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Taking Telecommuting To the Next Level - the RV
An anonymous reader writes "I have been telecommuting as a software architect for a major corporation since 2007. It has allowed me to live a quality rural lifestyle. Never content, am now considering living on the road for several years. Due to the proliferation of 4G and wireless hotspots, I see no reason I could not do this from a 5th-wheel trailer. Have any slashdotters truly cut the cord in this manner? Any advice or warnings?"
In Romania (and probably the EU), we have a law that forces all ISPs to publish service quality parameters (such as average complaint resolving time). Make sure you check them if there are any in the US, to help you decide which provider you pick.
Only stay at places with shower facilities. RV'ing can be fun, but without some comforts like the ability to take long/hot showers, it will always feel like a small step above camping.
Not something you will want to do for several years. And find places with electrical outlets. Air conditioning is something to die for during the summer, and you wont have it if you are running a generator only.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Maybe consider half way between a house & RV. Better when in cold climates.
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/
Many of the places you may want to travel to may have limited cell coverage. I have stayed in many campgrounds where 2G is the most I can hope for. Think about where you want to go before you dive into this plan.
The technology-related issues are easy to solve these days. Unless you're in the middle of the desert, 3G/4G cell phones and personal WiFi hotspots should work. If you are determined to live way, way out in the boonies, then look in to satellite-based Internet. It's not very good, but sometimes it's your only option.
The government and regulatory issues might be a bigger problem. Are you keeping your current home? If not, what will you use as an address? You will have problems with things like driver's licenses if you don't have a permanent address.
There are several RV-related web sites with articles and forums on the subject of full-timing. Make sure to check them out.
Wow. TFA says 8.9 million American households that have RVs, about a half-million live full-time on the road.
And the National Multi Housing Council site I found says there are a total of 118M households in all.
So 7.5% of all households own RVs? And 0.4% live on the road? I had no idea such a huge percentage was doing this.
I have been telecommuting fulltime for 14 years now and used it to move around the country..not in an RV however. I find 4G coverage still spotty in rural areas and even if it wasnt, the data caps will kill you unless you're grandfathered into unlimited data..Sprint's just getting around to deploying LTE so they're unlimited data is mostly 3G, 3G data is unacceptable for most interactive IT work on the net.
I find working in Rural areas rought..no hardwared internet access unless I want to drop in a T1, The new satellite services(Excede) also have data caps.
I went to a cabin in northern Minnesota this summer..it was on a lake, nice, peaceful and a perfect place for me to work..no cell coverage and certainly no internet access.
There's some good and bad sides to this. I actually tried this out about 3 years ago, wanted to travel while I'm still young and can do more. Me and the wife bought a 35' fifth wheel, moved out of the apartment, and put excess stuff in storage. After about 6 months, we moved out of the RV and back into another apartment. (Kept the RV though, still like to travel!)
The good:
- Having a new backyard every day/week was great.
- Met a lot of friendly people along the way. Many having dinner outside their RV would frequently ask if we wanted to sit and eat with them when we were walking around the park. In turn, we always tried to do the same when we had cooked something.
- A lot of experienced RVers and full-timers are more than willing to help out with issues you might have, as long as you're open to it.
- Seeing the country is great fun, especially the out of the way areas.
- On some days it feels like a full-time vacation (even when working).
The bad:
- High speed Internet access was spotty/unreliable. Being in a rural area, you may be familiar with this already, but when traveling around in an RV to random campsites and rest areas, you find out rather quickly that anything above 3G is still iffy on the open road. Don't count on the coverage map saying 3G or 4G is available in the middle of nowhere, especially if you have time-sensitive work you need to submit.
- Most campgrounds (i.e. RV-oriented campgrounds, not state parks and such) will offer wi-fi access, but it may be spotty, slow speed, or unreliable. And the campground office tends to either be empty when trying to find someone to tell there's a problem with the wi-fi, or if a person is there they usually aren't sure about the wi-fi setup or how to troubleshoot/reset it.
