- Well hello, everybody.
This is probably one of my most requested videos.
Those of you who've been watching for a while,
you know that I was born in Cuba.
That's why I talk like this.
But many of you have requested that I tell the story
of how I came to the United States and all that.
So since, on December 13th,
it was the 30th anniversary of my arrival here to Miami,
I thought it would be a fitting time to tell you my story.
So, without further ado, let's do that.
(upbeat music)
♪ I'm riding, riding, riding ♪
♪ Riding in my RV, my RV ♪
♪ Wherever I want to be ♪
♪ Because I'm free in my RV, yeah ♪
- I was born Robert Yurineil Morales Gonzalez,
in the island of Cuba, in Havana, right here to be exact.
My parents, Alma and Vicente.
My mom, she's an educator.
She used to be a teacher.
And my dad, he was an architect.
Quite the travelers, both of them.
My dad in the 50s, he traveled all over Europe,
and then when they got married,
their honeymoon, they visited pretty much
every country in South America,
and they even came here to the United States,
to Miami, D.C. and New York.
That was until 1959, the communist revolution.
You couldn't travel abroad anymore.
So they continued to travel actually,
but within the confines of the island.
I was born in 1971.
Oddly enough, not Roberto, but Robert.
I guess my mom and my dad, they were like
getting ready, prepared, for the inevitability
of leaving the country at some point.
In fact, one year before I was born,
that's when they decided they wanted to migrate,
because they realized that Cuba
probably wasn't going to go back
to the way it was before the revolution.
So they gave me the English version of my name, pretty cool.
And my middle name, Yurineil,
a combination of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut
and Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut.
So that's probably why I've always
had a fascination with all things outer space.
I had a pretty normal, happy childhood
for Cuba in the 1970s and 80s.
As soon as I was old enough, though,
my parents, they started dragging me
around the island on all their travels.
And we visited some of the most remote corners of Cuba,
both to the east and the west.
And this right here that I'm gonna show you,
this is very rare,
one of the first times I ever appeared on video.
Probably the first time
and this was shot by some Norwegian friends,
who happened to be living Cuba back in 1980 and 1981.
As for myself, early in life,
I always had a passion for photography.
I remember I had this old book,
probably printed in the 1940s from the Eastman Kodak Company
and it had like all the techniques for photography,
you know, aperture and shutter speed and iso,
another combination of all those.
And I read that book cover to cover quite a few times
and that's how I learned pretty much
all the photography techniques, although,
what I really liked was moving pictures,
you know, video or movies.
But of course, that was impossible at the time.
I mean, sometimes it was hard to get batteries,
let alone, get a camera or something of that sort.
So, my video ambitions would have to be
pretend for a few more years.
That's until we left.
Of course, my parents always continued
with that ambition to leave the country at some point.
And my mom was like that last hold out, you know,
in an era where there were no Christmas trees in Havana,
she still had her Christmas tree
and she would put Christmas music
and people thought, probably thought we were weird.
Because that was like the hardest part
of the communist regime where religion
was all but forbidden, let's put it that way.
And of course, my dad got demoted
at work when they found out
that was leaving the country at some point.
And of course, my mom left work right before I was born.
When I was teenager, of course,
I had to go a couple of times to work in the agriculture,
as part of paying your dues.
And I worked in the tobacco fields of Pinar del Rio,
which is like the western-most province in Cuba.
And it was a lot of hard work,
you learn a lot and it was a little bit of fun,
I mean, you put a bunch of teenagers in like a shelter,
you know, what could possibly go wrong, right?
But that's the way it was and I don't know if it still is,
but that's the way it was back in the 80s.
Now finally, in 1987, after many, many years of trying
and that was one of my biggest points of stress.
Because nobody could find out in school
that we were trying to leave
the country or anything like that.
You know, that would mean if I ever had to stay in Cuba,
that would mean not going to university,
many negative things.
But eventually, finally in 1987,
my dad reached the age for retirement
and so he was able to get the Liberation Letter
from the Ministry of Construction.
And that same year,
his best friend who lived in Madrid, Spain got us a visa.
So finally, on September of 1987,
we left the island on our first flight for freedom,
let's call it that way.
And it was hard at the beginning, I'm not gonna lie to you.
You know, it's getting used to a new country,
kind of new customs, but it was Spain.
So, you know, we spoke the same language,
it wasn't all that bad,
it was just the idea of starting from scratch.
At the time, I wasn't working but for my parents,
you know, getting work permits
and the renewal of those was kind of a drag.
And my dad being in his 60s,
he was gonna be forced into retirement soon.
So, coming to America was still
one of our highest priorities at the moment.
And we wanted to come to Miami
because that's where the largest
Cuban community outside of Cuba was.
So yeah, this was the place and we got very lucky.
1988, there was this program called Exodo,
Exodus in Spanish.
