Carson Mansion, Eureka, California
One of the places that stayed with me on the road.
How Full-Time RV Travel Influences My Writing
Over a decade of traveling across North America in an RV has changed the way I see the world—and the way I write about it.
When you live on the road full-time with your wife, the landscape stops being background. It becomes a character. You notice the way light falls differently in the high desert than it does in the Pacific Northwest. You feel how silence sits heavier in an old mining town than it does outside a busy national park. You learn that every place has its own rhythm, its own secrets, and its own way of holding history.
That awareness shapes every setting in my novels.
In The Hidden Cipher, The Black Chalice, and Babel the locations aren’t just places the characters pass through. They’re chosen with care—cathedrals that still feel watched, archives that hold more silence than documents, cities that carry centuries of unfinished business. Spending years moving through real landscapes taught me that atmosphere is never generic. A rainy alley in one city feels different from a rainy alley in another. The difference is in the details you only notice when you’re not just visiting, but living there for a while.
Travel has also taught me something important about people. When you’re constantly moving, you meet people at temporary intersections—campgrounds, diners, trailheads, small-town libraries. You see how strangers can become allies for a day, and how trust is often given carefully, in pieces. That same dynamic runs through Elena, Antoine, and Liam. They don’t start as a perfect team. They become one the hard way, the same way real people do when circumstances force them together.
Living full-time on the road also forces a certain kind of honesty. You learn what you actually need versus what you thought you needed. You learn how quickly plans change. You learn that the most interesting stories often happen in the spaces between destinations. That mindset—paying attention to the in-between moments—has influenced how I structure tension in the books. Not every scene needs to be a chase or a revelation. Sometimes the quietest moments carry the most weight.
The practical side of life on the road has shaped my writing, too. Years of traveling in an RV have taught me that enjoying the journey means understanding how to navigate it—whether that means finding a quiet place to spend the night, preparing for the unexpected, or simply knowing how to stay safe when you’re far from home. Some of those lessons eventually found their way into my nonfiction books, including Boondocking in the U.S. and Secure on the Road: How to Stay Safe in Your Motorhome.
I never set out to write “travel-inspired” fiction. But after more than ten years of waking up in different places, it’s impossible to separate the journey from the stories. The road keeps teaching me that history isn’t only found in books and museums. Sometimes it’s still out there, waiting in the silence of an unfamiliar place.
And that’s the feeling I try to put on the page.