- If you travel a lot (i.e. don't hook up in one place for more than a few days) you will spend a lot on gas. And if you do stay in one place for a period of time, don't forget to account for campground fees.
- Most trailers aren't made for "permanent" living. You'll notice this most with the walls and lack of insulation, especially in peak summer and winter months. Quality counts here.
You'll definitely want to budget things out though, as you can easily spend a lot more than you would in mortgage or rent. Joining Good Sam helps some, committing to a place for 2-4 weeks at a time can help out more with campground prices. Some campgrounds will even let you do odd jobs to help decrease the "rent", but you'll usually find that "regulars" that have been there for extended periods already are doing those jobs. If you do commit to full-time, let your insurance agent know - most major carriers can convert your homeowners/renters insurance into an equivalent "full-timer" RV policy so you'll have coverage on the stuff in the camper.
In short, if you like to travel it's a good experience. If you don't like camping out, you won't have a good time (modern RVs are comfortable, but you still need to remember it's camping out, and you won't have all the amenities of a regular apartment/house). Also depending on how much you need an Internet connection, how fast you need it, and how often you need it, you may not want to commit to it full time. At least, just yet. As the infrastructure and reliability continues to improve, this will become less of an issue as time goes on (I'm sure it's improved some in the 2-3 years since we did it).
I assume if you're RVing, you want to be in reasonably rural areas -- not in city RV parks.
I RV'd through British Columbia and Alaska 3 years ago. For much of the route, 3G wasn't available. State/County campsites don't have WiFi. Commercial campsites almost always have WiFi.
However, the quality of the WiFi can vary wildly. You could easily find yourself camped on the edge of the coverage area of a consumer-grade 802.11b access point, sharing a basic DSL connection with everyone else on the site. Sometimes even basic web browsing is frustrating. I wouldn't want to be reliant on it for VOIP, screen sharing, email attachments of reasonable size, or largeish file transfers.
So I think you'll find yourself hunting out sites with reliable WiFi, which means you won't be as free as you might have hoped.
I work for a consulting firm so I'm either on-site with a client or sitting at home with my laptop writing reports and managing the rest of my team and I cut the cord last year.
I spent last winter living off the back of my motorcycle in the southwestern US, usually spent my nights in a tent but I would retreat to the occasional hotel room when the weather threatened. If I can do it on a bike you can do it in an RV. I carried a small inverter to keep my laptop charged and powered everything else directly off the bike. Between 3G tethering through my iPhone and WiFi wherever I could find it (hint: due to Mormon sensibilities there are no Starbucks in southern Utah, look for a Subway) I was able to stay online. The "Coverage?" app for iPhone really helped when I needed to find a signal (I'm sure there's something similar available for Android) and I got online in some crazy places (try Googling "Muley Point" or "Dry Fork Coyote Gulch"). I got a small storage unit in Las Vegas for $30/mo where I would keep a suitcase full of "work clothes" for when I had to fly out to a client meeting (something you wouldn't have to worry about in an RV) and as a convenient/cheap/enclosed spot to park the bike while I was away.
The bike is currently stashed in the storage unit and I'm now living on a 41' sailboat (the RV of the seas). I've set it up with a 4G hotspot and some big cell/WiFi antennas so I can get service offshore. Currently located in Manhasset Bay at the western end of Long Island Sound, sailing down the East River later today to tie up in NYC for a month or so.
I'm not an RV'er but, since the economy chased me out of my Unix sysadmin gig, I resorted to putting food on the table by becoming a freight jockey (it was also a nice change of pace). When you're on the road for 26 days out of the month (as well as single with no children) shelling out rent for an apartment is kind of a moot point, so I literally live in the truck. Wifi on the road is really no big deal anymore, especially since most major truck stops, hotels, and even quite a few interstate rest areas now have hotspots.
That being said, there are a few things I do to make online life a little easier for a road warrior:
(1) As I already mentioned, many of your typical diesel stops are going to have wifi but the network can get pretty crowded at times. Some of the best times to use wifi at these facilities is 9 am to 5 pm, when most of your competition is going to be on the road instead of hogging up the bandwidth.
