How Do You Spend Holidays On The Road When You’re RVing?

by Karen

Christmas, Food And Cooking, Halloween, Holidays On The Road, Relatives And Visitors, Thanksgiving

A subject that often comes up when I am talking to people about my full-time RV lifestyle is:

What do you do for the holidays? Don’t you miss spending holidays with your family?

Cruising the Natchez Trace Parkway in a motorhome

For us, the answer is “Yes”… and “No”.

Yes — because we do miss our family. But we’d miss our children no matter what time of year or where we are.

No — because even if we still lived in a house, we wouldn’t see them every holiday every year anyway.

Going to visit relatives? Here are 6 things to think about before you take the RV.

 

Visiting Relatives When You RV Fulltime

We have one son who is career military.  He’s been gone far away for 14 years and is currently living in Maryland.  One daughter lives in Virginia, two live in Georgia, and one granddaughter lives in Seattle.

We try to get together as a family as often as possible. 

Usually, we meet up somewhere — in Texas, in California at the beach, or at a cabin in the north Georgia mountains.

But most holidays are spent far from family members.

 

RV Christmas Holidays

We’ve spent a couple of Christmases having dinner with 400 other guests of a large RV resort. Each couple brings a side dish, and the resort furnishes the turkey and ham.

Christmas dinner at an RV resort is a great way for fulltime RVers to enjoy the holidays together

At the RV resort we were at, you were assigned to a table for 12 people — with one person designated as the “hostess” for that table.

All the women met a week before the day of the meal and planned the menu and what they were going to bring. On Christmas day, we gathered in the dining room to eat together and sing Christmas carols.

 

RV Thanksgiving Meals

On Thanksgiving, I usually cook a large chicken and some dressing, along with a couple of side dishes.

I invite other people who are camping in whatever RV park we are in to join us for Thanksgiving dinner.  I especially like to invite camp host volunteers to our holiday meals.

Inviting fellow RVers to join us for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at the RV park.

Sometimes, one or two of our children come to visit if we happen to be close enough to them — and if they have the time off from work.

 

RV Easter Holiday Fun

My most memorable holiday as an RVer so far was when Jim and I were working in south Texas at a large resort.

We had several Hispanic guys working for us in maintenance. One of them invited us to spend Easter with his family at a local park. We enjoyed grilling fajitas on the barbecue grill, dancing to lively Mexican music, cracking cascarones filled with confetti or flour over each other’s heads, and watching the children break open the Easter bunny piñata.

Little girl at Easter picnic hitting the Easter bunny pinata

This year for Easter, we were working at a Georgia state park as volunteer camp hosts.

We spent the Saturday morning before Easter hiding 700 Easter eggs, and helping clean up the area after the festivities were over. On Sunday, we worked in the camp store, then went to the restaurant at the lodge for a buffet lunch with the other camp hosts. In the afternoon, each of our children called us to wish us a Happy Easter.

 

The Bottom Line

So yes, we really do have fun and happy holidays on the road — in an RV!

Now that I’ve shared some of the things we do to make the holidays special when we’re traveling in our RV, you might be interested in seeing what other RVers do over the holidays. Here are some other great ideas for spending the holidays in your RV: