Thinking about hitting the road and wondering about the benefits of solo RV living?
You might imagine that RV life is for adventurous families with young kids or maybe retired couples. As a single person, you’re drawn to the adventurous part, but you feel like the road life might not be for you if you don’t have someone to do it with. We’re here to say that couldn’t be further from the truth. While there are plenty of positives to traveling with friends or family, don’t discount solo RV travel. There are endless upsides to solo traveling that group travelers will never get to experience. If you’re considering life alone on the road, you might just be convinced to give it a go after reading our list of the benefits of solo RV living.
Freedom to Choose All of Your Travel Details
Chances are at some point you’ve tried to plan a trip with friends and you just couldn’t find the right group of people who had the same budget and schedule availability as you did. Plans might have fallen apart, or you settled on a trip that was less than what you wanted in order to appease the group. When you’re traveling alone, you don’t have to worry about any of those things. You call all of the shots on where you’re traveling to, how much money you’re spending, and what you will do while you visit. If you want to go white water rafting, there’s no one there to tell you they’re not up for the adventure. If you want to stay in bed and read for the day, who will stop you? It’s your schedule and your rules when you’re traveling alone.
Move at Your Own Pace
When you’re traveling with others, each person brings their own expectation as to what the travel experience will be like. One of you might be a regimented Type A who thrives on planning out every detail and reaching destinations like marking items off of a to-do list. Another might be a Type B who would rather soak in a location and not feel rushed. No matter which type you are, when you live solo in an RV, you don’t have to deal with the conflict that comes with meshing different travel styles. You can get to as many destinations as possible, or you can take your time at the ones you like more than others. However you travel best is how you get to travel.
Have Space to Yourself
We talk all the time on our RV USA blog about how to adjust to a smaller living space. But when you are traveling alone, it’s far less of an adjustment. Sure, it’s smaller than a sticks-and-bricks space, but you don’t have to share it with anyone. Your bed is yours alone, and so is your kitchen. If you want to leave the bed unmade, you’re free to do so. If you want to keep the kitchen immaculately clean, no one else is going to dirty it up. It feels far less cramped when you aren’t sharing the space with a roommate and setting rules about housework.
Get Outside Your Comfort Zone
While traveling alone provides certain comforts of having space to yourself, it can also force you to get a little uncomfortable – in a good way. It’s easy to hit a challenging trail or grill burgers at a campground with friends, but society makes us feel a little awkward about doing things that are usually considered social activities alone. Solo RVing will force you to get past that awkwardness quickly because you have no other choice. You’ll find on the other side of your nervousness to have fun without a support system around you that there is a sense of freedom. A whole new world of opportunities opens up that people who don’t adventure in the same way may never realize is there. As you continue to push your comfort zone, your confidence will increase. It’s really a beautiful way to develop your own character.
Reason to Meet New People
One of the ways you can step outside your comfort zone as a solo traveler is to make new friends. There are tons of things you can enjoy alone, but RVing has a way of connecting people and you never know when you’ll meet someone who could be an adventure partner for a weekend or a lifelong friend. Camping alone can provide opportunities to strike up a conversation with neighboring campers that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you were engrossed in the company of your own travel partners. We guarantee you’ll come across some fascinating people along the way.
More Authentic Travel Experiences
Because of all the things we’ve listed so far, traveling alone opens you up to a much more authentic travel experience. You aren’t playing by someone else’s rules; You’re spending time just getting to know the destination. You don’t have someone to keep you company, so you get to meet locals and learn about their stories and their favorite spots to visit. There is no agenda; you just get to immerse yourself in the local culture. You’ll start to realize how many little things you might have missed if you hadn’t been traveling alone.
Learn to Enjoy Your Own Company
And finally, solo RV living teaches you to enjoy your own company. On long drives, nights cooking dinner alone in the rig, and mornings soaking in the beauty of nature around you, you often only have your own thoughts to keep you company. You’ll get to know yourself quickly – the things you like and the things you don’t, what makes you anxious, what excites you, the things you look forward to and the things you miss.
Just like spending a long trip in an RV with a friend will force you to get to know them on a deeper level, the same can be said about traveling with yourself. The more you do it, the more you’ll learn to embrace it. Enjoying your own company is a skill many people in our connection saturated world never learn – and we can’t think of a better way to hone it than on the road.
The Benefits of Solo RV Living
What are you waiting for? There’s no better time to take the leap into solo RVing. We can assure you that you don’t need a travel partner to reap the benefits of RV life. You’ll learn so much about yourself and about the world around you that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