(2) The signal coverage in the places can also be a little spotty: one corner of the lot may have wonderful signal strength but another can absolutely suck. If you can, park so that you can have a clear line of sight to the building in which the antenna is located. Also, try not to put the fuel islands between you and the building if it can be helped; you can go from a really good connection to being knocked offline because somebody's Peterbilt pulled in to the fuel lane at the wrong time.
(3) Many of the wifi hotspots in these stops are managed with OpenDNS and certain websites will be blocked (namely, anything having to do with torrents).
(4) Wifi obviously won't be available everywhere you stop. If you often find yourself in the middle of nowhere (like me) then consider getting something like Verizon's MiFi or Fivespot devices. Verizon's plans seem to be better for heavy users but, if all you do is surf or check email, then there are probably cheaper plans around.
(5) One of the best investments I've made was a wifi repeater with an externally-mounted antenna. A typical trailer is about 13'6" (4.5 meters) in height; when all the diesel jockeys park it for the night there's going to be a awful lot of metal for your signal to try to get through.
(6) I often use my laptop for trip planning as well as keeping my DOT logs via an approved logbook application, so my machine is often running while I'm driving (but I do keep both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road). Don't know about RV's but trucks bounce around a lot; as you can imagine, this repeated shock-testing can't be very good for the condition of your laptop. If you're going to be doing something similar then I highly suggest getting a laptop stand which bolts to the seat (the seats are usually equipped with "air-ride" shock absorbers and can greatly reduce the constant jarring experienced while driving).
This space for rent!
My father RVed (not full time, but a large fraction of the time) and consulted during his psuedo-retirement in his 50s.
First of all RVs are incredibly expensive to maintain, fuel, buy (if new) and park. They're designed to separate retirees from their money in the couple years it takes for them to get sick of it. Assuming you're not a confirmed landlubber, you're about 1e9 times better off on a live aboard sailboat. You'll get more space for cheaper and it costs virtually nothing to move it and maint costs aren't any more or less than a RV. If you love the sea you want a boat, if you love the mountains, well, maybe not. Also boats are awesome in the summer and generally suck in the winter, assuming you're in a climate that has a real winter. TIME also strikes in that simple things like doing the dishes in a sink about the size of a large salad bowl simply takes a long time compared to the dishwasher at home.
RV takes more maintenance cost / ability / TIME and guts than a house. As long as you're cool with spending 4 hours rebuilding the generator carb instead of billable hours during crunch time deadline instead of just calling the local electrical company during an outage... If you are used to doing housework/repair/improvement on saturday morning, maybe a RV will realistically require housework/repair/improvement all day saturday and maybe some of sunday if you're full time or pseudo-full time.
Clients understand if you're living in a cabin in Wyoming and they're in NYC you aren't going to just drop on by the office. Clients do not understand that at $4/gallon and 5 MPG you are not realistically able to drive from a state park in Wyoming to NYC to discuss a $1000 contract in person, I mean, you're mobile and free, right, so you should be parking your RV in their corporate parking lot, not in a national park, and being mobile means you have no commute/travel costs at all, right? Clients have problems understanding the expense per mile of a RV.
Clients understand travel time is an hour at the airport each side plus at most a couple hours in the air. Clients do not understand that RV travel means at least one full day to maybe a week to "travel" during which its physically impossible to generate billable hours.
Its not all perfect with sailboats either.... Clients do not understand how slowly sailboats move. So you want to be 200 miles away from the hurricane that is 3 days away... you need to evac NOW like 3 days before landfall, and clients think 200 miles divided by 75 MPH in a car means you should be working for them right up until hours before hurrican landfall, or at most, a day. It doesn't work that way with boats. 100 miles is a excellent daily run (depending on size of boat, weather, and skill of sailor...) and if your life depends on it, 200 miles should have at least three days budgeted. Of course there will be no marina slips 200 miles away, so you need to go further or pray wifi works out to an anchorage, or work from the remote marina clubhouse, or ... Realize that when evac from a hurricane in a sailboat you do not need to reach blue sky, you merely need to reach a level of storm you're comfortable with. 30 MPH winds are no big deal, and the odds of your marina being ground zero are very low anyway, so you might only need to evac 20 miles or something. Also clients don't understand that a hurricane striking the middle of nowhere is a big deal if your marina is in the middle of nowhere, just because the weather channel isn't FUDing New Orleans or Tampa Bay, doesn't mean there's no personal emergency for you... Clients kind of understand if they see New Orleans being evacuated but if its not leading the news...
