Like many at that time, the O’Phalen family was at a crossroads in 2020.
Kate and Daniel were living in Brooklyn with their two kids and had a third on the way. Kate was in grad school, and Daniel had a demanding job. It was the bustling life that many people dream of when they think of moving to New York.
Then, the pandemic hit, and suddenly, everyone’s in-person commitment vanished. The O’Phalens made it work in their apartment for a few months, but their lives weren’t as fulfilling as they once were.
“Everyone was kind of cooped up and miserable,” Kate, 40, told Business Insider.
Their lease was up in June 2020, so the O’Phalens decided to rent an Airbnb in Maine for the summer.
They couldn’t have anticipated their decision would lead them to leave New York for good and embrace RV living, even if it comes with the occasional expensive challenge that can cost thousands of dollars to solve.
The O’Phalens were ready for a change of pace.
Kate, who is her kids’ homeschool teacher and a content creator, told Business Insider that she and her family were eager to spend time outdoors after months in their apartment.
They put their belongings in storage and planned to return to New York for the school year, hoping the summer would offer some respite.
However, after three months of hiking, beach days, and a slower pace of life, the O’Phalens didn’t want to go back.
They decided to keep traveling for another year.
Since Daniel’s job as a recruiter remained remote, there was no reason they couldn’t keep traveling.
“We decided to do a loop around the country for a year, and we did it in Airbnbs,” Kate said. “We did monthly Airbnbs combined with a few short hotel stays.”
They spent much of that year on the West Coast, visiting every National Park they could, before looping back to the East Coast. They had a blast.
In fact, the O’Phalens had so much fun that they wanted to find a way to make the nomadic lifestyle work more permanently.
They decided to buy an RV that they could live in full time.
The O’Phalens knew they loved traveling, but an RV would be a big change for them. They had never towed a vehicle or driven a truck.
“We had only recently even bought a car, living in New York,” Kate said. “We didn’t even have a car for 10 years.”
Still, in 2021, they bought a truck and spent $18,000 on a used RV that Kate renovated. The family rented an Airbnb in Alabama, where Kate has family, while she worked on it for six months.
“It was what I like to call granny hunting cabin chic when we purchased it,” she said. “It was sort of camo floral all over the place and brown everywhere, but it had good bones.”
Kate didn’t have much experience with home renovations aside from painting, but she was excited for the challenge.
The RV needed some TLC.
Kate and Daniel were most drawn to the RV’s layout. The door opens into a living space with a couch, a kitchen, and a loft. A primary bedroom sits at one end, and a “toy hauler” room is at the tail end. The bathroom is inside the primary bedroom.
Kate didn’t take down any walls during the reno, but she did gut pretty much everything else, both because of the decor style and the shape it was in.
“The layout was really good, but it was absolutely hideous. And it had not been used a whole lot recently, so it was absolutely filthy,” she recalled. “So, we started by just demoing a lot of it.”
Everything they ripped out, they took to the dump and had it weighed, making sure they knew how much weight they could add to the RV without affecting its function.
Kate focused on making the living space feel airy.
Kate didn’t want to sacrifice coziness in the 400-square-foot RV, so she focused on making the small space beautiful and functional.
She splurged on their flooring, choosing a dark, durable vinyl that would withstand her active kids.
There is also a wall in the living room covered in floral wallpaper. It cost about $200, but Kate loves the pop of color it adds to the space.
She offset the cost by using the couch from her family’s apartment in Brooklyn as their main seating area.
“When we lived for a year in Airbnbs, there were only two things I really missed,” Kate said. “One was my sectional, and two was a good vacuum. So now we have both.”
Surprisingly, the kitchen needed the least work.
Kate said she didn’t have to demo much of the kitchen because the cabinets and appliances were in good shape.
She painted the cabinets a soft green and added brass hardware to give them a more luxurious look. The kitchen also has a fold-up counter extension, giving the O’Phalens more space to prep food, and she uses baskets for additional storage above the cabinets.
“I feel like the paint in our renovation really did a lot of heavy lifting,” Kate said, adding that she thinks the kitchen is one of the most beautiful spaces in her home.
You can also see Kate’s eldest child’s bedroom, a loft that sits above the room, from the kitchen. It’s covered by a curtain during the day and accessible by a ladder.
The bedroom has to be able to transform on travel days.
The primary bedroom has a queen-size bed, a dresser, and a closet.
However, the bed sits on a slide-out that must be pulled in when the O’Phalens are driving so it fits in a highway lane. Because of that, some pieces of the bedroom have to be taken off the walls when they drive.
“In an RV…your house goes through an earthquake every time you move,” O’Phalen said. “Everything has to be really secured, or it has to come down.”
They use the bed to store larger items that need to come down on travel days, such as large mirrors or other art pieces.
The O’Phalens also have a washing machine in their bedroom, so they don’t have to stop at laundromats on the road.
The RV’s sole bathroom is in the primary bedroom.
The shower and toilet sit separately in the RV, with the toilet in a private room on one side of the bedroom entrance and the shower on the other.
The orange paint and artwork make the bathroom cozy, and Kate said she ended up completely redoing the shower.
“It was the hardest part of the renovation, and I discovered exactly why plumbers make good money,” she said. “I sat on the floor of the Home Depot for so long trying to figure out what fittings I needed that an employee came over and brought me a cushion.”
She’s happy with how the shower turned out, though, with its skylight and tile walls.
The kid’s bedroom was originally a storage space.
“Our RV is called a toy hauler, which means it’s designed to haul side by sides or motorcycles or big kid toys, essentially,” Kate said.
They don’t need to haul those kinds of items, but they did need additional bedroom space for their two younger children.
Kate installed lofted queen beds in the space, which can be raised during the day to create extra living space for the family.
