Feature
Close Quarters
Ten years, three kids and 110,000 miles—for the Elhard Family,
home is where you park it.
- Kate McDonald
- Fred Lopez
What is the American dream? Typically, the answer involves a house, a white picket fence, maybe a couple of kids, and a dog. But what if the new American dream means ditching the fence to live wherever you want, whenever you want—in an RV?
More than a million Americans live in RVs full time, and the Elhard Family is five of them.
Once owners of a 2,700-square-foot house in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and a 3,900 square foot studio, Jon Elhard worked as a photographer and his wife Denise managed the business. The couple worked long hours, including evenings and weekends. Time for family adventure and exploration was minimal at best.
However, life took a sharp turn in 2011 when Jon returned home from a trip to Washington, DC, with a big, bullseye-shaped rash and multiple sclerosis-like symptoms.Extreme fatigue, muscle spasms, numbness, headaches. “The doctors were stumped,” Jon recalls. “They hadn’t seen anything like it, and so I got labeled with MS even though we all knew that wasn’t the case.”
Turns out, Jon had contracted Lyme disease; the effects of which he lives with to this day. “Back in 2011, that wasn’t a common diagnosis, and it’s often confused with MS. Either way, 2011 and 2012 were really hard years. Denise and I started to have long conversations about how long I had—what if I got worse? And so we decided to make the best of it while we could, and started planning a once-in-a-lifetime, six-month trip across America with the kids.”
“It was always our dream to travel in the US, to see the national parks, the American West, and spend some time in Florida. Not many people have the luxury of taking six months off, but with a seasonal photography business, in Canada no less, it wasn’t hard to hit the road in the fall and travel through the winter. Plus, we were already homeschooling Aimee and Jake, so that wasn’t an issue. So we bought a truck and a used 30-foot long, 250-square-foot travel trailer, and just made it happen,” Jon says.
Denise researched for months and had every little stop lined up. “She was the brains of the operation, finding campgrounds for us to stay and things for us to explore,” Jon says. “I’d like to say I was the muscle, but really I was the driver. I knew certain things we wanted to do with the kids, and I was the one to figure out how long it would take us to drive between stops. But really, we had no idea what we were doing. We just went for it and figured it out on the road.”
And figure it out they did. That first year, the Elhards visited 27 states, 40 different campgrounds, and countless national treasures.
“I joke all the time that my kids have forgotten more about US history and national parks than most kids learn in the first place,” says Denise. “Every place we visit had some kind of significance to their studies and learning. Aimee and I were obsessed with Little House on the Prairie, and we actually traveled most of the route that the Ingalls family took in their books. Zion, the Grand Canyon, the Black Hills, Joshua Tree. The Oregon Coast, Stone Mountain in Georgia, New Orleans, Great Sand Dunes National Park in Alamogordo, the Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, The River Walk in San Antonio. I mean, seeing the Alamo in person is so much better than reading about it in a book, right?”
The ability to weave homeschooling lessons with real life adventures is one of the most widely appreciated aspects of the Elhard’s RV lifestyle. Conversations with them are punctuated with vast experiences in both well-known and lesser known destinations.
Now, 10 years later, the family has traveled more than 110,000 miles, seen 41 states and five provinces, and even added a third child, Coulson, to the mix, without a single regret. “We’re just an average family living an extra-ordinary life. It was the best decision we ever made.”
Tiny Living, Big Life
The common belief about campers is that they are pretty cramped with not much space or storage, so how would you possibly fit all your things in it? And with three children?! Many of us think it would be impossible.
But one look inside the Elhards’ Forest River Sierra 410-square -foot fifth wheel (purchased in 2015) proves there’s a lot more space than you might imagine. Eighteen windows flood the space with natural light. There’s a full-size kitchen with a residential refrigerator, a master suite with a king-size bed that lifts up for storage, a washer-dryer, a second private room, two bathrooms, a “treehouse” loft the kids use as an extra bedroom, and the great outdoors as your front porch.
“The whole point of the RV lifestyle is to be outside. This is really our living room,” says Denise, gesturing around her as she curls up comfortably on an all-weather cushioned sofa under a canopy. This “outdoor lanai” has seating for eight, with plenty of room for friends to pull up their own foldable camp chairs. Nearby, an oversized tent houses an outdoor dining table, which doubles as a space for games, art projects, and plenty of room for Coulson’s Legos.
All of which gets packed up and conveniently stored in the basement—the large storage area underneath the RV’s floor, accessible from outside storage doors.
Jon and Denise speak with ease about living with less. Then again, they’re well-practiced after 10 years of road life. But the early years were a little more challenging.
“After two six-month trips in the travel trailer, upgrading to this RV felt like we were in a mansion!” Denise laughs. “But it was also then that we decided to sell our house and make RV living a full-time endeavor. Downsizing from the 2,700 square foot house into an RV … now that was challenging!”
Working in their favor was the 180-day maximum they were allowed to be in the US as Canadian citizens. Even though they sold the house, the furniture, and most of the big items, they were able to store smaller items — clothes, keepsakes, tools, and such — with friends and family. Each time they came back to Canada, they were able to let go of more things. Life on the road was teaching them what they truly needed.
Turns out, that was less about clothes and appliances and more about friends and experiences.
“You can meet families on the road and eat meals with them, and enjoy Coffee Talk and make friendships in three hours that are lifelong, and deep,” says Jon.
“There’s a core group of families that we’ve been friends with since that second trip in 2014,” adds Denise. “We meet up every year, sometimes in the same locations, sometimes with others. They’ve really become our road family. We obviously enjoy seeing our Canadian family when we visit, but there’s something about the bond you make with fellow RVers. It’s irreplaceable.”
These days, many of the Elhards’ core friends have traded full-time RV life for homes and acreage. “We’re one of the last of our group to still be doing this full-time,” says Jon. “But we’re all still connected. It’s part of the reason we live here, in Winter Garden. We have friends with homes in Windermere and Stoneybrook West. Three other families have settled in South Carolina, so we spend a lot of time there. And there’s a couple in Benson,Arizona,outside of Tuscon, we call them Road Grandparents because our kids have known them for most of their life.”
Yet while other families have chosen to expand their square footage, the Elhards still love the freedom of their RV life. Only now, they call Winter Garden home, and spend most of their time living at the Encore RV Resort off State Road 50.
“Florida was always a place where we knew we wanted to be,” explains Jon.
“Even during our very first trip, we spent three of our six months in Florida, knowing that someday we wanted to make it our home,” adds Denise. “It took almost a decade to come to fruition, but we did it.”
And for the first time during all those years on the road the Elhards are able to stay year-round thanks to a growing Creative Cartz golf cart business that they started with friends in Fort Myers in 2021, using a two-year small business work Visa. When Hurricane Ian decimated the area in 2022 their partners were hit with significant family challenges, and job opportunities that changed the business structure. This gave Jon and Denise the opportunity to bring the business elsewhere, so they officially moved to Winter Garden and started fresh. Jon and Denise have applied to extend that visa and if granted will be able to live in the US full-time for five more years.
“It’s a very stressful process,” Denise shares. With no guaranteed outcome, their business and the proverbial home they have built for their family is on the line.
“And yet, there’s no place we’d rather be,” Jon says. “Winter Garden has the best of everything—big city conveniences, small town friendliness, a community of close friends nearby, and the weather. I mean, we’re Canadians. We know snow. And this is so much better,” he laughs. “Winter Garden, and these 410-square-feet, it’s home and we absolutely love it”.