You need to understand that you can't drive your RV during rush hour (at least in the cities) and you can't drive during the day because you're supposed to be working, but the RV park office is only open 9-5 so you have to check in and out while you're supposedly working and/or avoiding traffic jams, the logistics are much mor
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I was working remotely as a sysadmin for a small US telco. Back then 3G coverage wasn't great, but it was there. I traveled constantly, and worked from my laptop. Sometimes, I just cheated a bit with presence on my phone (IM Client), when bringing my laptop somewhere wasn't an option. I didn't go for driving though, I took planes, trains, buses, boats, and every other form of public transportation available. I stayed in cheap hotels. That went on for ~2 years. I had the time of my life, and my employer at the time never noticed I left my house. Go for it, but take into account if you go for the RV, driving is a full time job in itself, and you can't drive and code (or whatever it is you do). You will travel far less than you might expect. Cheap hotels and public transportation, OTOH, allow you to fall asleep at night on a plane, and magically wake up the next in a completely different place. You get used to sleeping on the go. I'd say go for it.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Greetings! Yes, this sort of lifestyle is totally possible! Several words for it include: Technomad, Digital Nomad, Location Independent Professional, NuRVer, etc. We're currently in our late 30s, are both software developers and have been on the road working remotely full time in an RV since 2006.
We started out first in a tiny 16' teardrop trailer, then a 17' fiberglass egg trailer and now a 35' vintage bus conversion. All of our homes on wheels have been geeked out with electronics, wireless internet options and solar panels. Our bus currently even has a lithium ion phosphate battery bank to power everything.
4G is definitely making things easier and easier. When we hit the road, finding a solid 2G signal was a struggle,and 3G was just starting to roll out - and even that was workable. More and more RV parks are also installing reliable WiFi networks, and there is WiFi boosting equipment that makes it easier to pick a signal. For cellular, we like a combination of the Verizon & AT&T footprint for keeping online in most places. We purchase our Verizon through bulk reseller www.Millenicom.com - where we can buy 20GB/mo of 4G service for just $69.99 with no contract. For AT&T, we just tether off our smartphones when needed. We also have a cellular amplification system on our roof that helps us boost up a weak signal. We carry an internet satellite dish for when we're somewhere without other options.
We blog about life on the road, particularly the tech aspect of it at: http://www.technomadia.com
Of particular interest, you might enjoy:
Our series going over a lot of the logistics: http://www.technomadia.com/excuses
Our mobile internet setup: http://www.technomadia.com/excuses
And if you're considering this lifestyle, recommend joining a bunch of us doing it at: http://www.nurvers.com (the couple profiled in the article you linked to are members there as well). Many of us rendezvous on the road and co-work & socialize from amazing places.
Best wishes.. and if there are any questions you have, please feel free to be in touch!
- Cherie & Chris / technomadia.com
Many Walmarts and Sam's Clubs will let you park overnight. Some require you to ask. Highway est stops are usually safe places so take advantage of them. In either case, be discreet and safe.
My father's life as an RVer results in the advice that if you buy a pop-up or a slide-out camper there is no way to argue with the cops or rentacops or just jerks in general that you're camping/sleeping. The slideout / pop up is kind of a give away that you're doing something "not allowed". However if you buy a completely fixed RV with no moving parts, there is no way for "the man" to know you're sleeping in the back of the RV vs maybe inside the store shopping.
