What Has It Been Like Taking Our Podcast On The Road Full Time?
In the 7 months we have taken our Trust The Trail Podcast on the road full time we can say for certain that it’s been great! Not withstanding the challenges of Full Time Travel in the middle of a National Pandemic.
Our goal was, and still is, to meet our listeners and offer anyone who wanted to go backpacking a much broader range of trails throughout the Country. As Outdoor Guides we feel that everyone deserves to experience the outdoors no matter who or where they come from. In the 7 months we have been on the road, we have been able to backpack in 3 National Parks including getting to one by Sea Plane, experiencing the torrential rains of the Smoky Mountains, having a Island to ourselves and cowboy camping in the Badlands. It’s been pretty amazing. Not too mention have a few Meetup Events where we were able to explore, hike and spend the night all as a group.
But what has been the reality of taking an Outdoor Podcast on the road? Often it comes with trade offs. On one hand, waking up and seeing the Red Rocks of Sedona outside your window or seeing the Buttes in the Badlands is amazing. But there is also the challenge of running a full time business on the road when the more remote you go, the harder it is to run the day to day operations of your business. Not having reliable Internet is a real issue. Of course, no one ever speaks about the Dust Storms that often happen in the Arizona Desert especially when Boondocking in these remote places. As with backpacking and coming off the trail, we always take that long hot shower and clean up. In Full Time Travel in a 1976 Airstream, your hot shower clean up will be short lived. Like in 3 minutes. Pretty much like trying to shower from your Platy.
We all understand that backpacking in remote area’s can be challenging. We face those challenges with the understanding that Mother Nature is in charge and she doesn’t care about our weekend plans. We see a huge similarity in full time travel, and backpacking on a trail. Just as we embrace the suck when it rains, or snows, we embrace the suck when we have a flat tire, or have a mechanical break down on the road. Both offer different kinds of challenges that we have to meet. Let’s be honest here. RVing and Backpackers have a lot of similarities. Both are always looking for a place to “dump” and get “filtered water”.
We were highly disappointed when we had to go from our normal “once a week” podcast to “bi-weekly”. The reality of taking our Podcast on the road was that it’s almost impossible to predict when we have good Internet when we need to have good internet. The struggle is real for bandwidth IF and this is a big IF, we want to be more remote.
We have always wanted to come out West and set up a livable base camp where we can go back to weekly and have a good work space that is reliable. Not too mention my Dad needs care. So there are personal reasons also. The fact is we can’t be everywhere all the time. As we would love to offer trips everywhere in the U.S and go backpacking with you all, there is no way we (at this time) have the ability to tow our home back and forth. Which leads us to a question: How do we expand Trust The Trail Podcast so we can get more people on the trail? If you have an idea, sure would love to hear it. (comment below)
What have we leaned:
Wow! huge in this category. WE absolutely LOVE living a Minimal lifestyle. Yes, it is a lifestyle. We wouldn’t change that for anything. Even with two dogs and 180 sq feet of space. We have also learned that we can face bigger obstacles together if we pull together. To be honest, the obstacles haven’t been that big. Probably (and more importantly) we have learned to be grateful for the immense beauty we’ve seen across our Country. And of course, meeting you! Our Listeners, now are some of our best friends. Which leads to the end of this post. We are so grateful for the chance at meeting some of you and being able to see people backpacking for the first time. Or gaining confidence in their own personal growth, or just sitting around the campfire and sharing our hopes and dreams together. We would not have done anything different. Thank you.
