Traveling full-time is incredible for personal growth. Shortly after moving into our RV, Tyler and I both noticed how quickly we were evolving, both personally and as a couple. Almost immediately, we started growing faster and in seemingly more important ways than we ever had before. It was an exciting thing to notice, and it made us even more excited for our new life on the road.

Now, I can look back on who we were when we first set out on the road and see how different we both are now. We recently revisited White Sands National Park, which was a special place to me, and it served as a fantastic checkpoint for my personal growth. It’s been almost exactly 2 years since we last set foot in the park – and a lot has changed in the past 2 years!

When I first visited White Sands National Park 2 years ago, I was a very different person. We had been living in our RV for 6 months, and were just starting to get the hang of what full-time traveling really means and how to make it work. At that time, I happened to be going through a deeply emotional personal transformation.

Like many people, I have had my fair share of low self-esteem and a general lack of confidence. At the time, I had recently been exposed to Kamal Ravikant on a podcast speaking about his book “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It,” and I was struck by how seemingly impossible it was to say that I love myself. It was difficult to say I even liked myself.

So during those weeks, we spent in Alamogordo, I spent my free time in White Sands trying to figure out how to love myself.

It was a deeply emotional time for me, listening to that book, journaling, meditating, creating mantras, and trying to change something that I hadn’t realized was so deeply set in my mind. What’s so interesting about that time is that I can’t say for sure whether or not I even buy into all that stuff I was doing, and there was still a lot of work to be done afterward. But I was trying to do the work to evolve. And what I can never forget is the feeling of how hard I was trying to love myself. 

Because of that, White Sands National Park will always make me feel loved. And I discovered a profound sense of pride in returning there. Two years have passed, and I know I’m not the same person I was back then. This checkpoint was a meaningful reminder of how far I’ve come.

We have had plenty of these checkpoints in our time on the road: some of them speak to me, some of them speak to Tyler, and some speak to both of us as a couple. One of our other favorite checkpoints is Tucson, where we return every winter and sometimes even more often than that! The changes we see between each of our visits there is more incremental, but still profound. We also recently passed through Fredericksburg, TX and remarked on how much more confident we are in traveling our own way.

Something about embedding memories in a place makes them stronger. By traveling full-time, it’s almost like the country is our own personal scrapbook, and these checkpoint places let us flip through the pages. To be able to leave somewhere you love and come back as a completely different person is one of the beautiful things about traveling full-time. Don’t get me wrong, I love exploring new places, but I would never want to give up these checkpoints all across the country.