Who We Are, Where We Came From, and Why We Are Still Moving
We didn’t plan this: RVing with Multiple Sclerosis.
Our Voyage with MS
We are Kreg and Charlene. We live full-time in a 2022 Entegra Vision XL 36A motorhome named Max, flat-towing a blacked-out 2023 Ford Ranger 4×4 Sport for the roads that Max cannot handle. We have been on the road since April 2022. Our travel companion is Jenny, a Jack Russell and Chihuahua mix who takes her job as chief morale officer very seriously.
January 2026 marks twenty years since Charlene was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
We did not plan any of this. Not the diagnosis. Not the RV. Not the road. And somehow, that is exactly the point.
A Hurricane Introduced Us
Charlene moved into her house in North Port, Florida in December 2001. I moved into the house next door the first week of January 2002. Same builder, same street. We did not meet for two and a half years.
August 13, 2004. Hurricane Charley makes landfall in Charlotte County. Our houses are in North Port, right on the border. Close, but not too close. When the storm passes, the neighbors come out to check on each other. I pull lawn chairs into the driveway, mix up a batch of margaritas, break out the red Solo cups, and it turns into a party. That is what you do on a Friday in Florida.
Charlene was one of those neighbors. A hurricane introduced us.
We became a couple in 2005 and got married on May 5, 2006. I married Charlene, knowing her whole story. That included Ryan, her oldest son. It included the grief she had been carrying since February 1992, when she lost her infant son, Tyler, to SIDS, just shy of three months old. And it included Mitchell, her youngest, who was still very much in the picture. Mitchell called me his chosen father. That meant everything.
Our Journey with an MS Diagnosis
In January 2006, Charlene was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Twenty-four lesions on the MRI. At the same time, she lost her job. Her symptoms had been affecting her work for a while, and now there was a name for why. Same moment. Crappy, perfect timing.
We did not sit down and make a plan. We just started handling it. Daily injections became part of the routine. Life continued. Disney. The Everglades. Annual passes to Busch Gardens. Trips to Germany to visit my family. MS was part of the picture from the beginning. It was always part of the picture. So was the grief Charlene had always carried quietly. So were the people she loved. None of that got left behind when the road began.
What we did not know yet was that it was also pointing us somewhere.
The Road and What Travels With It
In December 2024, we lost Mitchell. He is laid to rest in Cary, Illinois, beside Tyler. The road did not stop. It never does. But some miles carry more weight than others. Grief travels with us. It sits in the passenger seat. On the heavy days, I give the push.
Ryan, Charlene’s oldest son, is still with us. The four dogs who have passed, Max, Skully, Lokai, and Jaxon, we imagine still traveling every road with us.
None of them are left behind.
The Question Changed
By 2014, the drive from North Port to Tampa was already taking too much out of Charlene before we even walked through the gates at Busch Gardens. We were not facing the end of something. We were facing a question we did not know how to answer yet.
We stopped asking how to keep doing things the same way. We started asking how to do them differently.
That shift matters. It did not feel like a breakthrough at the time. It felt like necessity. But looking back, it was the most important turn we made.
In October 2018, we bought our first RV. A humble Class C. We had no idea what we were doing. We just knew that if we could bring the home with us, we could control the pace. We upgraded to a Class A in 2021.
Then, on February 28, 2022, someone called and asked if we wanted to sell the house. We said yes before we thought about it. Papers signed March 3. House closed April 13. On the road full-time. Homeless, in the best possible way. I retired in October 2022.
The System We Built Without Knowing It
MS affects energy. Not just physically, but the whole calculation of a day. Heat makes it worse. Big events cost more than they appear to on the front end. You cannot simply rest your way back to full. You have to manage what you have with intention, and you have to start managing it before the warning signs show up.
Part of my job became learning to read those signs. Watching. Adjusting the plan before Charlene had to ask. Not because she cannot advocate for herself, but because the earlier you catch it, the less it costs.
In 2025, I found the name for what I had been doing for nineteen years. I call it the BMSer framework. Think of MS like a smartphone with a degraded battery. Charlene is the battery. I am the Battery Management System operator, reading the charge, managing the load, and protecting the system from unnecessary drain. The RV community understood it immediately. When your rig runs on solar and batteries, you already know what it means to manage capacity and protect against overload.
We lived the framework for nineteen years before we had words for it. That is the pattern of our whole story. Living it before knowing it.
What We Want You To Know
If you are reading this because you or someone you love has MS, a disability, or a chronic illness, and you are wondering whether a life like this is even possible, here is the direct answer.
It is.
You do not have to sell everything and go full-time. That was our path. It is not the only one. Start small. Rent an RV for a weekend. Borrow a friend’s camper. Plan a two-night trip an hour from home. Do what you can at the scale that makes sense for where you are right now.
MS changes the how. It does not have to change the whether.
A diagnosis is not the end of the road. It is a recalibration. The question is not whether you can still have a life. The question is what that life looks like now, and whether you are willing to build it a little differently than you planned.
We figured it out by living it. We did not know we were doing it right. We just kept going.
You can too.
Let’s see the world, one charge cycle at a time. 🧡⚡