I am quite interested in learning about your lifestyle. I would like to know what is it like to be a full timer and what do you guys do?
We are between 2/3 and 3/4 time campers but have met many full timers. We volunteer camp host between 4 and 6 months per year and travel 1-3 months visiting friends, family and vacationing.
Many, many full timers are camp hosts. If you volunteer you generally don’t get paid, but get a free camp site, in great places. You don’t work very hard either, generally 3 1/2 days one week and 4 half days the next. When you’re working your 1/2 day you generally don’t work the entire 1/2 but occasionally you do. If you are a paid work camper you work at least 40 hours/week for very low pay. I’ve heard stories of work campers being taken advantage of by their employers.
Most volunteer camp hosts are retired and do it for the love of traveling and interacting with campers of all ages. We are the opposite of people who want to live in senior enclaves.
We have met a number of younger full timers traveling with their kids. They are all home schoolers. These folks all seem to have some sort of internet jobs. Most of the kids seem personable, out-going and happy.
If you want to check out real full timers you should check out the Escapees forum:
I have an online friend who’s a FT camper with her husband. As the above poster said, she in the retired demographic, and she and her husband have been hosting at a particular campground for a number of years. The camping season there is roughly 5-6 months long. When it’s closed they either host at another campground further south, or they travel, or they visit various relatives and friends.
I don’t know anything about pay or whatnot, but I gather it’s a pittance because she’s mentioned Medicaid and food stamps.
I do know she started FT camping when she and her husband basically lost everything in the midst of the recession on top of a pile of medical bills. Their house was foreclosed, so they scraped up what was left in their savings and bought a trailer.
Met a lot of them while traveling in our own RV, but the most time we’ve spent on the road was about five months back in 2009. It’s a lifestyle you either have to really love or to have no choice in the matter. If it’s by choice, then you really have to love being with your partner and not minding small spaces to live in. If privacy and modesty are paramount to you, then life in a motor home is probably not for you. It wouldn’t suit us, as we like having community roots.
A lot of the big rig owners end up being snowbirds, parking their rigs in what amounts to a large parking lot in an area that is near their interests: golf, gambling, whatever. Then they use their towed vehicle for transportation. Seems pointless to me, but to each his own. We thought we might like the work-camper life or the camp host situation, but again it has to suit your nature, and you have to be willing to do the job in campgrounds that aren’t Yosemite or other world wonders.
So we spend a few days or a few weeks or a month doing what we like to do, which is visit an area and see everything there is to see there. We do this several times each year and have probably visited at least 40 national parks, preserves, monuments, etc. over the past 5-8 years, and countless state parks. We’ll be taking a month this summer to head out to the Midwest.
My strongest recommendation to anyone contemplating the full-timer lifestyle is to rent a motor home for a month, longer if you can afford it, and see what living out of a box really entails. The used RV lots are full of rigs that retirees have run out and bought as their dream retirement vehicle, then discovered that they really can’t stand each other 24/7, and that they now own a rapidly deteriorating and depreciating asset that sucks down fuel like a frat boy at a kegger.