RV Life vs. Life Abroad
It's been seven weeks since we traded our RV life for life abroad in Mexico. Which nomadic lifestyle is better?
To read this article in Spanish, click here.
“These aren’t my bananas,” I told the lady at the fruit stand, as I pointed at the stray bananas in my bag. “Son para ti,” the lady responded. “You can make a ‘licuado’”. I don’t have a blender to make smoothies, but her gesture touched me.
“She knows who we are!” I thought as I smiled under my facemask. Every morning, our Chihuahua mix, Lolis, and I stop at this vibrant fruit and vegetable shop downstairs from our apartment in San Miguel de Allende. The lady is polite but aloof. The bananas proved that seven weeks into our stay, we might just be accepted here.
A sense of acceptance and belonging isn’t always easy to come by in our life as RVers in the United States. We've been RVers for nearly three years and we typically move to a new location every two weeks. This means that we only have a few days to get to know locals; by the time we make a friend or two, we leave.
The banana exchange made me realize that I miss knowing my neighbors as we did at our apartment in Dallas, before moving into an RV. Sometimes, you don’t know what you’re missing until you’ve lost it and get it back. Along with friendly neighbor exchanges, being a nomad abroad has also reminded me how nice it is to take long, hot showers.
So, now that Iife abroad has provided some of the things we lost when Noah and I became RVers, I’ve been wondering:
Which is better: being a nomad abroad or in an RV?
I discussed this question with Noah, and after weighing a few pros and cons while drinking some “pulque”, here’s our conclusion: It depends.
There are many RV nomads, and there are many nomads who live abroad (e.g., in Airbnbs). I’ve met few nomads who do both. So, now that we, two RVers, have been living abroad for seven weeks, I thought I’d explore both sides of each coin: which nomadic lifestyle is easier? Which is cheaper? Which one is more social? If you’ve ever been curious about becoming a nomad, whether the RV or globe-trotting kind, read on for our comparison between the two.
The 4 Cs of RV Life vs. Life Abroad: Comfort, Convenience, Community, and Cost
When Noah and I decided to pause our RV travels and move abroad, we did it to experience a new type of adventure. Comfort, convenience, community, and cost were never important motivators. However, as Noah and I discussed RV life versus life abroad, these are the categories that were interesting to compare.
Category #1: Comfort
“Do you drive, honey?”, the truck driver behind me in line asked. I shook my head as I rushed forward to the counter to pay for the next available shower stall. All I could think about was that finally, after almost 5 days, I was about to take a hot shower, flip-flops on my feet and all. No one, not even this overly-friendly truck driver would deter me. When we’re RVing, these are the moments I miss my private apartment shower in Dallas.
Showers on the road aren’t the worst, but they’re not the best. Our 25-gallon fresh water tank is smaller than most RVs’. If we want our water to last a full week, we use baby wipes and dry shampoo, taking showers every few days at gyms, campgrounds, and truck stops. The truck stop showers are the best with their clean stalls and generous hot water. At $10 a pop, they’re expensive, though.
After three years of sporadic hot showers on the road, you can imagine my delight at having, once more, a private large and free shower with abundant hot water in our Mexico apartment. Daily hot showers whenever we want? How luxurious!
Moving back into an apartment in Mexico has reminded us of a few other luxuries we’ve been missing in our camper. For example, space! At 84 sq. feet, our camper is less than half the size of an average American tiny home. I’m sometimes baffled at how two adults and two dogs peacefully coexist (and work!) in such tiny quarters. We do it happily, but being able to now take work calls in two separate rooms is a plus!
Another luxury we have in Mexico is easy-access to laundry. For less than USD$7.00, one can have a full load of laundry washed, dried, and folded. We have a laundromat that does this for us across our street in San Miguel de Allende. All we do is drop off the clothes, pay when we pick them up and put them away at home. This small luxury makes me feel like a queen.
**Comfort winner: Life abroad**
For us, apartment life is more comfortable than RV life. If we RVed in a Class A motorhome instead of a Casita travel trailer, it might be a different story. Not because of the space, but because of the larger water tanks. But then, we wouldn’t be able to park just about anywhere we want, which leads me to the next category.
