What We Wish We’d Known Before Overlanding Full-time (Part 7)

Welcome back, as I blog my in-progress ebook. This is Part 7. As a quick introduction, I’m Brittany Highland, and I’ve been traveling full-time by vehicle with my husband Eric since February 2014. We’re now driving around the world with our five-year-old son, Caspian. We originally spoke about what we wish we’d known before overlanding full-time at several events in 2021, including two Overland Expos.

I have so much to share that I decided to turn our presentation into my first ebook. Once the ebook is complete, I’ll be emailing it to all our subscribers for free. That way, you can download the PDF file and refer to it whenever you want to.

If you want to go back and catch up, you can do so with these links:

• Part 1: Stuff is a sad substitute for experience
• Part 2: Stuff is a sad substitute for hands-on training
• Part 3: Payload capacity doesn’t go away if you ignore it
• Part 4: Overlanding involves intentional self-deprivation
• Part 5: Logistics involved (can’t play constant tourist)
• Part 6: Meteorology matters (chase the weather)

Now let’s continue on to the next lesson!

7/ Internet and that gorgeous campsite rarely go together

We’ve all seen the photos: attractive female lying on the bed with Crate & Barrel pillows, the back doors of the Sprinter van spread open, the sun rising over the ocean in brilliant colors. You can just imagine her opening a MacBook Pro and working industriously with a chai tea next to her, the happiest member of the workforce in the whole world.

For those of us who need to earn money to sustain our travels, we’re dying to know:

Is that real life? Can you really stay at gorgeous campsites AND have enough Internet connectivity to work and sustain your travels?

To answer those questions, let’s go back in time a few years. Read on for our experience…

When Eric and I started traveling full-time in 2014, we had a 9-5 work commitment, Monday through Friday. We owned an online marketing company, and our clients expected us to be online and available to them. Because of that, we had the freedom to travel in our RV, but there was something tying us up: the need for reliable Internet connectivity. The grip felt tighter and tighter every year.

At first, our solution was to stay at private campgrounds in areas with reliable cell coverage (we carried our own Internet with us and never relied on WiFi). But after about four years of that, I told Eric I didn’t think we were “doing it right.” We lived in a home on wheels, but we were staying in concrete playgrounds with mere feet separating us from our neighbors.

Meanwhile, I saw our friends posting gorgeous campsites on social media and knew they had work commitments like we did. So for 2018, Eric and I decided to make a change and begin camping extensively off-grid. That year, we spent 105 of 365 nights off-grid with our Class A RV, including 22 straight days in Moab.

For full-time overlanders, this isn’t impressive. But considering where we’d come from (and the fact we were working 40+ hours every week and had a one-year-old), this was incredible. Mid-way through 2018, we discovered overlanding and the rest is history.

If you’ve been following the story, then you know we were able to find Internet for those 105 days of off-grid camping. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to stay there. Right?

Well…sort of.

We now have four years of off-grid camping behind us. During that time, we’ve traveled and worked through:

• All the national parks in Utah
• Every state in New England
• The entire Baja Peninsula of Mexico
• And everywhere in between

With our long-term experience as full-time travelers, here’s what we’ve learned.

Internet and that gorgeous campsite rarely go together.

Reality is the ideal campsites we picture as overlanders, the ones buried in pristine wilderness with no one around us, rarely have Internet coverage. So we can’t camp there and work on the Internet at the same time.

But there are exceptions, and there are work-arounds.

We’ve had Internet connectivity in places we didn’t expect, like the beautiful La Huasteca Potosina region of Mexico. And the Internet didn’t work for us in places we expected it to, like Upper Teton View in Wyoming.

If you want to stay at beautiful campsites, but also have work commitments, then we recommend the following:

1. Do your research: we are fortunate to have many resources at our fingertips in 2022 that allow us to predict Internet connectivity at a camping spot before we arrive. We’ll go over specifics in Part 10.
2. Stay flexible: no matter how much you research, you need to expect the unexpected. Practice taking deep breaths.
3. Communicate well: it usually isn’t sustainable to hide your travel lifestyle from your clients or the people you work with. By communicating openly about your Internet limitations, those people will be more understanding when things go sideways.
4. Always have a backup plan: if you have an important work call or deadline looming, have a Plan B. Sometimes the Internet at your Plan A campsite will be non-existent, or it will stop working at the most inconvenient time. Know which coffeeshops with WiFi are in the area or select another campsite to move to. We’ve made these adjustments countless times over the years. Our lifestyle requires it.

COMING UP: The United States is an amazing gift to overlanders

Stay tuned for the eighth lesson I share, as I blog my in-progress ebook. We’re on the home stretch now! If you haven’t already, don’t forget to sign up for a copy of my complete ebook, which I’ll email you for free as soon as it’s finished.

Thanks for participating in my blogging experiment. We’ll see you soon for the next lesson we’ve learned–the hard way!

-B