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Welcome to RV Travel Freedom

August 5, 2019
Wandering Hills Sandpoint Idaho

Hello and welcome to RV Travel Freedom, a new source for what works and what doesn’t with RV Travel Life.

Introduction

Hi, I’m Jerad Hill. In late 2018, we purchased our very first RV Travel Trailer. We are a family of six and typically would go camping once or twice every year. We love camping, but we wanted to go on longer trips and that required having a few amenities that a travel trailer would provide us.

We went back and forth for months trying to decide whether or not to purchase an RV Travel Trailer or a Motorhome. There are many pros and cons to each, and I plan to go into further detail in future posts about how we made our decision and what some of those pros and cons are.

We haven’t even had our trailer a year, but we have put over 5,000 miles on it traveling up and down California and for two months nonstop during the summer of 2019. Yes, we were a Full-time Travel RV Family for two months. This is also something I plan to dive into. We have learned so much over the past nine months as RV Travel Trailer owners.

Wandering Hills Boondocking
Boondocking Picnic off the highway on our way to Montana.

What is RV Travel Freedom

I immediately started drinking from the firehose of information online immediately after I purchased our trailer. I wanted to make some improvements to our trailer. We purchased a 2018 Salem Cruise Lite Travel Trailer by Forest River brand new from Epic RV in Madera, CA. I had also read many pros and cons about purchasing a new RV travel trailer vs purchasing one used. In our instance, I was glad I purchased a brand new trailer, but I will get into those pros and cons in another post as well.

Since purchasing our trailer I started making some updates to things I wanted to improve. Some of those updates include:

  • Installing Solar Power
  • Converting the Deep Cycle Lead Acid Battery to Lithium
  • Relocating the Battery bay inside the trailer
  • Changing out the speakers on the audio system
  • Installing a Cellular LTE Signal Booster
  • Upgrading the showerhead
  • Adding a splash to the shower to keep water from running onto the floor
  • and more…

Through the process of making these upgrades, I have learned a lot. The biggest undertaking was, of course, the Solar Installation and relocation of the battery to inside the trailer. I will go into everything in more detail in future posts on this site.

I have also found what works and what doesn’t work that well. For the most part, I did my research and have made pretty good decisions so far. Having traveled in our trailer full-time for two months up through California, Nevada, Boise, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and back down California, I feel that our trailer and all of my changes to the trailer have been battle-tested.

On this website, I will share tips, tricks, and reviews from my own personal experiences that I hope will help you find your own RV Travel Freedom. I chose the trailer I did and made the changes to our trailer that I did to further separate our reliance on plugin services such as electricity. Through our travels, we boondocked quite a bit and only once came close to not having enough power (which ended up being a fluke situation).

I have a lot of experience using and reviewing products from my years of operating a YouTube channel called State of Tech and another channel called Ditch Auto. I have been writing for decades and I really hope some of my articles here help a few people on their journey to RV Travel Freedom.

Wandering Hills On The Road
Traveling down a narrow dirt road to our next boondocking location.

What’s Next?

First, I plan to catch up. Over the past nine months, I have learned so much and I want to share it all with you. Some of my posts will be about products I have used and how they benefited our RV travel experience. Others will be about decisions you have to make as an RV owner.

Before we started our Full-time RV Travels this summer we started an Instagram page to document our adventures and called ourselves the Wandering Hills. You can follow us at @WanderingHillFam and me personally at @JeradHill to see some of our adventures.

I hope you will join me on this journey. To get updates as I post more, put your email address in at the top of the site. I will make sure to shoot you a short email when I post a new article I think you might like.

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