Category #2: Convenience
"We’re home!”, Noah sometimes jokes when we arrive at a Wal-Mart parking lot in our RV. As many other RVers do, we often stay overnight at Wal-Marts on our way to our next destination. The idea of sleeping at a store sounds questionable but it’s no big deal: we simply close the blinds, turn on music, and suddenly, we’re home. The next morning, we wake up in our own bed and continue the journey, pulling our home and cozy bed behind us.
The biggest inconvenience about global nomad life isn’t that you can’t bring your own bed. It’s that in order to go anywhere other than the place you’re living in, you have to plan. When we’re RVing, we often decide on our next destination while we’re driving; it’s unusual for us to know exactly where we’re headed days in advance.
This weekend, Noah and I went on a little adventure to Querétaro, a beautiful colonial city, for a night. This is the first time we’ve left San Miguel de Allende. Alas, we couldn't simply hit the road and make a last-minute decision on where to go. Rather, we had to book a place to stay. We arranged a dog sitter. We packed our bags. We bought bus tickets. Oy, so much work!
**Convenience Winner: RV Life**
There is nothing quite as exhilarating and convenient as being able to hit the road without a destination figured out yet and discovering where destiny will take you. The best part? You don’t have to pack!
Category #3: Community
I chuckled at the glitter in my hair. I’d just come back from teaching English classes to two young girls and I’d brought fun glitter-covered animal masks to teach them new vocabulary. Noah and I have struck a great arrangement with these girls’ parents: I teach their daughters English and the parents speak to Noah in Spanish for an hour.
Beyond a language exchange, Noah and I have become friends with this couple. After the last English class, they pampered us by sending me home with some quesadillas and fruit. While it’s only been seven weeks, Noah and I care about and feel cared for by others in San Miguel de Allende.
Being in one place for more than two weeks has allowed us to get to know not just this couple and the fruit lady, but other neighbors too. For example, Francisco is the young man who runs the convenience store down the street. “Hola, Noah!” he loves to call out when we walk by (I’m convinced that he’s forgotten my name since I’m not nearly as interesting as my gringo husband).
With all these new friends, you’d think that life abroad is better for community-building, right? Well, Noah and I debated on this one.
Our community is growing in San Miguel de Allende, no doubt. Our friendships are forming quickly, but few of them will go deep. We simply don’t have the time or the right sense of urgency. As sad as it might be, we are unlikely to see many of our new friends once we leave (though we hope we do!).
Making friends and building community as RVers feels different. Our community with this group is small, but the connections are deep. Thanks to organizations like Escapees and its subsidiary for working-age RVers, Xscapers, we’ve made good friends whenever we’ve parked next to other members of these groups. We have a sticker on our campers that tells each other, “I’m cool, let’s be friends.” If you’re an Xscaper among other Xscapers, you belong.
It’s easy to see why RVers get along well: we’re all crazy rebels defying the status quo by rejecting the brick-and-mortar house and instead, living on the road. There’s no need to explain our lifestyle. Instead, we share meals and drinks outside while we trade details on the best destinations, secret camping spots, and the latest RV gear. We help each other, feed each other, and have one another’s back, even if we just met.
Similar to living abroad for a short period, we don’t have much time to nurture friendships with other RVers. Sometimes we travel with other RVers for a few weeks, but usually, we “live” parked by one another for just a few days. The big difference with RVing is this: we know we’ll see each other again.
If you’ve ever watched the Oscar-winning movie, Nomadland, you’ll remember Bob Wells, the leader of the support meet-up for nomads and van dwellers, Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR). In the movie, Bob shares the words that make all the difference. When we part ways with new RVing friends, it’s not “goodbye” that we say, but rather, “see you down the road.” And we mean it.
**Community winner: RV Life**
This was a difficult choice, but the deeper and long-lasting relationships we have with other RVers upstage the more numerous, but likely fleeting, friendships we’re making abroad.
Category #4: Cost
Three beers, two ceviche tostadas, popcorn chicken, street corn, a dish of jícama, and some chips. This odd mélange of drinks and food we had at a “botanero” (a snack place) last night amounted to MX $290 or USD $14. For U.S. prices, this is a “ganga” as we’d say in Spanish, a real bargain.
My sister-in-law asked me what the cost of living is in San Miguel de Allende. I don’t have a universal number, but I do know that it’s more expensive than other areas in Mexico given its notoriety as “the world’s best city”.