In an urban environment if you take a pop-up/slide out RV to the mall and obviously camp, you can expect to be very severely hassled. On the other hand, unless you offend them somehow, there's no way for a mall rentacop to figure out if you are shopping or sleeping in a fixed configuration RV. If they start chalking and towing then "regular customers" are going to scream bloody murder when their car is towed away while they're shopping, so thats a non-starter if the TV and newspapers could ever hear about it.
So no slideout / popup is a HUGE logistical advantage. Also what you don't have, can't break. So you'll never be "stuck" unable to leave a campground because your slideout is stuck open or the pop-up is jammed.
This leads to a vampiric lifestyle. Wake up around mall closing time, lets say 9pm, drive until the next big city mall opening time, lets say 9am (with stops for meals along the way, etc) then sleep or sightsee or shop or whatever until 9pm again. It sucks being exhausted at 8:30 am but can't park until the mall opens. Also being on the road shortly after bar closing time is often far too exciting... thats a good time to park somewhere for your "lunch".
The cheapest daily urban camping rate I've ever heard of is sports stadiums, assuming you can sleep thru the sporting event. Sometimes as low as $3 per sleep period, which is amazingly cheap in a heavily urban environment. I've heard some places demand to see your event tickets before you get to park, but almost all do not. In urban environments there are also airports and convention centers and strangely enough, hotels, all of which are often pretty good places to park for cheap/free. Hotels will often hassle you if you park there overnight, but rarely if ever during the day.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
#1 - strip your RV of ALL fancy vinyl graphics and paint it stark white. You need urban camouflage. Bonus to add AT&T or VERIZON logo graphics on it to further make it look like a Company work trailer.
#2 - All Walmarts let you boondock in their parking lots for 2 nights without hassle. more if you go to the edge and look unobtrusive. The camouflage works here too.
#3 - Buy and install Limo Tint on all the RV windows. also install black curtains on all windows so at night nobody outside can see that you are inside. A cop will investigate your Rig, but if it looks like a corporate work RV and nobody is in it, he will go away after checking that it is secure. Putting lettering by the door that says "Fiberoptic Splicing TRAILER" help convince a cop you belong there.
#4 - learn where fill and dump stations are, but try to not use your toilet in the RV unless you have to. It is a lot easier to find where to fill up fresh water at, and you can dump the grey water on the ground. but finding a dump station to get rid of all your turds is not a fun part of doing this. Leave your duces at restaurants and stores.
#5 - if you dont own the RV, get a "toy hauler" that has a garage. that way you can bring a scooter, Motorcycle or Smartcar and not burn 3mpg gas driving around.
#6 - unless you get an insane deal. do NOT buy a motor-home. Motor-homes are crap compared to a pickup truck and 5th wheel. Why? if you have any breakdown on your truck, you can park and get the truck fixed. If the Motor-home breaks down, you are in a hotel for a week while the RV repair center rapes you and your wallet over and over again. Having your 5th wheel towed to a local KOA campground for a week is a lot cheaper and you still have your home.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why not rent an RV for two weeks and see how it goes?
I've never done it full time on RV-based, but I've spent sometimes more than a month away from my conventional home, and working from the road on either solo or two-person road trips. For a few years I did a 4-6 week cross-country trip from Seattle to various east coast destinations and back. Some great upsides to it:
- While gas is (relative to the rest of the world) cheap in the U.S., it gives a (again, relative) bargain on seeing an interesting country. If you have friends scattered over North America and the flexibility in schedule to visit them, it's more economical than dozens of commercial plane flights. I've gotten to see old friends all over the country this way, and that's a hard thing to overprice, because seeing friends in small batches is my ideal social experience. It's neat to catch up to people, make dinner with them, see how their kids resemble them or not, etc.
- You can follow the seasons as you see fit. I happen to like Seattle weather year 'round, Texas weather part of the year, and New England mountain weather when I'm not the one driving on a road made of equal parts ice, mud, and gravel.
But I was driving a passenger car, not an RV -- I spent my nights either parked in a safe spot (safish, at least), visiting with friends and family, camping, or at a hotel. While RVs are cool technology, as you know the big ones take a lot of gas and take more planning to park for the night.
