the start — uproot

Chris

We’d dreamed about quitting our day jobs and starting our own business before... building an indie game, maybe starting a games marketing and PR consulting company. We knew that if we ever took that leap, we’d be bootstrapping it with our own money, and not necessarily seeking outside funding.

Since we’re not gajillionaires, such a venture would require a dramatic reassessment of our lifestyle and budget in the interest of frugality. To reduce our cost of living, we figured we’d move away from uber-expensive urban centers like LA and Seattle. But where? We’d mused about Bend, Oregon and Salt Lake City, Utah, but nothing felt like a sure bet.

I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what I read or saw that made me consider living nomadically, but in mid-2017 something clicked. I despised my job at the time -- I’d come to the realization that I dramatically prefer working with small, agile teams with passion and shared vision over large, rudderless, hyper-political corporate beasts. And that job had brought us to Seattle, where we’d just come through a particularly brutal winter of perpetually gray and drizzly skies (the exact opposite of Leslee’s preferred climate).

I went down a deep rabbit hole of #rvlife instagrammers and blogs about RVing full-time while working or starting a business. It all sounded right. RVing can be rather inexpensive - and flexible: your rent becomes the cost of fuel (dependent on how often you move between locations) and campground fees (you can camp for exactly $0 in some truly beautiful places, or you can blow $100/night on an RV resort in Newport Beach).

And as privileged white millenials, we are obliged to LOVE TRAVELLLIIIIIIIIIIING!!! #wanderlust💼✈️🏖️🏝️🗾⛩️🏞️🏜️ We’re outdoorsy (I’m a fucking Eagle Scout, thank u very much). We love hiking and biking, and I recently fell in love with snowboarding (Leslee not so much). And while we’ve traveled overseas more than anyone deserves to, we really haven’t explored that much of the United States. Plus, if we do want to eventually settle down somewhere, traveling for a year or more could help us choose that destination.

So this nomadic experiment seemed aligned with our wants and needs: reducing our burn rate dramatically while affording us the freedom to travel and be active.

There are, of course, some downsides -- a few we anticipated, and a few we’re discovering along the way. But we’re just at the beginning of this adventure, and we’re starting to find our routine. And I’m writing this from our home, currently planted in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Zion National Park:

(a note: this post was originally written in March - the procrastination in launching this blog is palpable.)

Leslee

I don't know where the notion of mobile living came from, as Chris has already mentioned. I've asked him many times what he saw, or read, or heard that made him approach me with this idea, but he doesn't recall exactly what it was that made him consider it. Nevertheless, I took it seriously and wanted to do something uncomfortable. I liked living in a normal home, with my go-to eating places and a familiar social net. I liked my extensive closet and reasons to wear dresses on a daily basis. But I was unsatisfied, even with my comforts. Many (MANY) months of planning, executing, and purging later, we've hit the road and we're living in a trailer full-time - a little bit of it thanks to my irrational decision-making.

Despite not knowing how we arrived at the idea (maybe it came to both of us in a dream; I'll accept any explanation at this point), it seemed to make sense for us. We were both tired of, gosh, so many things: the contrived idea that work has to be done in a minimum 5-day, 40-hour workweek and in-person, the endless loop of coming home and having only a couple of waking hours together, not finding the energy to be the change we wanted to see in the video game industry, not knowing where we wanted to live, and so on.

We had mostly enjoyed our industry jobs and our professional trajectory but we wanted to do our "own thing," and this lifestyle lets us do that. For Chris, it's being an independent consultant for games PR, or influencer management, or whatever it is he does - and for myself, it's having the time to develop my own design chops and write. I also want/need to accelerate my career, and it seems like the biggest way to do that is to do something absolutely crazy. It turns out that "something absolutely crazy" means living in a trailer. With two dogs, and two cats, and another human.