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What’s in Our Camera Bag?

2 weeks agoAdd comment

The number one question we have always gotten as photographers is “what kind of gear do you use?” Well, here’s a quick peek at what’s in our travel camera bag! Light and versatile is the name of the game when traveling as a photographer, and these tried and true...

Welcome to our Blog!

3 weeks agoAdd comment

Hello! We are the Pope family and we are so glad that you’re here. 3 years ago we realized that we were in need of a reset of sorts. We were working all the time and missing precious moments with our kids. We wanted to travel more and connect more deeply as a family and that’s when...

RV Tour

May 10, 2021Add comment

Hi! We’re The Popes, a family of 4 that travels the USA in our home on wheels. We’ve been traveling nomads for over two years and are excited to share our journey with you! Today we’d like to give you a tour of our Grand Design Reflection 311BHS fifth wheel, and share...

We are the Popes!  In 2019 we decided our lives were getting a little too busy and hectic, so we sold everything to buy an RV and travel the country full time. Join us on our journey to simplify our lives, slow the heck down, and explore the beautiful sights this country has to offer.

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  • 32 States Visited
  • 38 k Miles traveled
  • 910 Days traveling
  • 72 Disc Golf Courses
We recently had the pleasure of hosting my mom at our home on wheels. She surprised the boys and they were so thrilled to have her, as was I. It was a wonderful two weeks full of adventures, everyday activities like a school, chores and work, and a few moves thrown in there as well. But we could have been sitting in the ugliest of campgrounds and it wouldn’t have matters - the gift of her presence was enough. I’m thankful that she is such a strong role in both of our boys’ lives, and of course, I’m so thankful that she is my mom. ❤️ Happy Mother’s Day @barbsuesnyder - we love you!
We’re often asked how we find photoshoot locations. I like to say they find us as we explore and get to know an area. We found the spot for our recent shoot while walking the beach at sunrise at Bahia Honda state park. And while Aniko @place_ofmy_taste and I both had our hearts set on making our sessions happen at low tide so we’d get rocks and sand like this, it was just as beautiful when we went at high tide. I mean, you can’t go wrong with this scene. 😍 Have you been to the Keys? If not, you must come! And when you do, put @bahiahondastatepark at the top of your places to visit. It’s always a highlight for our family.
Benji and I have a special tradition of waking up for sunrise together. He’s always been a morning person, me not so much but I’m learning to love it. On this particular morning, I was exhausted and didn’t want to get up. But he said, “mom, we only have a few days left at Sunshine so we need to go now.” I knew he was right, so I threw on a dress (usually I just put on exercise shorts) and we walked out to the beach. He doesn’t love the salt water, so he asked me to carry him. My friend Kelly just so happened to be out there too, so I asked if she would snap a photo. But I never expected THIS. What a blessing to receive such a beautiful memory, perfectly framed and without Benji sticking his tongue out. Lol. Thank you so much my dear friend @roadrabers and to God for the amazing memories we are creating with our kids on a daily basis. We are so blessed. #rvlife #rvfamilylife #fulltimerv #floridakeyslife #sunrise #traveltheusa #travelfamily #letthembelittle #raisinglittles #bethankful #agratefulheart #rvlivingfulltimewithkids #sunshinekey #sunshinekeyrvresort #floridakeys #floridalife
raw. authentic. perfectly imperfect. sunset in key west with friends. we love you and your beautiful children @livingsmalldreamingbig Photo by #travelingphotographers @thepopesphotographers
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! I hope your day was full of love and celebration. Squeeze those people that you love, and create beautiful memories together. ❤️ ~ the Popes
We are so excited to jump into answering your questions, starting with how we plan our routes! This country is huge and there are so many incredible places to visit - it can be hard to decide where to start. One of the best pieces of advice our friends @crazyfamilyadventure gave us when we first started RVing was that the sooner we became ok with missing things, the more we would enjoy our travels. And that has 100% proven to be true! We have missed a ton of things (like the Grand Canyon!), but we have fully experienced the places that we HAVE visited and wouldn’t want it any other way. There are two tools we cannot live without when it comes to planning our travels. The first is google maps. Whenever we hear about a cool place or see a social media post that piques our interest, we immediately open up our map and save it. We have separate tags for each of the different categories - camping spots, national parks & attractions, and all the friends & family we want to see along the way. We plan our routes in 4-5 month segments, so after we take into consideration any commitments on our calendar, we look at the clusters on our map and decide which part of the country we’d like to explore next. Then we open up tool #2, the @roadtrippers app, and start mapping out our route. We enter our starting and ending points, then plug in the key locations and people on our “need to visit” list. After that, we use the “search & explore” feature in Roadtrippers to find additional parks/attractions and campgrounds along the way. You can filter by outdoor recreation, amusement parks, lodging, restaurants, RV services and more. We have found some of the coolest spots this way, and have even re-routed our travels as a result of a new find through the app! A few screenshots from last spring/summer’s route are at the end of this post so you can see what it looks like, and if you want to give the program a try for yourself, you can follow the link in our profile and use the code BTR5QTP for $5 off. :) We hope this is helpful to you! As always, if you have any questions, or want to share another useful tip, we’d love to chat in the comments below.
