RV Shenanigans! Podcast from Millers in Motion
The RV Shenanigans podcast is your go-to audio adventure for all things RV travel! Hosted by Ryan & Lauren Miller of Millers in Motion, this podcast dives into the ups, downs, and downright hilarious moments of life on the road. From navigating epic road trips and campsite mishaps to discussing RV gear, maintenance tips, and travel inspiration, RV Shenanigans brings a mix of expert advice and laugh-out-loud stories. Whether you’re a seasoned RVer or just dreaming of hitting the road, this podcast delivers relatable tales, helpful tips, and plenty of good vibes to fuel your wanderlust. Tune in, buckle up, and get ready to keep the wheels rolling and the adventures coming!
RV Shenanigans! Podcast from Millers in Motion
Our journey from full-time RV living to finding balance with a home base has changed everything.
After months of silence, we're finally back behind the microphones with some major life updates that have completely transformed our approach to RV living. The biggest news? We've sold our massive Alliance Valor, purchased a home base, and downsized to a more nimble Alliance Delta 252RL travel trailer under 30 feet.
This shift wasn't a snap decision. It evolved gradually as we weathered both literal and figurative storms in our full-time RV journey. Texas ice and scorching summer heat tested our resolve, while work commitments kept us closer to "home" than we'd initially planned. The limitations of traveling in such a large rig became increasingly apparent - we couldn't fit in most state parks and national parks, couldn't easily navigate certain areas, and Lauren wasn't comfortable driving our beast of an RV. Those 12-hour travel days left us exhausted in ways they don't now with our smaller setup.
Let's bust a common myth: RV life isn't automatically cheaper than traditional housing. For us, costs were roughly equivalent, though this varies widely depending on individual circumstances and choices. We also couldn't ignore the financial reality that while our RV was constantly depreciating, real estate typically appreciates over time. This stability factor, combined with increased travel flexibility, ultimately guided our decision.
Don't worry - we're not abandoning RV adventures! With seven trips already planned (including three weeks in Florida and appearances at the Tampa RV show), we're simply embracing a "weekend warrior" approach that offers the best of both worlds. Our new dedicated podcast studio means more consistent content, guest appearances, and exciting new segments coming your way. If you have questions you'd like us to answer in future episodes, send them our way through your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe now so you don't miss a single adventure as we navigate this next chapter of RV Shenanigans!
We are finally back from hiatus with new digs. That's right, Welcome back to the RV Shenanigans podcast. My name is Ryan, that's Lauren over there and this is home base Now. Now we have put a lot of effort into the podcast. It was one of the more popular things we did and we knew well let's start with why did we go on hiatus?
Speaker 2:There were a lot of things that changed. Let's just say that. A lot of things, and the main one being where we were filming the podcast. We used to film this from the comforts of our RV living room or random balcony random balcony, all kinds of fun makeshift places, Um, so I would say the biggest thing is we sold our beloved Valor and um, I'll leave part B of that plan for later, but yes, we sold our Valor.
Speaker 1:We did Um, and we obviously bought a home base cause we're sitting in it. Okay, we sold our valor, we did, and we obviously bought a home base because we're sitting in it.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, that was part B. Yes, we bought a home too.
Speaker 1:So at the end of the day, well, I don't. It's hard to talk about all of this. It is, and if you haven't figured out by now, we're going to simply kind of fill you in on where we've been what we've been doing, which spoiler if you watch the main videos, you are aware.
Speaker 2:For anybody who prefers to listen, we'll dive into that a little bit.
Speaker 1:So why did we end up selling the RV after we made the decision to give up full-time RV life for the weekend warrior lifestyle?
Speaker 2:So for us, if we weren't going to be full-time in that RV, it was a bit of overkill. If you will, we could be a little bit more maneuverable, um, without one of the largest RVs known to man, and so that had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean you talk about maneuverability when we were in as big of an RV as we're in, and we'll talk a little bit about our new. Rv, because we're not giving it up.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, being able to be nimble and do some things that we maybe haven't done, and I felt like we had kind of blocked ourselves out of the state of Texas. So for us to travel in our RV, we I mean we could repeat stuff in Texas, but we would have like we didn't really fit in state parks. I think we fit in like two state parks and I think we fit in like six national parks.
