Chapter 1: The Beginning
Welcome to the beginning.
If you found us from our vlog or our podcast or some other place on the internet, then you have probably already figured out that we are Tyler & Andrea, and we make up the Wild Hixsons! We travel and live full-time in our East to West Alta RV. How did we get into this, you ask? It’s an uncomplicated start that ended up leading us down a deep hole into who we are as people and what we are looking for out of life.
The short story is that together we own a marketing company, and we found ourselves traveling A LOT because we have clients all over the country. That is not an exaggeration by the way! We would be in Florida one week, then Nebraska the next, then Texas right after, and it was a crazy time. It was planes, hotels, rental cars, work, sleep, try to eat, repeat. The cycle soon found us in this state where we realized that we were never really able to enjoy the places we were going, but we also weren’t home long enough to enjoy our beautiful home of Colorado either. So we decided the nomad lifestyle might be exactly what we were looking for. RV life has given us the freedom to be both always home and always traveling at the same time.
So we got married, got our first RV, and then started off on our adventure.
We have been on the road now for a little over 1 year and have been all over the US, especially our favorite direction, out West. A few highlights for us in year 1 would be Mount Rainier in Seattle, Washington, and the saguaro-dotted deserts of Tucson, Arizona. Both places offer something that we both love – personal isolation surrounded by nature. At first, isolation seemed like a negative thing, but as we lived our new life on the road, we soon discovered that it’s not. That it’s actually a gift, and that at our core we are isolated wanderers. After all, being alone is not the same thing as being lonely.
We have changed a lot during our first year in the RV. There is something about life on the road that lets you tap into personal change even faster than we had ever experienced. On the road, you are experiencing and evolving at a rate that is sort of insane! It can be exhausting and intense, but it can also be invigorating and refreshing. We have a new revelation about what we want to do and who we want to be at least once a week. It’s hard to pinpoint all of the great things we’ve learned after a year, but here are a few that made the top of our list!
Top 5 Things We Have Learned While on the Road:
1. When you break one rule, the rest become easier to break too.
2. Life gets better when you do harder things. Seek discomfort.
3. We need so much less stuff than we thought.
4. Great adventures happen when you least expect them. Expect nothing, enjoy everything.
5. Home isn’t a place.
When we began traveling full time, we had to address and ponder over a challenging question. What is home? Earlier we mentioned that we started RV life so that we could always be home, but the strange thing is that everywhere is home and nowhere is home simultaneously. Sometimes it feels like calling a place home that we only spent a few weeks in isn’t fair. But why? And what does home really mean?
For us home is not one thing, it’s many things. It’s having a place where we can explore our passions like making homemade sourdough bread. It’s having a cuddly friend always there to make us smile (Ours is named Mose, and he’s a very unintelligent guinea pig!) But most importantly, we’ve found that it’s a place where you feel secure, respected, challenged, loved, and sad when you leave because you know you are leaving a little piece of you behind. And for us, that is true of everywhere we have been to and everywhere we will go. It’s honestly why we created our other creative projects, Tyler’s Strangers Worth Meeting podcast, and Andrea’s Newly Nomads docu-series. We have created home in all of the places we have visited.
Home is more. So much more. And life on the road has given us that. We are often asked when we will stop doing what we are doing, and our answer is always the same. We will stop doing it when it stops challenging us. Until then, we are ready to take on every adventure this world has to offer.
Who’s ready to explore with us?
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