Zooming from her camper in Milwaukee, Jessica McCorkle told me about her daughter and how she’d been very sick for five years. After going to several doctors for three years as she got progressively worse, Addison, who’s 15 now, was diagnosed with pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. It was triggered by a prior mono infection. McCorkle says her daughter went from a happy child to a completely different person overnight.
“I had my daughter, and then I didn’t have my daughter, like mentally she was not there,” McCorkle said, trying to hold back tears. “You could see it in her eyes that she was still in there somewhere.”
Once Addison was diagnosed, she went through nearly two years of intravenous immunoglobulin treatments, before their doctor told them she was in remission. That night, McCorkle remembers coming home crying to her husband, questioning their lives.
“I looked at him, and I was like, we just need a reset,” McCorkle said.
McCorkle and her husband, who’s a stepfather to her three kids, were both in their mid-thirties and worked long hours. She owned her own business selling natural cleaning supplies and felt like she barely saw her kids. They decided to get a camper and take a trip for a couple of months—a reset from life, as McCorkle put it. That trip out to the West Coast, beginning with Albuquerque, evolved into their new lifestyle: living in an RV and traveling across the country, homeschooling their three kids. That trip they took before realizing they’d like to do this longer term became a sort of trial run.
“We didn’t really know that it was a trial run,” McCorkle said, as her husband, Dub, sitting beside her, said with a laugh, “We didn’t plan to live in a camper.”
But they found a whole group of other families that lived in their campers, traveling full-time, and it felt like a community. The entire trip, McCorkle said, was an emotional experience for their family. They went back home and sold their home in South Carolina. That was around the end of 2020, and they’re still going and have no plans to stop.
Stopped in Milwaukee for medical appointments, McCorkle said this particular stop wasn’t as fun as their usual travels. But they’re headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and then to Indiana to run some cross-country errands, as McCorkle put it, before meeting up with friends in Massachusetts in June. Their 47-foot fifth wheel, and home, is their third camper. They knocked down a wall that separated two loft areas to make it one big living space, took out one of the two showers for more storage room, and built cabinets for the garage—quite an upgrade from their first camper that cost them $36,000. McCorkle calls it a “bougie camper.”
They’ve made it to their 30th state and are in their third year of their cross-country tour. Aside from loving the big cities like New York, where they camped right on the Hudson River and hopped on the subway to get to the city, McCorkle said southern Utah has been her favorite spot yet. The national parks and beautiful views everywhere you look seemed to have made it a simple choice for her.
You’d think that she and her husband would be the outdoorsy type considering their lifestyle, but neither of them grew up camping. McCorkle said she’d only been in a camper once before, in elementary school. So it hasn’t always been easy. When her family started traveling, living out of their camper, McCorkle said she didn’t know how to do nothing. She remembers sitting on the couch one night, when all the kids were asleep, thinking that she couldn’t do this. The next day she went to Walmart and bought yarn and crochet hooks. By the end of that day McCorkle crocheted winter hats for the whole family—granted it was summer at the time—but it gave her something to do.
“There’s definitely ups and downs, and it’s not perfect,” McCorkle said. “It’s not like going to national parks every single day. We still have a regular life, we still have to work…But I can say that we are definitely more intentional with our life now.”
When she says intentional, McCorkle explained that she thinks of it as not being stuck in a rut, having the same routine, and not living for each day. That’s changed for her, but it was hard to adjust, particularly to not being with family. It’s become almost a tradition for them to meet their extended family in Florida every winter, like a makeshift home base for them. But despite initially thinking that they’d be lonely living on the road, they’ve found themselves rolling with a community of families living the same way.
“Nobody’s running their lives ragged, and I cannot have wrapped my head around how this works until we were like in it. But we travel together,” McCorkle said, stressing how important friendship is to her and how she didn’t want her kids to miss out on that since they’re homeschooled and constantly on the move.
Aside from finding a community, they’ve also built one, with more than 2 million followers on TikTok alone. McCorkle and her family are known as the family of nomads on social media. Her goal was to simply show people their lifestyle and essentially encourage them to think outside the box in terms of how they live. After posting one of her first videos, it went viral. People had questions, and they continue to have questions, so she keeps posting clips to answer them—now it’s her family’s main source of income.
When asked if there’s been any moments where they doubted their decision, McCorkle’s husband laughed and said, when it got down to the thirties in Phoenix. But then she pointed to a singular moment where she said she knew they’d made the right decision, selling their home, packing up, and living in an RV indefinitely. McCorkle and her family were at a state park in Tennessee and they were all just outside hanging around, but she said she felt so much peace.
“We were able to just really fully be in the moment,” McCorkle said. “And so many of life's stressors go away…when you remove yourself from the hectic lifestyle that society tells you that you’re supposed to have.”
They were all busy, McCorkle said, even her middle daughter who was involved in so many activities that she loved, but at the end of the day would come home crying because she felt like she never saw her family. McCorkle said it was as if she didn’t realize how much time it takes to think and manage everything that comes with living a traditional life.
“We just were sitting outside, and we didn't have anything on our to-do list,” McCorkel said, her voice cracking slightly. “Like before we started traveling, we had to-do lists that never got finished. We just were sitting outside with no to-do list that was looming over us, and we were just enjoying our family.”
