Monday and Tuesday of this week we decided we needed a little R&R, so we booked ourselves a hotel room. It was so nice.

As a bit of back story, we have been moving about once a week. We usually try not to drive any further than 2 hours at a time, but moving weekly is still… a lot. We have been doing that because weekly is about how frequently we need to fill our fresh water tanks, and we figure we might as well combine filling water, dumping tanks, and relocating all in one go since moving the RV is a pain. (Side note: I must say we are doing pretty well to go 7 days on 35 gallons of water for 2 people and a big dog! That’s drinking water, dish water, toilet, shower, and anything else.) I think I’ll do a big write up soon on what moving days look like, but for now, suffice it to say it’s a big and tiring chore (Edit: Moving Every Week, Part 1 and Part 2).

So, Sunday, we needed to leave our boondocking spot in the National Forest since they have a 7 day limit. Wednesday we were putting Daisy (the RV) in the shop to get the shocks replaced and have a few other things looked at (nothing urgent, just maintenance and fixes to make her more drivable). That left a weird little two day period on Monday and Tuesday. In making our weekend plans, we had floated the idea of just going somewhere with a normal bed and a normal shower. We did other stuff over the weekend but decided we wanted to have our cake and eat it, too. 🙂

I’ve never been the type to splurge on a hotel room “just because” before. It seems very frivolous to me. But in our house, we would “get away” when we needed to recharge to sleep in a tent. We still have that option, but our normal life is (by design) similar to camping enough now that camping just didn’t seem very restorative. We wanted to take multiple showers in a 24 hour period and get really, really clean (can you tell I’ve become mildly obsessed with showering?). We wanted a bed we didn’t have to climb a ladder into. We wanted a continental breakfast we didn’t have to wash dishes after.

Mostly, we wanted not to need to worry about meeting our needs. We love our RV lifestyle, but it isn’t easy. We spend a lot of time planning how to meet our needs. Where to find a campsite. Where and when to fill up water and dump tanks. How to get clean. Where to buy groceries. Whether or not the boondocking site we’ve picked out will have a good enough cell signal that we can get work done. Where to recycle and throw out trash. What chores need to get finished while we are near a hardware store. I could go on and on. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off of “planning mode” and just relax.

It was so nice that I think we will make this part of our routine every couple of months. But it really did the trick. 🙂