The back wall of the room also opens completely, allowing them to enjoy indoor-outdoor living when the weather is nice.
The O’Phalens spent about $7,000 refurbishing the RV.
Kate did her best to keep the RV renovation costs low, saying the aesthetic upgrades cost only about $5,000.
In addition, they had to make some safety upgrades, including $1,000 for new tires. They also spent around $600 on their washer-dryer.
A lot of the decor was budget finds, like a dresser they found on the side of the road, which Kate altered to fit the RV. She made a DIY version of a light fixture; it would have cost $400 online, but she made it for $30.
Kate also said her kids helped paint and make the space feel like home, so they felt invested in the RV too.
They hit the road in early 2022 and haven’t looked back.
When the RV was finally done, the O’Phalens were excited to start traveling in early 2022. Kate said she and Daniel weren’t worried about living nomadically, since they had already done so for a year in Airbnbs. It was the idea of driving a truck and an RV that intimidated them because of their lack of experience.
“The first time we hitched up the truck and trailer, it took us two hours because we could not figure out why it wouldn’t hitch up,” Kate said. “We’re city people. There was so much to learn about things that seem obvious to people who have grown up outdoors.”
Overall, though, Kate said her family adjusted to RV life pretty quickly.
“We had gotten really flexible and resilient,” she said. “It felt like home immediately. And every time we’ve talked about moving out of it, my kids are really upset. They don’t want to move out of it.”
The O’Phalens have traveled all over North America in their RV.
The O’Phalens typically travel every two to three weeks, staying at campgrounds or on public land. They have traveled all over the US, including Alaska; seen 53 of the 66 National Parks in the US; visited 11 provinces in Canada; and spent six months in Mexico this past winter.
Kate said living on the road was initially a little lonely until they formed friendships with other people who live the RV life.
“We have a traveling community that we have caravanned with for years now,” she said. “We have friends that are like my kids’ cousins at this point.”
She also said she’s been surprised by how much her kids get out of RV life, particularly through hands-on learning experiences. For instance, her eldest daughter is an aspiring veterinarian, and she has been able to spend time with a variety of animals thanks to their lifestyle.
“She just got to do the veterinary camp at UC Davis this summer, and we have been to vet camp on a farm in North Carolina,” Kate said. “We went to the monarch butterfly migration in Mexico. We went to a jaguar sanctuary for her birthday in Oaxaca. We released baby sea turtles on the beach.”
“We just have had such incredible, deep lifelong learning experiences because of the way that we live,” Kate said. “It’s hard to give that up.”
It’s also brought their whole family closer.
Kate and Daniel were both always involved parents, but traveling together has only brought them closer. Daniel, in particular, said being home with his kids has made a huge difference for him.
“I went from seeing my kids only an hour or two a day to never missing a moment, and I’m very grateful to this lifestyle and the time that I’ve been given with them,” he told Business Insider.
“He knows his children in such a deep way now,” Kate agreed, saying the time her family gets to spend together is something they never take for granted.
RV life also saves the O’Phalen family money.
Kate said that she knows people who live very affordably on the road and people who spend a lot of money on vehicle payments or luxury resort stays on RV life.
Her family falls more in the middle. They live mostly off of Daniel’s income, with Kate providing some additional income through her content creation. They have a Thousand Trails subscription, which costs them a little under $1,000 a year for nationwide campground access.
“When my husband was laid off a couple of years ago, it really helped us weather that,” Kate said of their lifestyle. “We said multiple times, ‘My gosh, if we were living in New York, this would be so stressful right now.’ And we were able to just really dial back our spending and make it through that.”
Still, RV living isn’t always easy. It can be expensive.
Kate told Business Insider that they have had plenty of problems with their vehicles, from their truck’s heater pump hose popping off in Yosemite to a tire falling off in Mexico.
Plus, when those issues come up, they’re not just managing their truck; they also have to handle their home and family.
“It’s not just like my road trip has gone wrong, but it’s like, where do I park my house while I figure out how to fix the vehicle that tows my house?” Kate said. “And do I have enough groceries and water? And are the police going to knock on my door and say, ‘You can’t park here?’ There’s just so much of that. That’s the hard part.”
Those issues often cost thousands of dollars, making them even more stressful. For now, those expenses are worth it for the O’Phalens, particularly since their daily living costs are so low, but they are still stressful.
Kate also said the “logistics” of RV life can be tough, particularly because she is raising young children.
For instance, when they first started living in an RV, her youngest child was an infant, and it was difficult to find doctors while traveling to keep up with the baby’s vaccination schedule. They find solutions, but living on the road can make day-to-day life more complicated.
Because of their lifestyle, they were able to save enough money to buy land.
In 2026, the O’Phalens used some of the money they had saved to buy an acre of land outside Bend, Oregon. They don’t plan to stop traveling anytime soon, though.
“We really have done a lot of the United States at this point,” she said. “And the cultural experience in Mexico was so amazing that we’d like to do more of that.”
They hope to slowly build a house that can serve as their home base, then embrace international travel.
“My vision is that at some point the RV stays here for good and we do more international flying for maybe three to six months at a time,” she said. “I have a dream that at some point we build out a sprinter van and ship it either to Europe or to South America.”
Kate said RV life has been “magical” for her family.
Kate said her family’s nomadic lifestyle has completely changed their family forever.
“It is magical in a way that almost defies description,” Kate said of their life on the road. “It is extremely transformative. I would say we’ve become outdoorsy and really conservation-minded in a way that we never were.”
Kate said she knows RV life can be challenging and that it’s not for everyone, though she hopes sharing her experience can show people it’s more accessible than they think.
“I would encourage anyone who is on the fence to try it out because I really do think even if you do go back to the same life that you were living before, you will go back with such an interesting perspective, and you’ll be changed,” she said.
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