Besides gas and parking, the worst-case scenarios with a full-size RV could be pretty bad ... if you hit ice and slip off the road, even if no one's injured it takes a pretty big effort to get it back on the road. Even without going off the road, there are camp roads, long driveways, and twisty paths along which I'd rather be in my nimble little car than in anything much bigger. When I have idly considered trying the RV-only life for a while, my plan has always been for a small one, like a RoadTek conversion van or just a small SUV outfitted for sleeping -- I'd rather pay for shower facilities on a piecemeal basis than have a vehicle big enough to contain a full-size one. (There are some van-sized shower units, but I wonder whether they're too much contortion and hassle ...)
Horses for courses; if RV travel is your thing, you may see the worst-case scenarios as easy to avoid or just interesting challenges, and just build in the expense or hassle of getting places the RV won't easily reach.
Connectivity is getting better all the time. I have used a Mi-Fi connection quite a bit (using both Verizon and Virgin devices), and found it to be a mixed blessing: when it works, it's fine, but slow as the 3G device that it is, and a bit flaky. When it doesn't work, well, I hope you don't *really* need to be online in the next little while. As with cellphones, the coverage map is always a lie. (Verizon, on this one front, has had better customer service and more consistent coverage, but the actual service is much more expensive; Virgin, in my experience -- matched by Samzenpus's -- tends to fail more often, and for longer at a stretch, and has customer service that Douglas Adams could have used without exaggeration in some part of the Hitchhiker's books. Cheery, youth-oriented, and hip is not what I want in a phone tree.
But with the carrying capacity of an RV, there are now some decent satellite options, and of course many more 3G/4G internet choices, including tethering. All depends how much your per-month budget for communications is, and how much your work requires being ensconced in your own office / surroundings and how much you need big data transfers. Even with "unlimited" service, if you've got a 3G connection, you're not watching streaming video much ;) [If you're patient, low-bandwidth video -- YouTube, for instance -- can work pretty well.] Some days, I can work fine from a Starbucks, and do -- that's been a frequent spot from which to work: they are nearly always friendly, have good-enough-for-me coffee, and sometimes nice cush
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Hi:
Lots of good observations in this thread from both land and water born travelers. But here is a suggestion that didn't come up.
The Great Loop is a 6,000 mile waterway built by the Corps of Engineers to protect U.S. shipping. It's pretty incredible and every year sees sunbirds making the migration from the Great Lakes down to Gulf, hybernating in FL for the winter, then returning north via the Inland Waterway along the eastern seaboard.
Passage is slow, through both rural and urban landscapes. Marinas are welcoming and you can anchor just about anywhere you want. There are associations that support loopers with the logistics. This might be an alternative to boondocking if you like the water.
You can even pull a houseboat if you like!
Also, somewhere in this thread mention was made of tumbleweeds. If you are travelling alone and if you can live in a small space this would definately be my choice. Litterally a tiny home.
Well insulated, comfortable, small footprint. Very towable.
Have a blast!
resist propaganda
...is that, um, like a coder or a developer?
Or do you really build houses from floppy disks?
I worked as a contract controls engineer (still do), and did a lot of startups & commissioning gigs.
I lived in a 40' 5th wheel, and enjoyed the flexibility. I could go from fully set up to fully set up within 24 hours. The flexibility made it a LOT easier for my employer to stick me into a gig, so the job security improved a lot.
The moves were not that often (every few months or so), so my employer hired an over-the-road truck to move the RV and I met them at the new site. It's cheaper than a week in a hotel, and WAY cheaper than paying to move an employee.
As an out-of-town resource, I still received the same housing and M&IE per diems as any other contractor (see your federal regulations on that one; there's charts for every major metro & surrounding area). This pays for the site as well as repaying the cost of the investment in the RV. (Investment--a thing where you spend money and expect to make money with the thing you bought. Like a carpenter who buys a good set of tools.)
I worked a lot of automotive gigs and found that there was NEVER a gig more than about 1/2 hour from a full-time park with Winter sites. Generally if you stay for a few months, they will give you a big discount on the slot, esp. Winter. Only one site didn't have sewer hookup (it did have electric & water), and the honey wagon came by every week.
