Let me start by saying Hello! We are Richard and Whitney Marshall and thank you for visiting our blog. We currently live in Dallas, Texas with our french bulldog, Rosie, and we recently tied the knot! Like most newlyweds, the question “where are we going to live?” was one of the first of many decisions we had to make about our new lives together.
This question seemed to have an easy answer. Get married, buy a house, then have some children. That’s the normal order of things, right? That’s what I’ve always been told, so in the months leading up to our wedding we started house hunting. What we found wasn’t a house but another bigger question, what did we really want our lives to look like?
So we and sat down and put aside what we thought our lives should look like and instead focused on what we wanted them to look like. We noticed we kept coming back to wanting more quality time together and wanting the flexibility and freedom to travel more. A house, or anchor, or money pit (just a few of the names that we refer to it as) would not bring us that. Instead, I quit my job soon after we were married and we started looking for a van to move into and travel the United States in. We have always been very interested in the tiny living movement and with the recent explosion of van life we thought this would be a good fit.
Then reality set in. I applaud anyone who has figured out how to work and also travel 365 days out of the year and I hope we reach that one day. But, as of right now, we realized that it will have to be a balance of travel and Dallas for us. Richard owns his own company and while it gives us a lot of freedom, he does need to be present in order to keep it growing.
This meant we would travel part-time and stay put where we were the rest of the time. Luckily, we are in a small duplex so the transition back and forth to something smaller will ideally be less of a challenge. This also meant that sprinter van life was out of the question. Have y’all seen the price tags on those? If this was not going to be our full-time home we could not spend that much. Enter travel trailers. Y’all these things are so cool and affordable! We started our search by going to an RV show and holy cow you wouldn’t believe how pimped out some of these things are! How someone could pull some of these suckers behind a truck I don’t even know. After trying out every single size and pretending to eat breakfast at every single table we came across the Riverside Retro collection and we were in LOVE. They have all of the retro charm that we love in a vintage camper, but with all the new amenities. This meant only having to do a few cosmetic updates. We found a dealer and that was that. We knew with a little paint and TLC this camper would be our perfect adventure mobile, and we named her Red.
Again, let me end this with a big thank you for visiting! Please subscribe to our blog so we can take you through the remodel of Red and then off on our adventure with us starting July 7, 2018! We will be bringing you remodel ideas as well as travel and camping tips! Oh and of course adorable pictures of Rosie for all you dog lovers!