OUR 1ST NIGHT IN THE AIRSTREAM // #RVLife at Disney's Fort Wilderness Campground

Well, this is how we're starting our trip around the country in a lot of traffic, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start here. I'm Lauren. And I'm Daniel. For a decade, we pursued the American dream of owning our own business. After a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, our little company turned into a successful enterprise. If you're looking at us from the outside, you saw the big house, the nice cars. We had all of the cool stuff. Then in 2019, we watched a documentary on minimalism, and it changed our lives. We decided to sell everything except for the company, of course, and travel the globe. Then 2020 happened. The pandemic has exploded to well over a quarter of a million cases worldwide. Every major city in the world has American tourists trying to figure out how to get home before it becomes impossible to do so. We were in Africa when COVID-19 exploded across the globe, and we ended up having to take a U.S. rescue flight home. Needless to say, we're pretty happy to stay on American soil for a little while, but sitting still really is not our thing. We've always loved exploring locally. More than ever, our country and our small businesses need us to shop locally, and we wanted to do our part to make a difference. So we've launched a 365-day, 50-state tour to shop 100% American-made and as local as possible, and we're doing it all in an Airstream. We're all new to this RV lifestyle, but after researching ways to travel the country safely, we decided this would be the best fit for us. So we decided to go all-in on the RV life. But it's really our hope as we share our adventures with you that you'll be inspired to get out there and create memories of your own in our beautiful country. We want to inspire you to wander local too. For our very first night ever in an RV, we decided to go to Disney's Fort Wilderness. It's Labor Day weekend, a little busy, and the most popular park in the state of Florida. Craziness ensued. The camper behind us looks like it's bigger than ours, but in reality, ours is probably the same size. I mean, it's 30 feet, so I know they get bigger, but I don't think they get too much bigger. Well, we made it to Camp Fort Wilderness, or at least just outside. But the line looks like it might take us a while to actually get to our spot from here. We're keeping our fingers crossed. One of the best things about being an RV newbie is backing up your travel trailer. It causes tons of anxiety because you're going to be bad at it, and everyone is going to be watching. So since this is Daniel's first time, I think it's only fair to let him do the narrating. We're in the 1900 section of the park. It's a little tighter than I would have expected. You've got some wooden posts, and you kind of have to hook it into its spot. If you ever heard of a three-point turn, mine was probably like a 300-point turn. Come on around as hard as you can. You just watch this inside. They got you on that side. Come on around. You want to get as close as you can to this. Okay, start getting this back in around once you clear this. But one of my absolute favorite things about this day so far is that instantly I was surrounded with campers here, the campgrounds, that were helping. So within minutes, I had other campers coming. One was making sure the truck didn't jackknife, meaning hit the back end of it. Another one was checking for the wooden post. Ultimately, when I got it parked in position, people were cheering. Okay, wait a second, Daniel. Did you get it parked into position? Um, I got it partially. Yeah, you got to turn the wheel the other way. So on the maybe 30th attempt, I got it part of the way in and then some guy offered to just do it for me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't just take the... He was like, he had just done it with his own camper. I'm going with that. And he did a much better job than I did. He just backed it in with a few less turns. Technically, you didn't actually complete your first parking. If this were basketball, I would call it an assist, which is still valuable. But it's not. So I'm not sure what you call it. Yes, somebody else parked it for the first time. I don't know what to say about it. Just, it just happened like that. It would have taken me all night. I chickened out. But I'm going to get it on the next go around. After our very gracious neighbor expertly parked our Airstream, now it was about how we hook this thing up and turn on the AC. We have no idea what we're doing here. So I've got the 50 amp plugged in here and it's going over to that breaker box. It looks like the breaker's flipped off, so I'll probably have to flip it on before I power it up. Put the water hook up here. This is the clean water. So what we did was we got a bright blue hose to match the blue sticker on here. I don't know if you can see that, but city water inlet. So we just got a bright blue hose so we would never mix them up. So hooking up the water. Um, we forgot to get some coaxial cable. Let's see the cable hook up here. So we'll have to remember that for the next trip. So we can connect the cable for one or two that would connect to the TVs. Also labeling the keys would be good. There's just too many. So maybe like something to label them would be really good. It's our very first night camping. We had a whole plan. We were going to go to the lodge. It's only like a mile away. We were just going to walk. But now that we've actually made it and the air conditioner is running and it feels amazing in here. Oh, we decided we'd just do frozen vegan mac and cheese. Yay to our first camping night. Vegan mac and cheese. It's really good. We've got everything plugged in now. We've got the water hose running to the freshwater tank. This tells us, we've learned, that this means that the shore power is hooked up. Over here to the left. I can see that our gray water tank is empty because we had it empty before we left. I can see the wastewater, which is also called the black tank, is empty as well. We've got the freshwater tank currently at 42.5 percent. We're safe. We made it. Turn up some music here. There you go. We've got music. We've got lights. It's gonna be a good night. All is well. All is well with the world. After an exhausting day of feeling like fish out of water, we crashed. Best sleep ever. So the next morning, we got up and off to Georgia we go. Overall, it was a pretty successful first evening in the Airstream. We have so got this.