I met some really great people full-timing in an RV; there's a real community out there. I've never had a bad neighbor, and the good thing is if you do, you can always move! Also, I met my wife while full-timing. We lived together in that 5th wheel for 3 years, and if we had an argument, there was no avoiding an issue by stomping off to the other end of the house. We pretty much had to deal with it then and there!
Some suggestions
You will need a "tax home" when you file your taxes and to maintain your driver license. If you qualify for residency in a state without income taxes, this is a good choice. If you move around a lot, get a forwarding mail service. This can also help with the item above. Personally, I used the post office of Mom & Dad. Every month or so they'd throw all my mail into a box & UPS it to me. If I needed something in a hurry, there was fax (ok, I guess it was a while ago...) and email.
If you plan to do this for a while, get a nice RV. If you live in rathole you will feel like a rat.
If you buy the RV new, have it prewired for generator, satellite on the roof and cable in the side. I used sat & cable both when I was on the road; cable is better, but SAT is not so bad. After you've done it a couple of times you can point the dish in about 10 minutes. I never needed a generator, so I never bought one. RV generators are not cheap, they're noisy, and the take up a lot of space.
If you need AC, get more than the vendor says you need. The folks that sell them lie. On the days you need it you will be very glad you got it. Either a roof-mounted RV unit (or two) or a window unit. You have to reinstall the window unit every time you move, but it's a lot cheaper and works just as good.
Water in Winter
Get some Raychem Frostex and heavy pipe insulation for your water hookup if you plan to Winter in a cold area. Dig out the water tap to below the frost line and run the heat trace and insulate. Buy a tankless water heater! I installed a precision temp RV-500, and believe me--a long hot shower in the middle of Winter is wonderful.
Heating in Winter
Don't get the tile floor. They crack up and are cold as hell. Do buy some good thick house slippers. I think we had "Uggs" or a knockoff like them. Thick wool sheepskin slippers. RVs floors get cold in Winter; your feet will thank you. Keep a spare furnace motor on hand. The DC motor has carbon brushes which are a wear item. Once they're go, you need a new motor. And they die when it's cold. Get the double-insulated windows, or just cut some Plexi to size and cover the windows on the inside. It makes a significant difference in the temperature and your propane bill.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Yeah, and those ^%$#@! generators will make you incredibly popular with everyone else in the campground as well. Everyone loves the asshole that come out into the middle of the woods and proceeds to run a noisy generator that completely ruins the ambiance.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Many storage unit places also have reasonably priced parking for trailers, motorhomes, and boats.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Make sure you don't get the wrong tow vehicle. My brother got a used truck. One of the previous owners had a fifth wheel installed for a horse trailer I believe. Turns out the truck was a giveaway because both the axle and tranny were dying. Both were severely underspecced for towing something as light as a horse trailer. Read the magazines and online reviews. Don't go cheap.
Second, get thee to a truck stop (or Amazon) and purchase a Rand McNally trucker's atlas. I was particularly fond of the large print one while I was driving. Don't rely on your consumer GPS. You'll want to go to the paper. If you must have GPS, get one specifically for trucks. If decent, it will route you away from roads that have corners that are too sharp and bridges that are too low. You'll also want to pick up a truckstop guide. A few years ago, that little book was about $4. Worth its weight in gold.
When fueling, if you are at a truck stop, don't get in the truckers' way. They are trying to make time and make money. They aren't on holiday. In fact, get out of the trucker lanes and go to the other side of the station. There is usually a nice diesel (your tow vehicle IS diesel, right?) pump with plenty of room to get your rig in and out of. Moving a rig like that through the car pumps is no fun (and there's often not enough overhead clearance). And pick up some loyalty cards. Every so many gallons of diesel (usually 100) you get a free shower. Not the best in the world at most places, but better than the ones at campgrounds. And if you don't ask, everyone will likely look the other way if you and the Mrs. enter at the same time. (Wear shower shoes whether at the truck stop or at the campground)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon