Hey there! We are Bret and Jennilyn (who does most of the writing around here) Gaitan. In the fall of 2020, we hit the road full time in an RV.
We had a crazy journey to get here. I started and stopped – three blogs, a photography business, and work for other photographers. Bret started and stopped a personal training business and taught elementary physical education for five years. He also started a real estate investing business and I eventually joined him in that business.
Travel has always been a big part of our relationship. When we first met, Bret was living and working in California for the Marines and I was in Maryland. Before we got married, we made several trips via plane to visit each other. Then we drove and flew to visit Bret’s family after he moved to Maryland. It was really on our first cross country trip that we fell in love with the road and this country. Since then, we’ve driven together across the country four times.
The seed of full time RV life was planted in the summer of 2016. Our friends shared about a dream to live on a boat and we thought that sounded cool for a hot minute, but a much better fit for us was an RV. We started looking into that (even back then, there was SO much content about it!) and Bret started working with our friends to build a real estate investing business. After about a year, we realized we needed to put the RV dream on the back burner to build the real estate business.
Want to learn more about Jennilyn, my business journey and our full-time RVing journey? Check out my episode on the RV Entrepreneur podcast!
We achieved great success in the real estate business, enough that it afforded us the opportunity for Bret to do it full time and leave his 9-5 job. 2020 impacted us like a lot of folks, our work slowed down considerably, we were stuck inside, and it forced us to really look at our life.
In July of 2020, our friends, who were already living full time in an RV, invited us to visit them in Colorado. The funny thing was that we actually planned the trip in less than 24 hours. This forced us to realize that there were a few things in our business that could be moved around and that we were much more flexible than we realized.
While there, our friend asked, “so when are you guys hitting the road?” It only took me about 5 minutes to say, “soon!” and Bret about an hour. When we got back to Maryland, we started the journey to finally getting on the road.
Want to learn more about us and our full-time RVing journey? Check out our episode on the RV Dreaming podcast!
Boy howdy, looking for an RV during Covid was a challenge. We had to go to four different states to look at and finally purchase our truck and fifth wheel. Where you would normally see 20 of a certain type of rig, you’d only see 3, and all of them were sold. In some ways, I think it was good to have the challenge, because it forced us to really get clear on what we wanted.
In less than 4 months, we got on the road full time. I’ve been itching to get back to blogging and making videos, but there were a lot of kinks to work out. We’re finally getting to a point where we can work on our real estate business and have time for creating content.
We’ll be sharing all sorts of things here, but let us know what you’d like to know.
