Meet the Retirees Who Live on the Road, Exploring the US by RV

30.03.2024 - 12:25 / cntraveler.com

This is part of a collection of stories celebrating the many shapes retirement travel can take. Read more here.

Jenell Jones (64) always felt the itch to travel, but a government career kept her rooted. “I was raised in a family of seven kids, so we moved a lot,” she says, having gone to 12 different schools in 12 years as a child. “It’s in me to move. I thought that’s what people did.” But after working for 26 years in the same Texas county, the wanderlust became too difficult to ignore. “As soon as I retired [in 2015], the first thing I did was think, ‘How can I travel?’” She sold her house, put her stuff in storage, and packed her life in two big suitcases: one for warm clothes and one for cold. She set out to hike the Amalfi Coast, and went on a cruise to Alaska. Still, though, something was missing. “I realized I liked traveling, but I want my stuff with me,” she recalls. Jones discovered the appeal of RV retirement, a lifestyle that would afford her endless travel and minimalist living on a budget. For her, moving from her “sticks and bricks” house to a Class-A motorhome meant the chance to venture on her own, save money, and continue to discover and learn.

Jones, who now runs the Wandering Individuals Network as a resource for fellow solo RV-ers, is finally free. “I hear it’s winter in some parts of the country,” she mused on a February call from her 36-foot Class-A RV in Southern California. “I’m in shorts. I haven’t turned my heater on. Basically, I don’t do hot or cold anymore.” When she decided to make the switch to life on the road, Jones took a map of the US and thought to herself, “I’m retired, I have no commitments. Where do I go?” She blindly placed her finger and it landed on Maine. “I had never been, so I went to Bar Harbor. The next summer, I drove to Alaska.” Along the way, she rode her bike atop the Grand Canyon, hiked Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, and bought lobsters directly from a Maine fisherman—boiling the crustaceans in the parking lot of an RV campsite, and eating them with butter dripping down her hands. “That memory has summed up this lifestyle,” Jones says.

“Untethering” is the word that Kim Kelly Stamp (64) uses to describe the transition—and the facet of RV living that appealed to her and her wife when they purchased a teardrop-shaped RV, a Little Guy Max, in 2021. “To go from a career where things are very structured to a moving home, where we can choose to go anywhere and do whatever we want on any given day, is a really freeing thing.” There’s no lawn to mow, no home to take care of, but they are constantly sharing new experiences together. “We’re doing things that we’ve never done before, and learning skills,” Stamp says, recalling her first time learning how