Angela Durrell - Special to the Sun

When Sandy Bowe and her husband Greg decided to sell their house and hit the road in their 400-square foot camper, she realized something very quickly.

'I had to learn how to behave,' she says wryly. Home, once a large, 3,600 square foot domicile, had downsized to the boundaries of a fifth wheel, and she had to learn how to adjust to a lot of new things. There was, she explains, a learning curve of compromise.

It’s home sweet home at Camp James in Kernville.

'In a house, you have room to get away if someone is bugging you,' she chuckles. 'In an RV, you can’t do that.' It’s a very focused, economic way of living that calls for planning, strategy, and flexibility. But the rewards, she says, are phenomenal. 'We’ve worked and lived all over the country for the last six years, and I don’t see us stopping anytime soon.'

Sandy and her husband are full-time RV’ers, part of a niche called workampers. They travel the country, taking jobs at various locations where they live and work for a time and then move on. It’s a fantastic way of providing income while at the same time indulging their sense of adventure and love of travel.

Enthusiastic campers and lovers of the outdoors all their lives, they had always talked about buying an RV and visiting places they wanted to see. At the time, her husband was 50; Sandy was 45. They had thought they’d be older when they finally decided to take the plunge. 'I think we were just sitting round the fireplace one night and just said, ’ÄòWhy shouldn’t we?’ We don’t have children, so that was one thing we didn’t have to worry about. So we decided we could make a go of it.'

Like thousands of modern gypsies before them, they sold their house and any possessions they didn’t need. 'Friends asked me, ’ÄòHow can you get rid of this?’' But, she goes on, living in an RV requires a lot of compromise and prioritizing. 'You realize very quickly that these are just things,' she explains. Then they hit the road.

According to Coachmen, a popular RV manufacturer, baby boomers are the biggest market for RV sales. 'The industry as a whole is getting younger,' says a representative. The largest segment of RV owners are ages 35-54 years of age, and one in ten households aged 50-64 have at least one RV. The fastest growth of RV sales is now occurring in ages 18-34. Like the Bowes, they’re young, active, mobile, and are free of ties to hold them to any one place.

RVing has become more than just a vacation luxury. There are several different ways of living on the road, different subcultures who operate and migrate according to their particular needs and purposes.

Fulltimers are exactly that; they live full-time in their RV’s and move around to different places. Some Fulltimers are also Workampers, like Sandy and Greg. Workampers literally move from job to job, sometimes for pay, sometimes exchanging site fees for work.

The Bowes opt for the former rather than the latter, since they don’t collect Social Security or have pensions to cushion their income. Workamping has become one of the largest segments of the RV lifestyle, enabling people to live and work wherever their whims take them. There’s even a magazine targeted specifically for this niche, with job listings, campground information, and volunteer opportunities.

'Workampers are becoming a great resource of labor for employers,' Sandy observes. 'There’s a wide variety of options.'

Networking is a huge source of leads and information, too. While parked in a campground, you might become friendly with the guy next door’Äîwhom you had never met before’Äîand find that he has a contact up in Bar Harbor where you’re thinking about taking a job. This is a major advantage for workampers, because job interviews are almost always conducted on the phone, and they never know for sure what they’re going to find once they arrive on-site. Fellow workers are nakedly honest and forthright with their recommendations.

'We tend to do that for each other, because you don’t want someone to travel 2000 miles and find out that the job stinks,' Sandy points out. 'And the employers are becoming more aware of that, too.'

She and her husband accepted a job as RV park managers once, and found that the sheer volume of work hours wore them out. 'It was too much like a full time job,' Sandy said, and both had quit their jobs in order to have the freedom and flexibility they enjoyed. 'Honestly, it’s a crap shoot. You never know what the job is going to be like until you get there. But that the beauty of workamping,' she goes on. 'You’re not tied down to it; you can move on.'

Fulltimers and workampers are a different breed from the snowbirds, who use their RVs primarily for getaways and vacations. ’ÄòBoondockers’ are slightly more hard core; they choose to sojourn in more remote, wild areas with minimal facilities. There is a generous selection of places to go; RVer’s come to stay at city, state, and national parks, campgrounds and resorts. Still others choose to take advantage of dry camping on BLM and Forest Service lands, which often offer camping at no cost, using their storage tanks and campfires for comfort and sustenance.

It’s a lifestyle that offers obvious advantages of convenience; you can take everything with you. You can work on the road, whether it be workamping or by remote, such as email and the Internet.

'It’s different than the old way of thinking,' Sandy agrees. 'The idea that you have to have a regular job, in an office, etcetera.' Referring to the writer, she adds, 'Your job is ideally suited to this lifestyle. There’s nothing that says you have to be in one place to do what you do.'

Most campgrounds these days offer cable and wireless internet as part of their fee packages, as well as water, sewer, and electric. It also offers the comfort of home, where you can cook your own meals and sleep in a bed you like. Plus, you have the option of simply moving on to wherever you want, whenever you choose to go.

Walk into almost any RV campground, and you’ll often find a section specifically reserved for the fulltimers. Patio tables and furniture, outdoor grills, yard ornaments, and even gardens adorn their sites; more frequently these days, they even boast satellite dishes.

There are compromises, too. Frugality and economy is the rule of thumb. Mastering the operation of one’s particular trailer or motor home is imperative, for obvious reasons. And RV’ers learn to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to packing and storage; anything deemed unnecessary is left by the wayside. When they first started out in their fifth wheel, Sandy found herself challenged by the issue of’Äîironically’Äîmobility.

'We only had one car,' she explains. She couldn’t just take it and go anytime she wanted, because she was sharing a vehicle with her husband. 'I had to give up my freedom to an extent, but now it doesn’t bother me at all.'

After six years on the road together, they have no plans to stop and 'settle down' to a more conventional way of living. They always knew that if it didn’t work out, they could start again’Äîbuy a new house, get new jobs if necessary. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

'We’re still on an adventure,' she says excitedly. 'We’ve been doing this for six years, but we feel like we’re just getting started.'