For those that earn in dollars, the cost of living in Mexico is certainly cheaper than it would be in most U.S. cities. However, given our already fairly low cost of living as RVers in the U.S., we haven’t experienced a significant decrease in our expenses (especially since we now pay rent). Having said that, there is one thing that has made a difference in our finances: using cash.
Every week, Noah and I convert the dollars sitting in our account for our weekly spending and head over to the ATM. The pesos we withdraw are exactly what we have to spend all week on food or experiences; no more, no less. Most restaurants do accept cards, but the markets and food stands where we typically eat only accept cash (these are often the most delicious too!).
Using cash has been an interesting experiment to manage our finances. In the U.S., since we only use cards, it’s easy to borrow against next week’s budget if we want to splurge on extras. Now, we can’t borrow against cash that’s not yet in our pockets. No cash? No extras (and we’re fine with that!).
**Cost winner: A tie between RV life and life abroad**
We haven’t found a significant difference in our weekly spending between our RV life and life abroad. As RVers, we don’t pay rent (we occasionally pay for campgrounds), but our savings go towards other necessities, like excellent wifi plans. As global nomads in Mexico, our dollars stretch farther, but we’re now paying rent. Overall, our cost of living among the two lifestyles is about even.
What about adventure?
If you recall, it wasn’t comfort, convenience, community, or cost which motivated Noah and me to move abroad. It was a different category altogether: adventure. Which lifestyle wins in the adventure category?
“Without the possibility of death, adventure is not possible.” -Reinhold Messner
Messner was the first to solo climb Mt. Everest. To possibly die is his definition of adventure.
I used to have a friend that called himself “adventurous” because he’d traveled to many countries. I mocked him because he would always stay at luxurious resorts. To him, staying at resorts was his definition of adventure.
The more I travel, the more I appreciate that we all have different adventure “meters” and that we all define it differently. For us, Mexico has been a change of pace from RVing. While not death-defying, it's been a wonderful time to experience life from a different perspective and shake up our routine. Challenging our assumptions and routines is an important part of adventure for us.
**Adventure winner: You decide!**
Ultimately, adventure is in the eyes of the beholder. What I can share from our experience is that both RV life and life abroad promise adventure, if you know what that means to you and you go after it. Whether it’s learning a new language, seeing the world from the eyes of other cultures, or shaking up your routine, pursuing adventure can promise us this: a life well-lived.
RV life or life abroad: who wins?
“It sometimes feels like we’ve unlocked one of the secrets to the universe.”
-Brent and Michael are Going Places
I believe that Brent and Michael, two of my go-to travel writers on Substack, said it best. Being a nomad (in any of its forms) is one of the best-kept secrets to a fantastic life that is not so secret anymore. Digital nomadism has become increasingly popular with the growing acceptance of remote work. Whether this trend continues on a global scale remains to be seen. But for us, being nomads will always be our way of life.
The truth is that, for us, there is no overall “winner” when comparing RV life to nomadic life abroad. As with all comparisons in life, there are pros and cons to both sides. More importantly, the pros and cons are in the eyes of the beholder. Our experience as RVers can be vastly different than it is for others, as can our experiences living abroad.
So, which one should you go after? That, dear reader, is up to you. Go forth and discover for yourself which one wins. You may just find yourself not loving one more than the other, but like us, deciding that both are exactly right for you.
Karla is a Mexican/American travel and fiction writer. She’s also a life and career coach for career-driven women. Karla is one-half of Aventura Road, a married couple of nomads who live in an RV and travel full-time. Karla writes, while Noah photographs.
Follow Karla on Instagram @karlaexploradora.
Follow Karla & Noah on Instagram @aventuraroad.
Loved this article Karla ! Such a very good question. Thank you for the extra links to explain things like pulque and xscapers, good thinking, I learned a lot :)) Now I must go and decide what my own definition of Adventure actually is, and armed with that, I can make a better decision as to whether I should get my camper as soon as I land in Europe, or travel light for a while first before finding my dream home on wheels :))
Great writing, Karla. You really bring us along with you in your articles. I really enjoyed this one specifically as I'm preparing to move to a more mobile lifestyle myself. I have to admit my trailer is a little bigger than your Casita. All the best to you and Noah!