So why would a couple in their late twenties and early thirties want to go against the flow and swim upstream, trading 2,000 square feet of living space for less than 300, bunks and a chemical toilet?

Where did we first get this idea? We hadn’t at that time read any books on the subject, didn’t know about any of the plethora of websites, nor had we bumped into a family already doing it. When spring came, out of the blue, I (Aaron) decided we were going to buy a big tent and the gear to go camping this year. This shocked my wife because ever since she’s known me I haven’t been an “outdoors” person. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the outdoors; it was because I have a immune system disorder that has led to me having a skin condition called psoriasis. Google it. It’s not fun.

There’s medication that treats it, and treats it very well, but it costs $1,600 per month, or $19,200 per year! It’s very painful, especially when outdoors because of the heat, and insects are drawn to it like, well insects drawn to blood.

$1,600 a month for two of these little things.

Shocked is putting it lightly. She thought I went insane.

So my wife was shocked when I said I wanted to go camping. The reason I wanted to try camping was because I was getting tired of living day to day in the same old high-maintenance, overpriced house, cooped up with my (wonderful but loud, haha) kids. The kids were sick of the house. I was sick of the house. So was my wife. We all were. But what else could we do? We’re supposed to live in a house, right?

During this time of frustration, I had submitted paperwork to the makers of the drug to treat my psoriasis (and the arthritis that goes along with it), and much to our joy, I was approved to receive the drug for free. I’m already seeing improvement and I am two months into the treatments. Every day I hurt a little less.

So we camped in my mom’s back yard, we camped at some state parks, and each time I liked it more and more. Little did I know a little spark in me had been lit.

“Hasn’t that car driven by six times in an hour, hon?”

One of our favorite things to do at the campgrounds was just drive around, checking everything out. I had never ever even considered the RV lifestyle beore, never gave it a second thought (or a first thought). But here it was all around us, and I liked what I saw. People hanging outside their RVs, playing games, cooking over fires, visiting with neighbors.

We came home from camping one weekend and the job I had since October of 2007 essentially fell apart. Broken promises, no benefits (promised since before I was hired), horrible wages (for what I was doing) and an unpredictable boss who liked to mix drinks on the job…

Not again…

So here we were once again without a “traditional” income, since I have always done freelance work online. I buckled down and quickly increased my online work to a sustainable income. Gee, why hadn’t I been doing this all along?

It was then that we thought about possibly getting a popup to make camping a little more comfortable, especially for me, since I was still in some pain due to my psoriasis. A popup would at least give me AC to retreat to during flareups and times when the pain is almost unbearable. And believe me, it can get that bad.

Now, rewind a couple years. Hannah and I were moving back to Ohio after being youth pastors in another state. We came back searching for God’s direction about what to do next. We felt we just needed to settle near “home” for a while, close to our parents, close to family and just get our heads on straight before we go making any hasty decisions.

Say Cheese!

It was during this pause that I started to develop the idea of a traveling video production studio that helped leapfrog churches and missionaries into the 21st century by producing high-quality programming for them to use in ministry home and abroad. My wife’s family having a strong missionary background, we could easily see ourselves traveling to visit missionaries in other countries and helping them put together multimedia programming that would otherwise be too expensive and essentially out-of-reach for them.

As we talked about it and prayed, we felt such a ministry would have a home base in the United States and would start first by hooking up with ministries and missionaries here in America, and eventually build up to being able to send teams worldwide. The only drawback we saw was all the traveling we would have to and really how much of a strain that could actually put on the churches and ministries we would be going to help. Either they would have to find a place for us to stay (which usually meant staying at someone else’s house) or we’d have to pay out-of-pocket for hotels and food everywhere we went. I prayed for some kind of resolution to this potential money pit.

Fast-forward to us thinking about buying a popup.

“Wait, all these people do what?!”

One night I was Googling RVs and popups to feed our camping hunger when I started seeing search results mentioning words like “fulltimers” and “roadschooling”. Hmm, roadschooling. That sounds something like homeschooling, something we’re already doing with our girls. Hmmm… roadschooling is homeschooling on the road. Wait, on the road? With kids?

That line of thinking led me to the Families on the Road website and from there I was pretty much sold. In fact, I remember right then and there looking around my office and starting to figure out what I could sell each thing for.

I printed out some pages of info and took them downstairs to my wife, who read over them and looked at me with a smile on her face. The next day I ordered the incredible book Adventuring with Children. When it arrived, we devoured it. Every night I was on the internet until the wee hours of the morning bookmarking websites, subscribing to blogs, comparing RVs and trucks… wow, this was doable, and even on our budget. We’ve always lived a little more meagerly than some, so we did the math and concluded that we could do it, and actually live a life on the road much more exciting and fulfilling than what we were currently doing.

The Connection

And it was then that the light bulb went off about the ministry we had thought of a couple years ago. Traveling in our own RV, with our kids, took care of the potentially outrageous costs housing and food would run us as we went from church to church. It would also allow us to control our schedule better, since our project deadlines wouldn’t be dictated by a return airline ticket.

In the months after this epiphony, we’ve visited RV dealerships to go inside travel trailers and 5th wheels. I’ve bookmarked many more websites and am subscribed to over 50 RV blogs. It’s almost all we think about and not a day goes by we don’t have a pro/con discussion about it. For every con we come up with, though, there’s at least three pros.

And that’s the story so far.

Throughout all of this, my wife and I have just been… discontent (for lack of a better word) with modern “life as we know it.” You know, we wanted a house, a nice fenced-in yard with four kids and a dog. We wanted a big-screen TV with TiVo and an always-on Internet connection, a king size bed in a house with three bathrooms, a basement, a two-car garage and a swimming pool. Yeah, we wanted all that stuff, but when we started to get it, we enjoyed it for a while, but the luster of it faded. Our kids got bored with it. We got bored with it. We became lazy, gimme gimme Americans caught in a hamster wheel to earn money to pay for the toys we thought we wanted. Our kids were missing us, crying when we left for work, begging for more of our time, and we kept saying, “One day you’ll understand why mommy and daddy have to work so many hours.”

Well what if they don’t? What if they grow up hating mommy and daddy because we worked all the time? That’s a risk I’m no longer willing to take. Our kids are the most important people in the world to us, and we will give them every opportunity we can. Every dream they dream, we will be behind them, cheering them on to fulfil it. And I’m glad its not going to happen in one town. I’m glad they will be able to pursue their dreams all over this wonderful world God has given us.

The Plan

Our tentative plan is to workamp and continue freelancing at first, while I build up contacts and assembly a portable high-definition video production studio. I have most of the equipment already, I just need to come up with a way of traveling with it easily, as well as developing the process we need to make our ministry happen. Eventually, we’d like to phase out of workamping and focus on the ministry full-time as well as commercial projects along the way. The commercial projects pay well and can support our traveling so the ministries we serve won’t have to pay us much, if anything, for the work we do for them.

The story of our ne life is just now beginning to be written. We really don’t know exactly where it’s going to lead. And you know what? That’s fine. The best part of the adventure is knowing that God is directing it and we’re along for the ride. Serving God, raising our kids, building a family… that’s the Unending Adventure.