Speaker 2:And also I wasn't comfortable driving the big RV and so having something smaller I am more comfortable driving. So whenever we're trying to do those long travel days, at least we have another option if need be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that kind of ties into why did we pick the smaller travel trailer? So she hadn't actually said a name. So we used to be in an Alliance Valor 44 V14. And now we're in an Alliance Delta 252 RL, which is a travel trailer.
Speaker 2:Under 30 feet.
Speaker 1:It's our first stint into bumper pull world it sure is Well as far as RVs go. Well, yeah, so why did you? I mean talking a little bit about? We already kind of talked about why we wanted to fit into state parks, national parks, that stuff, right?
Speaker 2:no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Didn't stop me from doing 12 hour days.
Speaker 2:It didn't, but it made them stressful for you.
Speaker 1:It did and I was more tired. It felt like a 16 hour day after a 12 hour day, which is a little crazy for most people, but um being able to maneuver small ones, you know, I got into a pickle. I think I was heading to Florida when you had to fly down and meet me so not last year cause we weren't there, but the year prior and I stopped. I was trying to stop at a cracker barrel in what was that town, hattiesburg.
Speaker 2:Maybe yeah, is that central Mississippi.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to go with Hattiesburg. Somewhere in Central Mississippi, let's just say it was Dicey and I say Dicey, it's just not one of those. You know we always talk about like your best, RV security is your gut.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I got one of those feelings where it's like there's and it sucks that people are put in this position but there's a lot of homeless people wandering around and they're wandering right around around and they're wandering right around there was a big manufacturing business behind the Cracker Barrel that was no longer in business so people were like squatting on it. There was like tents, it, just the feeling wasn't there. I just got a little apprehensive traveling by myself and so I packed up and kept on, well, never unpacked, just kind of looked at it and didn't really open the slides and took off. So the closest alternative was to get to kind of the Mobile Alabama area, which for us was in route down to Florida. Uh, got there, pulled into the first cracker barrel I could find where I thought I could fit and, based on satellite images, I could, uh, there were so many low trees yes, those weren't on the satellite.
Speaker 2:Very well.
Speaker 1:No, and that's part of it. Things change. That satellite image could be two years old, but you know I whacked a few good ones and didn't really feel comfortable staying there because I couldn't find a spot that I couldn't not take out half the things on our roof.
Speaker 2:Well, now it's dark too, so that was complicating things.
Speaker 1:So I literally kept on driving until I got just across the border into Florida. So I literally added, like a fun four hour bonus. Um, got across the border and found a brand new cracker barrel. On Google maps not even on RV life for any of the trip wizards or Garmin or any- of that stuff and it was awesome. Yes, but anyways, that's just a an example of how it complicates things Right and now having the smaller rig, I can kind of pop into like I could have stopped at that second cracker barrel pretty easy.
Speaker 2:I have a hiccup. I see that I'm not.
Speaker 1:I'm not conditioned for podcasting again but I can probably swing into that one and fit, because it was. You know, I would have been shorter and I would have taken an hour and a half two hours off the drive that day. So, um, does it change the way we plan our trips?
Speaker 2:I'm going to say yes. The short answer is yes because you, as the driver, aren't as easily fatigued, and so not that we want to go longer necessarily, but I do think that it does change that when we can stop, how nimble we can be when we stop that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, I also think too that it's a big portion of where we decide to go. You know we have coming up. We have some state parks on our list, that's right. We would have never, ever, ever, ever, in a million years fit in our Valor. I don't know. We can make it through the guard gate, and now we can.
Speaker 2:But also our little Delta does not have solar stuff on it yet like the Valor did. Our Valor had a wonderful solar package, but yet like the valor did, our valor had a wonderful solar package, um, but you know it's, one day maybe the little delta will, but not yet. So we do have to plan accordingly for that.
Speaker 1:So that's the rv side of it. Why did we end up doing the whole home base thing? And we? We actually have talked about this very briefly on the main channel. Yeah, um, but there's a lot of factors.
Speaker 2:There were really a lot of factors. We were not on the road as much as we thought we would be able to because of traveling. Yeah, Technically we slept on it all the time because we were full time in the RV but there were several other commitments that kind of kept us a lot closer to the home base, I think, than we anticipated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, work family.