And it was pretty much organized by Jorge Mas Canosa,
who was the president
of the Cuban-American National Foundation.
And the idea was that there were a lot of Cubans,
particularly in Peru, who were really, really struggling
and the idea was to bring them to the United States.
So he convinced President Reagan, at the time,
and they signed this project called Exodo, as I said
and basically, meant visas for us.
There was one catch, we had to have medical insurance
paid for for two years, you know,
a relative or someone in United States had to do that.
And we were not allowed to get like welfare
or food stamps or anything like that.
We wouldn't be a burden to society, let's put it that way.
And that was that.
And as part of that program, on December 13 of 1988,
we boarded the plane, I arrived in Miami.
And I'm gonna show you a couple of pictures
also from that time period, that I took from the plane.
Miami has changed so much since 1988.
And here we had to start all over again, you know,
new country and we had to learn the language,
adapt to the culture, which sometimes could be different.
And even though I had learned English in school,
it's not the same thing when you have to use it
and actually train your ear
to listen to it on a daily basis.
But you know, I went to high school here, of course.
And I had a job at Winn-Dixie, that was my first job.
But when I really started learning English
was in my second job,
which was this duty-free shops
that they used to have the Port of Miami.
And you know, interacting with my co-workers
and with, of course,
tourists from all over the United States
and all over the world, actually.
I actually picked up a little bit
of Portuguese and French in the process.
In 1990, I graduated high school, Miami High.
And that was also where I met the love of my life, Ili.
During the early 90s,
I was working at this duty-free shop in the Port of Miami.
I was going to college, Miami Dade College first
and then, Florida International University.
And I started playing with
a bunch of salsa bands here in Miami.
Salsa, which at the time,
was like the trending musical style.
And it was a very nice year,
I got the tail end of that era that started in the 80s
of the largest salsa bands playing at nightclubs.
And I played with, mainly with Orquesta La Llave.
And we were 10, actually 12 musicians in that band
and that was a good time.
Didn't travel much during this time period, you know,
the mandatory trip to Disney World once in a while.
And eventually, a few years later, yeah, I went to New York,
San Francisco, I even went back to Spain and back to Cuba,
actually a couple of times in the late 90s.
Even though I didn't travel all that much,
editing those travel videos
and I always took a video camera.
Editing those travel videos, as family movies,
was always a hobby of mine.
Actually, my passion for travel
got very much rekindled
after a road trip we did in Europe in 2006.
We visited mainly Spain and France
and I was in a rush like it usually is.
But after that trip, I said,
I started paying more attention to editing
the videos in a better fashion.
And of course, technology helped,
this was the time when computers were being more powerful.
And I was eventually able to edit in HD,
which at the time was like woo, HD, yeah!
Around the same time, in the early 2000s,
and this is important, I discovered podcasts.
And it was something that, you know, that's like radio,
you listen to it but it was something that you could produce
yourself also and put it out there in the world.
And actually, video podcasts came rather quickly after that
and then YouTube was founded around that same era.
It was the Web 2.0 era and user created content,
as it used to be called.
We even went to Macworld Expo in San Francisco in 2008.
You know, to be part of that era, let's put it that way.
Okay, let's talk about RV life here
and how we got started in that, in a sense.
Sometime in the late 2000s, Ili's niece and her family,
they moved to Atlanta, to Lawrenceville to be more exact.
And we were going to go there for Thanksgiving, you know,
to visit, it's a surprise, kind of.
And my brother-in-law,
he decided to rent an RV for the trip,
because they were going in large group and they had a dog.
And I thought, like hmm,
this sounds like a very comfortable way to travel.
And then, in 20, was it 2010?
We went to Alaska,
we actually flew and drove the Dalton Highway.
And I thought, hmm, with a rugged RV
this would be a much more comfortable trip,
because going to the bathroom and all that.
We were starting to get more into the mindset of RVing.
In 2011, my stepson Bryan,
he wanted to go to the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio,
which is like one of the largest in the world
And we decided, let's make it a road trip
and then we rented an RV ourselves from Cruise America.
And that was a very fun trip.
And we got to see a little bit of the country
and how RV parks were and we liked it, we liked it a lot.
Then in 2014, we flew to Denver, Colorado and rented an RV
and did a road trip in the Four Corners region, you know,
the Wild Wild West video that you've all seen.
And by that time, we were hooked.
Now let's talk about YouTube, in 2007 or 2008,
that's when I started uploading videos to YouTube.
It was a different channel because it was mostly my music,
I started uploading videos of us playing
at different nightclubs,
more like with promotional kind of thing.
And before then I had started
a video podcast called Tropical Music
but that didn't last very long
because all the music would have to be original
and at that time, I didn't have that many original tunes.
And I just couldn't find enough content
to put on that podcast,
so that lasted probably 10, 12 episodes and that was it.
