How Do You Road Trip with Your Partner and Not Have a Nervous Breakdown? This Full-Time Traveling Couple Knows the Secrets

Yahoo

12-05-2025

When Eric and Allison Bieller quit their full-time jobs to create travel content, they say their relatives thought they were 'crazy.'
'They're very confused about how it all works, but now they're used to it,' says Allison, 38. 'Now they're just like, 'Where are you in the world, my little traveler?' So they've come around.'
It doesn't hurt that the couple has amassed an audience of over 600,000 on their YouTube channel, The Endless Adventure, vlogging their trips across the nation and around the world. They've ferried down to Washington state from Alaska, shared a tiny apartment in Hong Kong, camped overnight at an IHOP parking lot and more.
During many of their travels, the pair trek through locations via RV, some of which they renovate themselves to be the perfect on-the-road home for the two of them. After a decade's worth of trips together, Eric, 39, says their relationship is stronger than ever.
'When you're traveling together as much as full-time, it's either going to destroy your relationship or bring it closer than it's ever been before,' he explains. 'Luckily for us, it brought us closer."
PEOPLE sat down with The Endless Adventure to learn their essential tips and reminders for surviving a road trip as a couple.
ALLISON: He does the (content) editing, and so he usually has his headphones on. That puts him into his own world. And while he's doing that, I really enjoy working out. I cook for us sometimes when he's doing that, and then plan upcoming adventures. I feel like that separates us.
ERIC: We don't feel like we personally need that much time apart, but we have enough little things. When I'm editing, it might take eight hours to edit a video sometimes, so I guess that's my alone time. Maybe that's why I feel like I don't need all that much alone time.
ALLISON: We listen to a lot of music, a lot of podcasts. We have games that we travel with. Two-person games, usually collaborative. We don't want to create arguments. So fun collaborative games. If we are in a place for a while or going stir-crazy, we'll go out to a pub and just sit and play games.
ERIC: Sometimes we'll just drop everything, go out, chill at a restaurant or a pub and just play a board game all night.
ALLISON: For us, we travel in a lot of older vehicles, so having spare pieces and parts [is essential].
ERIC: Spare everything. We have coolant. We have extra drive belts. We've got extra power steering lines. So basically, anything that's broken in the past, we have a replacement that we've saved up for it when it breaks inevitably in the future.
ALLISON: If somebody's having a particular rough go of it, the other one realizes that and tries to stay positive and light and look for solutions. And maybe that's not always what they want to hear. So maybe you're just quietly in the corner looking up a mechanic while they're just getting their anger out. And you're not trying to be like, "Oh, it's fine. It's fine,' when they're like, "I just want to be angry for a second." Letting them sit in it for a little bit, but not too long, is important.
ERIC: I'm the one who handles most of the mechanical stuff and sets all that up, and I've done a lot of the work on the RV myself. So if something goes wrong, it's a lot of pressure on me to fix it. And I'm very annoyed with myself that I let it happen, depending on what the situation is. So I have to usually take five, 10 minutes and get past it and start to look for a solution. During that time, she's just very supportive, instead of nagging me or being mad at me or anything like that.
ALLISON: We always keep in mind that we're on each other's team [and not] bring the other person down. You're a couple, you're together for a reason. You shouldn't want to hurt or intentionally go after the other person. Obviously things are going to come up that you don't agree on, or there'll be miscommunications. But maybe if you both can get your points across and see a potential middle ground — or realize that maybe it's something you can't get over, so you just need to talk about it and understand, as best as you can, where the other person is coming from.
ERIC: One important thing is just to not keep score about everything. I always talk about that in our relationship, that it's like... If you start tallying up every time that one person was right or wrong, or when some person made a mistake or the other person did, then you're basically in a game with each other, battling each other. We don't try to look at it like that. We don't keep score on anything, which is hard to do, but we've gotten good at it over the years.
ERIC: We hear a lot of couples just in the airport and on trains and on buses, just throughout the years, just getting at each other. And we're always like, "That's exactly what we don't want to do." You just have to have a little bit of patience and understand that when you're trying to travel, especially traveling full-time or often, stuff's going to go wrong. That's just inevitable. That's what happens when you travel. You've got to accept that.
ALLISON: It's almost better if things go wrong, because it makes things so much more memorable. And I feel like it makes you a stronger person and a couple, because no matter what happens, you'll get to the other side of whatever the issue is. You'll always figure it out some way. You're not just going to be stuck in this one place for the rest of your life. It's always so much more interesting if you had this hardship to go through and you both overcame it, and then you learn from it. And next time, maybe it won't seem as daunting when something bad happens, and it helps you become better at problem-solving.
ERIC: That's one of the fun things about traveling with other people, is that when something happens — usually it's something bad — but if you can remain positive and just laugh about it later... We have some things that happened five, six years ago. We still comment about it or have some joke that we say daily about some random thing that happened. Like, an interaction between us and a Lyft driver six years ago in Albany, we still reference some goofy thing that he said.
ALLISON: There was one time where we were on an international flight to London, and somehow between getting off the plane and getting to customs, I lost my passport. I have no idea where it is. It's never been found to this day. It was a fiasco, don't get me wrong. But we got through it. And then after that, Eric left his laptop on a plane.
ERIC: So every time when we land somewhere, I say, "Hey, do you got your passport?" She says, "Yep. Hey, do you have your laptop?"
ALLISON: Nothing is the end of the world … You get confused or turned around on your way to your hotel, or maybe the room isn't exactly what you thought it was, or the hotel is dingy or you don't like where you picked for dinner. Nothing is catastrophic. The next night, you can go to a better place, or you can do more research next time. Don't take it all too seriously. It's supposed to be fun. It's travel.
ERIC: Be ready to share stuff with the other person, because a lot of times I just am constantly thinking about the videos and work and editing, so I'll leave stuff behind all the time. If I leave my headphones, she lets me use hers, or if she leaves her charger, I have a charger specifically that she can plug into as well. If I don't have socks, she'll give me socks to wear.
ALLISON: He uses 100 pairs of socks every vacation we go on.
ERIC: She's very patient about it. She doesn't give me a hard time about it. So all that stuff helps.
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