For Joel Holland, what started as an impulsive decision with his wife to travel the United States in an RV has grown into a business and network that supports over 5,500 small businesses across the country, including a few right in Eagle County. Holland is a Vail resident and the owner of Harvest Hosts, a business he purchased in 2018 hoping to connect RVers and campers with small businesses and new experiences nationwide. Holland and his wife, Mary Ashley, moved to Vail eight years ago from the Washington, D.
C. area. At first, Vail was just one of many stops on a two-year road trip through the lower 48 states.
“I was kind of just burned out on city life, the concrete jungle and traffic and wanted to try something different, and so my wife and I pretty impulsively bought an RV and started traveling just to kind of get it out of our systems and ended up loving it,” Holland said. While they were traveling with no specific destination in mind, they were keeping an open mind to try and find their next hometown. “We pulled into Vail in June 2016 and everything was perfect, it was beautiful,” Holland said.
“I’m a huge skier — I grew up racing on the East Coast — and so I’ve always romanticized the idea of living in a ski town. And so we once again impulsively basically put down roots in Vail.” Like many others, the couple committed to trying it for a year and ended up sticking around.
“Here we are eight years later, and we just absolutely fell in love with the.