By this time, I also had a couple of travel videos
in the archives, let's put it that way.
We had traveled to California a couple of times,
there was a video about here in Miami.
And I decided to start a new channel
called Traveling Robert,
which is the one that we have right now
and I decided to upload some of those videos.
Of course, in 2012 we did that road trip in California,
where we did the Pacific Coast Highway.
And for some reason,
that video started getting a little bit of traffic,
some people were watching it.
So, I'm like and at that time, I think,
also is when YouTube started, approved monetizing.
So I'm like, hmm, we may be on to something here,
let's start doing more travel videos.
So for the next couple of years, I started uploading.
But it wasn't until 2013, actually,
after our trip to Canada, which was a great road trip.
Also, my parents, Ili, Bryan and I.
And I started getting feedback, people started commenting.
I was so excited that I posted the comments on the video
at the end of some of those videos.
Of course, the next year was the Four Corners trip,
I already told you about that one.
And then during that same time,
I started researching because I was already pretty much
decided that I wanted to get an RV at some point.
I had read all the books, not all of them,
but most of the books published on the subject.
I read Loloho's Long Long Honeymoon.
I had read, of course,
John Huggins' So, You Want to Be an RVer?
There was one called Meandering Down The Highway,
a bunch of books.
So, I knew pretty much but at that time,
actually I was sure I wanted a Class A.
But reality kicked in and I'm like,
let's try to get something relatively inexpensive
that would fit here in my driveway,
that I could sort of tow with my Kia Sorento.
And that research led us to Casita's, but the Casita,
I wouldn't fit in the bathroom and it was kind of cramped,
so we decided to go a little bigger.
And we saw this Winnebago Micro Minnie,
which was a trailer company that Winnebago
had recently purchased, actually.
And we saw that they had 'em available at La Mesa,
which is a dealership in Fort Myers.
So we said, you know, let's go just to see it.
Famous last words.
We arrived there, of course, you know,
they're very nice when they want you to buy the RV.
We saw the RV, we fell in love with it,
it was one of those things that when you walk inside
and you are like, it felt right, you know,
that subjective manner of buying things
that sometimes we use.
And at the time,
I was a little sensitive because my dad had passed away
like a month before and I was in that,
you only live once mode.
And I said, you know what?
#YOLO, You Only Live Once,
let's sign on the dotted line and get this thing.
I mean, we could afford it, we financed it, of course
and then, eventually I paid it off.
But that's the story of Minnie the trailer.
And the rest of the story, you know we've been traveling.
Like the beginning, we were like the ultimate
weekend warriors because we had no time,
I had a job at the time.
So, I had to like,
every other Friday I would beg my manager,
can I leave a little early?
So we could hitch up real quick and go somewhere,
at least, you know, for two nights.
And the furthest we got, of course,
was Fort Myers or to the north.
Yeah, that was basically it.
We made that one longer road trip through Chicago,
but still it wasn't enough content like to support
a growing YouTube channel and at that point,
by the Chicago trip I was like,
this thing is gonna go somewhere one of these days.
Actually, the next year, my 47th birthday,
I decided to give notice and I quit my job.
And at the time, it may have been
a gutsy, irresponsible kind of move
because the YouTube channel wasn't making enough money
to support the lifestyle.
Of course, in that same year,
John Huggins of Living the RV Dream podcast had contacted me
and told me if I wanted to continue with a podcast
and of course I told him yes.
And at the time I had a sponsor, you know, and all that,
things were going somewhere.
But still, pure AdSense revenue wasn't there yet.
The reason I quit my job,
yeah, maybe I had watched too many inspirational videos
or something like that.
Because I was not really happy at that job,
it wasn't a bad job, by any means,
but it was not what I wanted to do.
Making videos, telling stories and traveling
is what I've always wanted to do in life.
So yeah, it is so timely that YouTube
happened in this time in my life, not just me, anybody.
I mean, it's such a great time to be alive
where you can communicate with other people,
you can reach so many people
without needing powerful corporation or a big antenna
or a powerful transmitter to get your message across.
All you need really is an internet connection
and something to say.
So, this is where I am right now,
in the present, 2018, the end of 2018.
And of course, telling travel stories through video,
it is my passion, has been for a long time
and I consider it my job, but I don't consider it work.
Because it is something that I love to do
and I would do it as a hobby
even if it didn't make me money.
So, I feel very fortunate to be able to do this
at this stage in my life.
After 30 years living in the United States,
in this great country
that has given me the opportunity to do that.
I am also very fortunate to have a family
that will put up with this crazy adventure, you know,
gallivanting all over the country, making videos.
So, may the adventure continue to next year.
I want to wish you a Merry Christmas,
Happy Holidays wherever you are in the world
and a very, very happy and prosperous 2019.
Until the next time, thank you so much for watching.
And see you on the road.
(upbeat music)