amazed at how much effort they go through just to come out for essentially one day for Saturday, and then they leave by Sunday morning to go back home.
00:17:09.759 --> 00:17:17.119
Sometimes they take Sunday, like sometimes they take Monday off just so they have the extra day so they can leave later on Sunday.
00:17:17.440 --> 00:17:19.279
I will pay for Sunday night.
00:17:19.519 --> 00:17:20.000
Yes.
00:17:20.240 --> 00:17:23.119
Even though I have zero intentions of spending the night Sunday night.
00:17:23.359 --> 00:17:23.599
Right.
00:17:23.759 --> 00:17:27.119
But it's nice to leave at like one o'clock or two o'clock in the afternoon if you don't have to be a few.
00:17:27.359 --> 00:17:31.119
Or even six o'clock because the you know, home is only twenty minutes away.
00:17:31.279 --> 00:17:49.359
So, you know, we'll stay at the campground all day Sunday and then pack up and leave and go home at six, six thirty, drop the trailer off, and we're home by seven, seven thirty, and then you know, start cycling kids through the showers and starting to load a laundry from the all the camp clothes and getting ready for the work week.
00:17:49.440 --> 00:17:50.240
So for sure.
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