Meet Bill and DeAnna Edmister | of Living the Silver Life

We had the good fortune of connecting with Bill and DeAnna Edmister and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Bill and DeAnna, every day, we talk about how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
For us, when we retired, we wanted something to do that revolved around full time traveling. At first, we considered work camping, but realized very quickly that we wanted to spend more time actually traveling verses sitting in one location for an entire season. Which led us to start, Living the Silver Life, our YouTube channel, Instagram and Facebook basing it on our travels. We didn’t really believe it would become a money making proposition. We were actually, like most people who first started their travel channels, as a way of keeping our family and friends up to date with where we were, and let them see what we were seeing. It wasn’t long though, when our community started to grow outside of those family and friends so we started addressing our channel’s new audience as friends or our nomad family.

When we would camp, we would get tons of question of where we were and what we were doing when I’d post to my personal facebook page. Which led to the knowledge, that it would be too hard to keep up with all these questions and comments without a formal location for them so that was how Living the Silver Life was born.

Living the Silver Life comes from our thoughts on the stage of life we were in (silver haired) and the Airstream we traveled in. For the first four years, our dog, Scout traveled with us. He went everywhere we went. It was a very rare occasion that he got left behind. We went to dog friendly travel locations, restaurants, museums and more. We lost him this past December to kidney disease. He was 17 years old.

Our first adventure after becoming full time was into Canada and Alaska. Bill had been to Canada as a boy, being that he was from Upstate NY, but I (DeAnna), being from Texas, had never traveled that far North. Bill or I hadn’t been to Alaska, and it was on both of our list of must see places. We loved everything about traveling through Canada and Alaska. From there, we continued to travel the various states. We’ve been to all, but about 7. Mostly, east coast and west coast states.

Bill and I have always enjoyed RVing/camping. We’ve been married for 35 years, and we’ve camped either full time or part time at least 30 of those years. Our daughters (We have 2) grew up camping. So many amazing memories came out of those family trips. We’ve camped with groups, and by ourselves. We love every part of it; except maybe when it rains for too many days in a row, and we can’t get outside. We knew very early in our marriage, that when we retired, me from teaching and Bill from AT&T, that we would do something that required us to move around the US in the states. We figured it would be to work in some capacity, but so far we haven’t had to include a work schedule into our plans. You never know what the future holds though.

Because of CoVid and fuel prices, we’ve made a few changes to our plan. We recently purchased 8 acres of land to use as a seasonal home location in Upstate NY near where Bill was raised. We have spent this summer clearing land to make ready to build a small cabin for the summers. Then eventually, we hope to do the same in Texas for the winters. We will save our traveling for the shoulder seasons of Spring and Fall. We do not plan to be anyplace full time again cause like I said earlier, we still have states we haven’t visited. We also have places we want to return to explore more. Plus, we want to do some international traveling as well.

So basically we’ve turned our passion into a social media platform that we’ve never considered to be a business. We feel like we are just sharing what we are doing. We hope to continue to grow because of the many people that we’ve met along the way through our travels that we consider to be life long friends now.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
We are enjoying the photography and video-tography. We’ve learned so much about social media through others and by trial and error. I’ll be honest though, there are things about the social media world that we know we should do to grow our channel, but they don’t interest us. We decided that if it’s something we aren’t comfortable with it would not be part of our brand; even if it meant not growing. One of those things are promotions. We only shared a paid endorsement once, and we realized then, that it wasn’t for us so we haven’t done another.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Since we’ve traveled in Arizona several times; we would recommend to our viewers and to your readers; visiting the Sedona area, take route 89A from Sedona to Flagstaff (Oak Creek Canyon), stopping to see the Grand Canyon of course, and visit Jerome-so interesting.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
A lot of our followers that have always been encouraging; like Chasing RV Sunshine. You wrote an article about them recently. (Who recommended us for this article)

Thank you Shoutout Arizona for reaching out to us to share our story. We enjoy reading your stories, and now we get to be one.

Instagram: livingthesilverlife

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livingthesilverlife/

Youtube: youtube.com/c/LivingtheSilverLife

Image Credits
The photo of us with Scout is at the Arctic Circle obviously. The 2nd picture was taken along 89A between Sedona and Flagstaff. The 3rd picture is of DeAnna and Scout kayaking on Greeson Lake while camping at Daisy State Park. The 4th picture is of Bill, DeAnna and Scout beach camping in Port Aransas. The 5th picture is of our Airstream, F250 and our kayaks.