We have a new address! It's 191 Rainbow Dr #9128, Livingston Texas. If you put this in your GPS to come visit us however, we won't be there. In fact, you won't even find a house. It's a mail forwarding center and the headquarters of Escapees RV Club.
If you travel full-time in an RV, where do you live? It's something most folks don't even consider until you ask that question. Usually they stop, think for a minute, and slowly say "Oh." In today's society, we need a permanent address. We need it to have a vehicle, a bank account, a credit card. Some full-timers just use a relative or friend's house who is willing to handle their mail and "rent" them a room, but that's not always feasible. So what do you do?
There are only a handful of states that allow full-time RVers to call their states home when we don't really live there. A mail-forwarding service, such as Escapees, will set you up with a physical address in one of those states and handle your mail by saving it and sending it to you wherever and whenever you want it. Of those handful of states that allow RVers, three of them appeal to most because they have no state income tax. I mean, why pay tax in a state you don't really live in anyway if you don't have to? So it usually comes down to a choice between Florida, Texas and South Dakota. To choose you have to look at things like the cost of vehicle insurance and health insurance. For us health insurance isn't an issue. Being a retired Federal employee, my insurance is available and coverage is the same in any state. Florida is good for people who frequent Disney World and take advantage of the Florida resident discounts, but their vehicle insurance is much higher. We're not Disney people, so for us it came down to a choice between South Dakota and Texas. Texas won mostly because, well, we're here. And we're more likely to be closer to Texas year-round than South Dakota if we need to make a trip "home" for something. And, I've really grown to like Texas while we've been here! But more on that later.
I actually didn't expect to be able to change our domicile yet. Since the house hasn't sold, I thought that we were required to be Iowa residents as long as we owned it. So when I went into Escapees Monday to sign up for their mail service and casually asked about becoming Texas residents, I was really surprised when she said we could. And even further surprised that by the end of the day it was a done deal. A quick vehicle inspection came first, followed by a trip to the tax office to register Weepy, and then the driver's license office. They process a lot of RVers here in Livingston since this is Escapees headquarters and it really shows! As long as you have all the paperwork they need, it's a very fast process.
Being Texan is going to take some getting used to. I've lived in Iowa, North Carolina and Florida as well, but this is different. When you physically move to another state, you are finding a house, connecting utilities, getting to know the area... you know you've actually moved. But this time nothing has really changed for us. We're parked here at Lake Livingston State Park, and one day we're Iowans, and then a few hours later we're still at the same park but now we're Texans. I guess if we weren't officially full-timing when we left Iowa six weeks ago, we are now!
Lake Livingston State Park is beautiful. It is completely different here from where we started at Palo Duro Canyon. From desert to pine forest, all without leaving the state.
