Last Updated: May 2026
Twenty-five years. Seven homes spread across San Diego County — downtown, the beach, a golf course community, and finally rural Rancho Santa Fe, where we grew Zinfandel grapes and made wine in the backyard for a decade. We loved all of it. And in January 2017, we sold or gave away almost everything we owned, staged the house, and drove east toward Florida to start a life we’d been thinking about for years. This is where the blog really begins.
Rancho Santa Fe
It’s astonishing how much you can accumulate over 25 years without ever noticing it happening. When we started going through the house seriously, we found three chainsaws — one on a telescoping pole — and we lived in a city. We had garden equipment for a property we were leaving, wine-making gear for a hobby we were walking away from, and furniture for rooms that didn’t exist in a motorhome. All of it went on Craigslist or out to the curb, which was its own adventure in a gated community in Rancho Santa Fe. We limited ourselves to a few pallets of possessions. Even that felt like too much once we actually started living in the RV.
Ten Years of Wine
The vineyard was something we’d built from scratch over a decade — Zinfandel vines, a small crush pad, barrels in the garage, the whole operation. Wine at that level of involvement teaches you things you never expected to care about: the difference between what brix number you pick at and how that ripeness shows up in the bottle years later, how much a single decision about extended maceration or malolactic fermentation shapes the character of the finished wine, what it actually smells like inside a barrel at different stages of aging. In the last couple of years it was genuinely drinkable. The labels in the photo below represent only a fraction of what we actually made.
What we gained beyond the wine itself was access to a community. People in the wine industry are almost universally generous with their knowledge and their glasses, and the friendships we made in the San Diego wine world were some of the best of our time there.
Before we left, we paid a visit to our friends Joey, Mark, and Lynn at Domaine Artefact in Escondido — a winery we’d watched grow from a small operation into something genuinely exciting. We dropped off equipment and spent an afternoon watching Joey rack wine and clean barrels. A good way to close that chapter.
Last Days in San Diego
Our longtime friend Dan invited us to the opening of MotoDeli in Encinitas — a joint venture he and partners launched after building a successful food truck and catering business. Good food, great people, and a proper send-off. We were glad to be there for the opening night.
We cleaned out the house, had it staged, made repairs, had it repainted, and arranged for a moving company to pick up the four pallets of possessions we were keeping. The moving company no-showed on the scheduled day, then again, then again — it took six days before they finally came for our things. We had to start driving to Florida without knowing the stuff had been loaded. Our friends Toni and John stayed behind to make sure it actually happened. We owe them considerably more than we’ve ever properly acknowledged.
The Drive to Florida
We planned the drive as a seven-day trip across 2,500 miles — a reasonable pace that let us make a few stops along the way rather than just covering ground. Jake was in his element from the first day: new smells at every rest stop, squirrels in every rest area, completely untroubled by the fact that we were leaving everything behind.
The first detour was The Thing in Dragoon, Arizona — a roadside attraction that has been luring drivers off I-10 for decades with billboard teasers starting roughly 200 miles out. For one dollar you walk through a series of old buildings to discover what The Thing actually is. We are not going to tell you. It’s absolutely worth the dollar.
We stopped in San Antonio to walk the Riverwalk — a genuinely beautiful urban canal lined with restaurants and old stone architecture — then pushed on through Texas and Louisiana. Bourbon Street in New Orleans was a brief evening stop, long enough to remind us why we both love and will never live in New Orleans. Jake found it overwhelming and fascinating in equal measure.
Finally, Florida
Seven days after leaving Rancho Santa Fe, we pulled into Fort Myers. The first proper meal was stone crabs on Captiva Island. After 2,500 miles of driving through the winter Southwest, sitting at a waterfront table in southwest Florida eating stone crabs felt like exactly the right reward for the chaos of the preceding weeks. Year one on the road had officially started.
Practical Tips
The San Diego to Fort Myers drive: We ran I-10 east from San Diego through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, then cut south toward the Gulf Coast. Seven days is a comfortable pace — roughly 350 miles per day — with time for a stop or two each day. In a large motorhome, plan fuel stops every 200–250 miles in the Southwest where stations can be far apart. Texas alone is 870 miles across on I-10.
The Thing, Dragoon, Arizona: Exit 322 off I-10. Open daily. One dollar admission. Bring cash. Don’t look it up first — the billboards starting 200 miles out are part of the experience and the reveal is better without spoilers.
San Antonio Riverwalk: The Riverwalk is free to walk and well worth an evening stop on a cross-country drive. Parking for large vehicles is limited in the immediate downtown area — we parked in a commercial lot several blocks away and walked in. Restaurant quality varies considerably; walk past the tourist-facing terraces and look for spots a block or two off the main canal.
Downsizing for full-time RV life: The conventional advice is to cut more aggressively than you think you need to. We limited ourselves to a few pallets and it was still too much. The items that feel essential when you’re packing feel like ballast after three months on the road. If you’re on the fence about something, sell it. Storage lockers are money spent preserving the decision not to decide.
Domicile: We established South Dakota as our domicile — see our Sioux Falls post for the full details on the process, what you need to bring, and how the DMV visit works for full-time RVers.
