As many of you already know, I live in a campervan and travel around the country, posting diaries of places I visit. When I started my travels almost four years ago, I ran a diary series explaining how everything was set up. I am now re-running it, since some of my methods have changed and the diaries have been expanded and updated.
Before you can set off on your cross-country journey, there are some bureaucratic paperwork issues you will need to deal with. Since you will be living on the road with no fixed address, your first hurdle is what to do about receiving mail, and what address you will use for your drivers license, vehicle registration, and insurance.
The simplest solution is to keep your house, apartment, or mobile home lot, live there part of the year, and live on the road for the rest of the year. That is what most “snowbirds” (people who live up north in the summer and then move south to Florida or Arizona for the winter) do. With this option, you can register all the paperwork for the van at your home, and forward your mail during the months you aren’t there.
If, however, you will be living on the road fulltime, without any apartment or house anywhere, you will need to be creative. Things just got a lot harder for us.
It used to be that fulltime van or RV dwellers could register all their paperwork at a maildrop. This is simply a place that would receive all your mail and then forward it to you wherever you happen to be. Most UPS and Fedex stores, and the US Post Office, offer rented mailboxes with an associated street address. These are often used by small businesses that don’t have a building of their own. A few commercial mail companies offer mail drop services. It was possible to use a mail drop address as your legal street address for registering a vehicle, getting a drivers license, even voting.
Now in the post-9-11 world, however, the Feds have cracked down on this, and it is no longer as simple as it once was. In 2005, the US passed the Real ID Act, which sets Federal standards for all states issuing drivers licenses and other identification cards. Every state has to be Real-ID-compliant by 2020. Of particular relevance to van-dwellers are the standards for demonstrating residency. The Act does not specify particular steps, but requires a certain minimum standard of security for people who apply for state drivers licenses, including verification of residency. As a result, all states now require proof of a physical residence before they will issue a drivers license, which usually includes a requirement for two methods of demonstrating residency (such as utility bills), and states will now not accept a Post Office or mail drop address.
Some states, such as South Dakota and Nevada, still allow applicants to establish residency by using the address of an RV park or motel. So, fulltime van dwellers can stay in an RV park for the required 30 days to establish state residency, use the receipt for this to register to vote, then use both your rent receipt and your voter ID to obtain a drivers license and register your van in that state.
A few mail services get around the Real ID requirements in another way: they have an attached RV lot and actually rent you a spot. That serves as a legal street address, and you can even go there and spend the summer if you want.
But it seems likely that the Feds will crack down on all of this and make it more difficult. I suspect that it will simply become impossible in the future to get a drivers license or register a motor vehicle without a physical address. So nearly all of us now use a friend or relative’s address as our legal address. Legally, I live with my sister in Pennsylvania. That means I have to be in PA each July to do all the inspections on the van.
You may also want to obtain a US Passport, which you will need if you want to visit Mexico or Canada (or drive through Canada to get to Alaska). Most cities handle passports at one of the local post office branches. You will need to fill out some forms and provide some paperwork (your birth certificate, your drivers license, or a previous passport), then get a passport photo taken. It can take several months for the State Department to process your application, so allow yourself plenty of time if you are on a schedule. Passports are good for ten years before they have to be renewed.
Once you have a legal address, your next task will be to square away your banking. You will need an ATM card so you can access your money from anywhere in the country, and you will need to set up an “automatic bill pay” for recurring expenses like insurance for the van. Obviously you will want to select a major national bank or credit union which has branches all over the country so you always have access. And you will want to set up an online account so you can go “paperless” and do routine banking tasks from any location.
In these post-9/11 days, setting up a bank account is also a lot more complicated than it used to be: you will need to provide ID and other paperwork. If you need to set up a business account, it will be even more complicated: you may need to reset all your business paperwork to your new legal address before you can even get a bank account. All of this will need to be done before you take to the road.
And finally, you will need some way to receive all of your mail at whatever location you happen to be in while you are traveling, so your friend or relative can periodically forward all your mail to you.
One option for this is to temporarily rent a mailbox at either a commercial place like the UPS or Fedex store, or a PO Box at the local US Post Office. The price for these will vary from place to place. One problem here, though, is that the US Post Office only rents out boxes for either six months or a year, so if you only need to get mail for a few weeks at each city, you won’t be able to do it. At Fedex and UPS stores, it is up to each store to set the terms of rental, so you likely will not be able to rent a box weekly or monthly there either. Another potential problem with US Post Office boxes is that they do not accept deliveries from services such as Fedex, which presents problems if you plan to order things online for delivery.
The solution I use is to set up a short-term “General Delivery” account with the US Post Office in each city I stay in. With a General Delivery account, anyone can send you a package or envelope as often as necessary, and it is completely free to set up and use. The big disadvantage is that each city will have only one local Post Office branch (usually the main office) that can set up a General Delivery for you, and that is where you will need to go to get your mail.
To receive your mail through General Delivery, you will have to contact the city’s Post Office, either by phone or by visiting the nearest branch, to find out where the main office is located that handles General Deliveries. To send mail packages to you, your mail service (or whoever it is that receives and forwards your mail to you) must send it to you at: Your Name, General Delivery, Hold for Pickup, City, State, ZIP Code-9999. The “-9999” is the postal code for a General Delivery and it must be included with the ZIP Code. And the ZIP Code must be the one for GD that is assigned to that specific Post Office branch.
The Post Office has a form to fill out for people who want to receive General Deliveries, which requires you to show an ID and asks for a reason why you can’t receive mail by regular delivery (I just write “I live in an RV”). I have found that some PO’s will have you fill this form out and some will not—there seems to be no consistency about it.
In my experience, mail sent by General Delivery seems to take at least twice as long to get there as regular mail. Once your mail has arrived, you will need to go to the Post Office where you registered, show your ID again, and ask if there are any General Deliveries for you. The Post Office will hold a General Delivery for you for 30 days; if you don’t pick it up within that time, they will send it back.