The Glampurs are Basecampers, and have been for all of our RV’ing years. What is Basecamping? Basecamping is where you maintain a Sticks and Bricks house and then go off on trips ranging from one week to six months. The longest trip we have ever done Basecamping was six weeks, before we felt the need to come home to our Sticks and Bricks house. Basecamping offers the best of both worlds, it is much better than weekend warriors but not as glamorous as full timing. For most of our trips we tend to do a seven day trip or one week, which allows us the time to get into an area, explore it, enjoy it and then head home. The nice thing about Basecamping is the fact that you do have a home base. Traveling on the road is certainly fun but it can get stressful, and having a place where you can go and take a break from the road can be the best medicine to keep your travel dreams alive, without allowing bad times or events to diminish those dreams.

Another advantage to Basecamping is the ability to perform routine maintenance and repairs in your own driveway with all of your tools at your disposal, and have a place to stay while those repairs are completed. This can be a real game changer! Performing repairs on the road though not impossible can be difficult depending on the repair that is required, and if you must give up your rig to a mechanic, then you will need to find temporary accommodations which could be difficult if you travel with pets. When traveling you typically only have a modified tool kit that will allow you to do some basic and easy repairs while on the road. Whereas when I have our RV in our driveway, I have access to all of my tools, fluids, and spare parts in which to effect repairs or maintenance on our rig.  I also have access to the internet and local stores in which to find parts, and a shipping address to have those parts delivered to. This can obviously make things so much easier than trying to drop ship a part while on the road with no permanent address.

Finally the best advantage to Basecamping is that you do not have to give up your friends and family. The people close to you will probably be more willing to accept your absences over short periods of time versus completely removing yourselves from your home town and their lives. We have found that this is so true and that our friends and family are always excited to have us come back from our adventures, and hear our stories from the open road. Whereas if we full timed we probably would not be back to our home town for maybe years, and that makes it hard to keep connections alive. Roots are important and we feel that roots trump our desire to travel indefinitely, besides it is always fun to plan out trips and adventures that we know will always have a conclusion to them.

In the end how you travel will depend on what is important to you! For some of us disconnecting from the world around us and hitting the open road for the next several years or more is a dream come true. Certainly there is appeal to that lifestyle and the adventures it could offer, but if you feel the need to keep your roots intact then maybe Basecamping is the way for you to go. I think that for most of us that embrace the RV'ing lifestyle we all go through these stages in our lives. First there is the weekend warrior, where we are all too busy with careers, school, kids, and life in general, and all we can seem to afford is a weekend away. That will change over time and then you will begin to feel the urge to up your game a bit and extend those weekends into much longer trips. From here it is up to you to decide what is best for you and your family and friends. The lure of the open road will always be there, it will always try to entice us into its never ending adventures, but for us and I think many others, the open road can get tiring. For those of us that want more but don’t want to give up roots then Basecamping is the perfect scenario to allow you to have the best of all worlds.

Happy Trails

The Glampurs