Look at that route! What a road trip. Yay for us! Here’s the kicker, we own and run our own business. We are very much involved in every single aspect of it. When we work from the road in our RV, it is challenging to say the least. This is our 4th time doing it. Our first time was in June of 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit us, all of our travel stopped. Before March of 2020, we were traveling a TON for work and pleasure. It was mostly flying but there were plenty of road trips in there too. None of those road trips ever involved our RV though. We had a travel trailer going into the pandemic that we only used once or twice a year anymore. We were actually on a working trip in California in the middle of March of 2020. It is now the end of April 2021 and we haven’t yet traveled for business. We have owned and operated our own business for 9 years now. We and our 5 employees are all remote workers. We were remote before the pandemic, each of us working out of our homes or from the road in hotels when we needed to travel for a client or a conference, etc. Then, the pandemic enters. HAULT all travel! You know the deal from there. Well, this is what we decided to do.
By the time we are all starting to realize that this pandemic and travel restrictions may be sticking with us for a bit, my travel bug and wanderlust were getting extremely itchy. I was traveling within the US at least every month and every 4-5 months I was traveling to an amazing place outside of the US before the pandemic. As May starts to roll around and I am not even able to plan any trips, side note, trip planning is 1/3 of the joy of travel for me, I start thinking about traveling in our camper. Then, the positive Covid numbers start to slowly decrease from what they were and there is a slight bit of hope that an end could be coming. I talk with my husband, we seize the moment and start talking about an RV trip across the country to Yellowstone NP, all while working from the road. I start to do lots of research. We decide we should trade our travel trailer in for a ”small” C-Class RV to make this a successful journey. We scour the internet looking at layouts and we peruse local RV dealers‘ websites for a used C-Class that will fit our needs. BINGO! We found one and traded our travel trailer in. We made some reservations between our home in central Pennsylvania to Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. We drove through plenty of parts of our country that do not support internet usage while on the road. We need internet to run our business and work. We had to do some planning to make sure that we were in coverage when we needed to be. There was a big work/travel/life/balance curve we needed to overcome. We discovered that we end up working harder at the times dedicated to working when we work from the road. I think that ends up being that way because we are also playing harder, if you get what I mean. Our work and the amount that we do and have to get done doesn’t at all change because we are on the road. There is an app called Open Signal that can help show where internet coverage is. There is another app called Campendium that will show wifi coverage at different campground and even specific campsites within that campground. Those and other resources become invaluable when planning work/travel/internet life.
The perception that working from the road is also a vacation is definitely not true. While we can work from vacation spots, we aren’t ”on vacation”. It is simply a misconception. Now, back to the incredible RoadTrippers map photo I have posted above. We are currently at the very beginning of this journey, fully vaccinated, and as you can see from the photo (bottom left), we are in a hotel. Because we had a very important work thing that couldn’t be sacrificed with crappy wifi coverage, we are staying in a hotel. We are doing this at the beginning of our trip and again at the end of our trip because the work dictates that we have the best shot at reliable internet. We feel being at a hotel does that. The rest of this trip, our 4th since the pandemic started, we will be in and out of coverage. If you know southern Utah at all, you understand that completely. It is a challenge at times, working from the road. But when you can have different hiking trails in your “backyard” on the regular and still get your work done, those challenges become nothing but a learning experience.
I plan to get every bit of my work done whether I am in Utah in my RV or in PA in my sticks and bricks. Now that I have decided to also start website and blog, my time will really be crunched. But, if I am not enjoying every bit of it, then I will discontinue. I love sharing what I have learned and I love giving to people.
Traveling has been in my blood since I was very young traveling back and forth in a car in the early 70s between central PA and Baltimore, MD. In fact, these road trips with my father taught me how to read. The road signs were my lessons. Today, the road signs are my inspiration.
Here’s to working from “home” in Utah!