Tips for Maintaining Friendships from an RV

I think one of the first things you fret about when thinking about moving into an RV is how you’re going to miss your friends and family back at home. We take a lot of comfort in seeing friendly faces. It’s also really scary to think that the relationships that you’ve spent years cultivating and nurturing would disappear just because you’re not in the same place anymore. While it is inevitable that some of the fringe friendships will go by the wayside, we have found that you absolutely can maintain the relationships you had back in your sticks and bricks.

1) Maintain routine “outings”

When we lived in an apartment, I had a few standing engagements. Every Wednesday I would play videogames with my friend Tyler, once a month I would have a girls night with Alexa, and every two weeks or so I would play Pathfinder (or Dungeons & Dragons) with a small group of friends. While playing Pathfinder on the road was a lot more difficult as a lot of the actual game is reacting to the actions of the people around you, it has been super important to me to try and keep the playdates with Tyler and Alexa. Playing videogames with Tyler was normally from the comfort of our own couches anyway, so it’s really been up to internet bandwidth. We have had to change some of the games we play from live action to turn based so the second by second actions werent as important if I was super laggy, but we still get together, talk, and have fun. The girls nights have changes to a gossipy Skype call where we recap what is going on in our lives. While we arent out at a movie or fancy dinner while we talk, the conversation and flow remains the same. It has made it feel like we aren’t far away at all from our friends.

2) Keep them in the loop

I’ve found that, for the most part, our friends and family want to know about our journey. I “bring them along for the ride” by sending out an obnoxious amount of postcards. I know it may feel a bit unreal to send actual, physical letters and mail in a day and age where you can instantly message a person, but there’s something nice about being able to hold something from a person from far away. I used to try and get postcards at every place we stayed the night, but some places had just garbage, stock photo from the 1980s type cards. I want people to be happy and excited when they get a postcard, so none of the boring Guideposts Calendar images for my friends and family (side note, if anyone wants to put me in touch with whoever makes the decisions on continuing to print those relics, I’m happy to offer advice).

It may take a while to get there, but its worth it!

3) See them!

The day after we left Minneapolis, Alexa messaged me and said “Okay, so when do we get to meet up?” While planning trips for friends and family has been difficult (more on that in another post), it has been so wonderful to have people that are willing and able to come visit us. We’ve had a very full two months, packed with sushi with Tyler, massages with Alexa, great chats with my uncle, and cobblestone strolls with my mother. We’ve also seen two of my aunts this month (Hi Charlotte and Janis!). One thing that is great about traveling full time is being able to see people you otherwise wouldnt, as well as explore new locations with people that otherwise wouldnt be there. Ron has visited multiple friends that up until now he had only met online and he got to meet my aunt for the first time ever. The reaction of our friends has been that we just need to tell them when we will be somewhere cool and they will show up. We are lucky that even it wasn’t cool, they still would.

You’re never alone when you’re with friends