Simi Valley Couple’s One-Year Sojourn To See America Is Headed For Its Fifth Year – LA Daily News

“The scariest part of this whole lifestyle is just starting it.” – Jason Miller 

Nobody believed them. Not their families in Simi Valley, not their friends. Give it time, everyone said. They’ll come to their senses and stay put.

You don’t just chuck it all at 28 and drive off into the sunset in a diesel truck pulling your new home — a 42-foot long, 16-foot high, top-of-the-line, fifth wheel RV.

Do you?

It’ll be five years this July — three of them BC, Before COVID-19 — that newly-married Rae and Jason Miller quit their day jobs and left their rented Woodland Hills home to set off on a one-year adventure with their dog, Carmen, to see America. They’re still out there looking.

“We were doing well in our careers (Rae was a project manager for Farmers Insurance and Jason was a cyber security engineer for Warner Brothers), but we weren’t ready for kids, and homes were just so expensive,” Rae said.

“We were going to give it a year, figuring what’s the worst thing that could happen?” Jason said. “We could always come back to 9 to 5 jobs.”

They said this last week from Orlando, Florida after spending Christmas with some RV friends from Michigan escaping the freezing cold. Instead of shoveling snow, they were passing the Coppertone.

The Millers have become well know in the RV community from their website, blog, and YouTube channel on life in an RV. It pays the bills. Half the time they’re in vacation mode, half the time they’re working from home — somewhere in America.

“We’ve been to 49 of the 50 states, and we’re preparing for Alaska this year, upgrading our RV’s suspension for the rougher roads. It takes a lot of planning,” Jason said. For Hawaii, they flew over, and rented an RV to stay in for two weeks.

Officially, they’re residents of Texas, where there is no state income tax, and they’ve both been fully vaccinated with a booster shot, and mask up in public.

The first year was the toughest, Rae said. They missed their family and friends, and it got pretty lonely not having people your own age to talk to. They’d pull into an RV campground and sit around a campfire at night with people old enough to be their grandparents.

“Some were very excited for us and wished they had hit the road earlier,” Jason said. “Others thought we should work and wait until we retired to be out there, like they had to do.

“In the last couple of years, though, we’re seeing a lot more young people out there in RV’s thanks to the internet and being able to work remotely.”

One of the keys to this unique lifestyle is having a strong relationship with your partner, Rae said. “If you have any issues, they’re going to be amplified immediately. Your relationship, your communication, can’t be just good, it has to be stellar.

“You can’t be fighting and angry when you’re sitting in the same space with each other. I used to stress out at any little inconvenience, not anymore. You have to keep your cool and know there is always a solution to any problem. And there will be problems.”

Like the one they encountered camping on a beach in Baja in March 2020 when people started talking about this viral strain going around the world called COVID-19.

“We came back into the country a day before the southern border was closed,” Jason said. “They took most of our food at the border, and there was slim pickings in the stores.”

“We made the decision to move to a beautiful RV resort outside Zion National Park, which was closed because of coronavirus so the resort was empty. We stayed there for a month, then went boon docking (camping on public land) with some friends for the next 100 days just outside other national parks.

“We got to experience them all when they reopened without the huge crowds. It was awesome.”

They miss their family and friends, and try to make it home to visit once a year during the winter months. The rest of the year they stay in touch by zoom and FaceTime.

“We’re just winging it,” Jason said. “We were always the people who had a five-year plan, but because our life in the last five years has always been up in the air we find it really hard to plan long distance things right now.”

Summing up their journey so far, Rae said, “the RV lifestyle isn’t always easy…but everyday brings new people, new surroundings, new natural wonders, and new memories.

“And if that isn’t the American dream, I don’t know what is.”

If you want to follow the Millers on the road, check out their website – getawaycouple.com – for more information.

Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at [email protected].