Speaker 2:And so when you're weathering out both Texas ice storms and Texas heat waves in the RV, it was kind of like the ice storm was easier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree, burned through some propane, but but the ice storm was easier.
Speaker 2:The worst part was getting down the stairs in the ice storm, so it just didn't make a whole lot of sense for us to be doing that and when we could have a little bit better balance, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and we talked about that aha moment where we really kind of first started talking about it. In fact, the video that I just got done editing was us talking about sitting in 105 degree Texas heat ACs pumping as hard as they possibly can the dog's not really having anywhere to play that kind of stuff and it just kind of festered a little bit, kind of like the idea to go full-time festered for a while. I mean, I don't know that anybody reacts on their first gut reaction of like we should full-time RV.
Speaker 2:I think it sits for a while oh, I know plenty of people that would react like that.
Speaker 1:Yikes, yeah, that's terrifying. Well, and another thing that I talked about in that video that I think was important is there was an investment portion of this, like a money management side, that kind of always bothered me a little bit. Right, and it's not that it's a bad idea to full-time no but financially it's not exactly the most stable investment and by stable I mean it's not stable at all.
Speaker 2:Well, and so let's just kind of break that down before somebody gets the wrong idea on that An RV is a depreciating asset.
Speaker 1:Just like your car.
Speaker 2:There's no way around that. That doesn't make it bad. If you're using it for memories, then maybe it's the best investment you can make.
Speaker 1:And I would agree with that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, but for us there was a little bit of lack of stability with where we were going to be when we needed to be there, the financial side, and so several financial things kind of started to come into play.
Speaker 1:Most real estate is an appreciating asset. It is and Got to be really bad real estate to not be Right, exactly so for us.
Speaker 2:Just we were uncomfortable being in that kind of uneasy place at this point in our lives.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we were okay with it initially and I think that just was a small. It's kind of like the Chinese water torture thing. It's like I can sit here all day for this thing dripping on my head. And then after about 10 hours you're driven clinically insane.
Speaker 2:You find the things that bothered you, that maybe you didn't know bothered you, but also anybody that says that RV life is cheaper just by nature is inherently wrong.
Speaker 1:I think it depends on where you're coming from. For starters, like the way we did it, it was pretty even Even yes, and so it can be more or less expensive.
Speaker 2:but some people just have that in their heads that automatically RV life is cheaper, and that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1:If you're going to be off-grid the whole time and you're not spending, like you don't care about temperature, you don't, maybe you don't have animals, that kind of stuff and and you're going to chase 72 degrees all the time and you're not, you don't have to pay for a ridiculously hard large solar system and you're going off grid. It could be it could be um. For us and our lifestyle it was pretty down the middle it was. I've also heard of some people where it's much, much more expensive.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:It depends on where you want to stay. Those resorts get expensive, so with that, is there anything else you want to let them know what's been going on over the last three plus months? We're recording this at the three month mark. I don't know what's going to happen the next month or two, so what do you?
Speaker 2:I don't know what are you?
Speaker 1:so there's nothing else. I'm just checking with you, that's all.
Speaker 2:Let's see. We sold an RV, we bought a house. We bought another RV, we went on a cruise. That was fun. We did go on a cruise with our friends Phil and Stacy and Aaron and Caitlin that's right and we had a wonderful time.
Speaker 1:Um, we have a lot of trips planned.
Speaker 2:I really feel like selling the large RV, buying a house, buying the new RV in the span of like three months was kind of enough.
Speaker 1:And I think between now and just after the first year we've got, there will be more trips booked in addition to this, but I think we're sitting somewhere in the vicinity of seven at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's probably right. There's a couple of.
Speaker 1:RV trips. We have some work stuff for you. We're going to go do. I have some work stuff and, as a teaser, we are going to be in Florida for like three weeks and so if you're going to the Tampa RV show, we will be there for portions of it. We will not be there for the whole thing. We have some other stuff going on, but we will be there for the proportions of it, and then we're also going to go like we normally do when we're in the area. Phil and Stacy are doing their fundraiser, so I don't know when tickets go on sale for that, but obviously you want to come say hi, that's a great opportunity and to give back to a great charity in the.
