We Chose Adventure!

We took the leap! Sold our house in March '22, at the peak of the Miami Beach market (phew! great timing for once. lol), put our belongings in storage and decided now was the time to spend more time together as a family. Our Miami Beach lifestyle was fun, but also fast paced, stressful, and expensive. Work and after school activities were the main focus. With a much slower paced life, we hoped we'd be able to shift that focus to what's most important, time with each other.

We had been following other families on Instagram that were traveling the US and Canada in RV's and thought, why not? However, I must give this disclaimer, while we love nature, we are not campers and had never set foot in an RV. But we do love to travel and saw how it could be an enriching experience for all.

While we discussed this idea as a family, we still weren't entirely sure if living in an RV would be for us, so the first thing we did was visit an RV Show to see what these looked like. We went in thinking motorhomes were the way to go but were surprised to find out how expensive they were and that you actually gained more space and had better floor plans (we really wanted a split floor plan!) in a fifth wheel. Seeing how in a fifth wheel we'd have most of our home comforts/conveniences and that they truly looked like a home (in a smaller scale of course!) we were (mostly) convinced that this was something that we could roll with (literally and figuratively).

We did the rest of our research online, mainly because we were out of the country. We compared features and floor plans and landed on the Grand Design Solitude 3740-BH-R. While back in Florida for a week we visited one RV dealer which unfortunately did not have the license for Grand Design in that area but they did have it in Orlando. At the time they did not have the model we wanted but they kept our contact information and a month later we received a call letting us know that they were about to get one at their store (not exactly as we would've requested it but close enough!) per a new order that had fallen through. We asked for pictures and decided to go for it and purchased it sight unseen in the beginning of October. While back in Florida in early November we made a trip to Orlando to sign the papers and finally see our new tiny home (pic below)! We weren't ready to get started just then, so after finalizing some services we added on (more on that later!) we had them deliver our brand new RV to storage in Fort Pierce, FL.

We also needed a truck to tow our new home around. While we wanted a Ford F-450, we couldn't find a new one at a dealer. 2023 production was also behind and they would not be ready till about May. We considered buying a used one but they were going for the same price as new ones which didn't make sense to us as an investment. So since we were itching to get going, we decided to get started with a GMC Denali. We thought, if we find it tows well, we'll keep it and if we later choose to upgrade to a Ford when those are available, we'll do that then (knowing our GMC will hold it's value well). Thanks to a friend who previously owned a GMC Cadillac dealership, we were able to get our new truck during our November trip to Florida. They were also nice enough to hold it for us till we were ready to get started with our trip in January.

We closed out the year in The Bahamas and then headed back to Florida on January 26th to get started with our grand adventure!

Our Fifth Wheel at the dealer