Hey everybody! It’s been a while since our last introductory post and there are lots of new faces around here, so we wanted to say hello! :) We are the Popes - an adventurous family from Seattle that has been exploring the USA in our home on wheels for the past two years. Airika & Gerald (a.k.a. Mom & Dad) are professional photographers and business/life coaches, and Asher & Benji, are adventurous brothers who keep us on our toes 24/7. We love slow travel, where you stay long enough to experience a slice of life as a local, and we love sharing our favorite spots and tips for Rv travel with kids. We also love exploring off-the-beaten path places, which we do by playing disc golf, biking and talking to the locals. It’s in these places that we usually have our best experiences and capture our most unexpected photos. Last summer, we created an e-book for taking better photos with your phone, and we are now working on expanding that into an online course. We are passionate about families getting outside and adventuring life together, while capturing it in a beautiful and true-to-life way! Thank you for following along, and please let us know what kind of content you are most interested in receiving from us in the comments below!
I originally only posted this to Facebook, but then realized you guys need to see both the pretty and messy of this journey. So I’m sharing here as well… November 19, 2021 - I had planned to write a really thoughtful and heartwarming post celebrating our TWO YEAR nomadiversary, but as chance would have it, we were scheduled to have our first breakdown as full time RVers! As I told some newbs, it’s just a matter of time before it happens to all of us. I mean, we are pulling our house behind us on freeways and rugged public lands! 😆 I’m so thankful to the man who flagged us down on the freeway to let us know our wheel/brake was smoking, because even though we have a tire pressure monitoring system, it didn’t go off. I’m thankful for the police officer who came to escort us slowly off the freeway with only 3 tires on our trailer. I’m thankful to the guys at the small town RV shop who stayed after hours to help us get all the parts we needed, including packing bearings for us! And I’m especially thankful for the fulltime RV community who jumped in with offers to help, including Troy (standing beside me in the group photo earlier that day) who came and helped Gerald replace our bearings, brake and tire. And finally, to the One who sent us the reminder of his protection and provision in the form of a stunning sunset outside our truck window. 🙏🏻 Honestly, I can’t think of a more fitting way to usher in our 3rd year of fulltime travel. Humbled, loved, safe, and surrounded by family and friends who love us. ❤️ This is a beautiful life. P.S. Don’t forget to repack your bearings!
It‘s funny - I used to think that building a successful business that supported our family and enabled us to buy a home in Seattle was the greatest achievement of my life. And then we had kids. 🙃 I know that some moms were “meant for this,” but if I’m being honest, parenthood has been a huge challenge for me. I think it has to do with all the unknowns - as a big-picture strategist, I’ve always been able to start from the end and work backwards, achieving my goals one little step (or leap!) at a time. But with parenting, all bets are off - just when you think you’ve figured it out, a totally different kid comes or one hits a new life stage and they debunk everything you thought you knew! So in order to keep myself sane (and have a sense of accomplishment), I decided that I needed to pick my core values and order our family & work life around them. One of the main things I hope to instill in these two is that they are a GIFT to each other and that they need to treasure and nurture that relationship. But at an age where fighting can break out over a broken crayon or the color of a cup, it feels easier said than done. So we intentionally plan activities where they have to work together and use each other’s strengths in in order to achieve a greater task. In this case, it was filling a giant box with apples and pears. 😆 Challenge accepted. We had heard about the Hood River Fruit Loop from some fellow RVers, so when I saw that Mt. View Orchard was a mere 10 minute detour from our route, I knew we HAD to go! The boys had a blast climbing trees and ladders and using the apple picker to fill our box with fruit. They also loved pulling the wagon around, playing in the fields and weighing their fruit at the end. And they worked so well together - just look at those smiles! Icing on the cake is that the fruit was just $1 a pound, so our fun little family-building excursion cost us a whopping $12! Now that’s what I call a “fruitful” day. 🤪🤣😘 Tell me - what are some of your family priorities and how do you intentionally pursue them in your everyday life?