Speaker 1:Tampa area charity. In the Tampa area the Elks Lodge down there does a lot of great work for the community.
Speaker 2:That's right. So, yeah, no, nothing else I can think of. What about you?
Speaker 1:Nope, that's kind of everything. So where is the podcast going from here?
Speaker 2:We don't know.
Speaker 1:I have a better idea than she does is what that means. So obviously a lot of time and energy has been put into building this set. We are in a stable place, like it's not moving. The dogs aren't right here.
Speaker 2:We don't have to worry about if the AC is going to come on and blast out the microphone.
Speaker 1:We actually have the fan on right now. It's very comfortable here. Lauren is almost cold because then it's the blanket. It's the blanket. No, we put some time and energy into designing this and having a more permanent set so that we can sit down and talk a little easier and a little bit more frequently, hopefully. But it's going to be a similar style. We are going to be bringing more guests on. So sometimes you can't. Your job prohibits you from having the energy to put up with me with a microphone in front of my face.
Speaker 2:I work 12 hour days, you know. Sometimes I just need a little bit of a break.
Speaker 1:So we have a couple of new segments that we're going to slowly introduce, but just know we're going to be having some guests, maybe some deep dives into why some YouTube channels have gotten into it, some more tech stuff, a little bit of everything. So if you have any show ideas or something that you really wish you could listen to while you're traveling again, we built this whole podcast to be more of a conversation thing. We want you to feel like you're sitting here with us, just unfortunately you're not. You're on the other side of that lens or the other side of that speaker and don't have a microphone.
Speaker 2:You're here in spirit, we know.
Speaker 1:Something like that. But yeah, we have a bunch of different show ideas coming up that we're excited to kind of start recording and yeah, all of the things.
Speaker 2:Well, and we wanted to record these in the RV, but trying to do that in your living room with all the equipment, set it up and take it down.
Speaker 1:Go back and watch. If you're on YouTube doing this, or if you're on the listening platforms, jump over to YouTube. We did a drivable versus towable with our friends Phil and Stacy, and I feel like I've named dropped them enough for this episode. Unfortunately, I'm not meaning to Um, but if you look, there's cords everywhere everywhere because the camera could only sit so far away. I had to get wide angle, cause there was four of us in the shot.
Speaker 2:We had to lock the dogs out. You couldn't get up to like go to the bathroom, cause you'd trip over something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I literally had to move things so that Phil could go to the bathroom at one point, and we sat there for an hour and 40 minutes.
Speaker 2:But anyway, so hopefully this is a little bit like you said. We can do this more frequently and just it'll be a little easier.
Speaker 1:Yes, so with that, thank you for tuning in for our first episode back in the relaunch. If you notice, we actually I know I just thanked them, but it went from RV Shenanigans to Miller's In Motion podcast back to RV Shenanigans. That's semi-important to talk about. What we had meant to do was so we had a lot of non-RV travel and we thought that the podcast going to its old channel and rebranding it just under our name was all a great idea In retrospect it was a bad idea it was.
Speaker 2:We're learning from our retrospect. It was a bad idea. It was.
Speaker 1:We're learning from our mistakes.
Speaker 2:It was not well received.
Speaker 1:It wasn't horribly received, but nobody could find it, and so we're just going back to what we know, and that's just shenanigans.
Speaker 2:We do know shenanigans.
Speaker 1:So, with that, do us a favor If you haven't done so yet. If you you're watching on youtube, subscribe to all of this chaos. If you turn a little bell notification on, we are going to be putting these out every midweek, so, and our main videos will still come out on saturday. If you're listening to this on your favorite podcast platform spotify, apple or our biggest two, um, do us a favor, hit that little follow button. There's also an option to actually send us a message in there. If you go, go to the show description. If you do that, shoot us a note. I can't reply to it, but we can answer questions. Do those types of things. I'd like to get to a point where we have a reoccurring segment that we actually answer y'all's questions on the show.
Speaker 2:So of course, don't do that while you're driving, please don't or have your navigator do it. You can listen to us, but no texting and driving.
Speaker 1:So with that, we're going to sign off from our first episode. Do you feel comfortable doing it? No, perfect, see you guys next week. Bye.
