Hey, give me a break! You try coming up with clever blog post headlines every day! It’s hard work!

After reading yesterday’s blog, some readers wanted to know if the new high back seat from Sea Eagle was any improvement for my bad back. Yes, after paddling 90 minutes on Saturday afternoon, I had no back pain at all, and felt great!

Somebody else wrote to ask why we keep deflating the kayak after paddling it, and then re-inflating it the next time we go out, and was it because the Sea Eagle PaddleSki was too heavy to carry inflated in our van. No, the boat only weighs about 40 pounds, and as this photo shows, I can easily drag it out of the water and stand it upright.

The problem is that our van is too tall for Terry and I to get it up there without using a ladder, and the inflated boat is over 14 feet long, so it won’t fit inside our van. Not counting the fact that our two hard kayaks are inside the van, as well as all of the newspapers we carry, and two Trek bicycles. It’s not all that much hassle to inflate and deflate the Sea Eagle, and it will be even less when I order the electric pump from Inflatable Boats 4 Less.

Yesterday morning, Dave Damon, who sells 303 products at RV rallies, came by to visit for a while, and we had a good time swapping lies. Then Terry and I had some running around to do, and drove down to Winter Haven, about 30 miles south of the Thousand Trails campground. 

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I have to be honest, I have never been enamored with Florida, but lately I have been thinking that with all of the water around here, and how much we love paddling and fishing, maybe we should switch our legal domicile to Florida. I could save some money on the cost of a resident fishing license over the much higher fees for a non-resident license. And getting back to Florida to renew our licenses would be easier than South Dakota, given our usual travel routes. 

There are three RV friendly states that seem to be home to most fulltime RVers – Texas, South Dakota, and Florida. There is an excellent mail forwarding service in Green Cove Springs, and the Good Sam Club has a mail forwarding service in Pensacola.

However, while talking to my car insurance company yesterday about another matter, I happened to mention changing domiciles, and was told that the higher cost of car and motorhome insurance in Florida would more than offset any savings on fishing licenses. We saved about a $1,000 a year on insurance when we switched from Texas to South Dakota, and I guess maybe we’ll stay right where we are.

Back at the motorhome, I had a long list of e-mails to answer, and an even longer list of forwarded junk, myths, and garbage that I just deleted without opening. I don’t mind a good joke now and then, and I’m guilty of forwarding one from time to time to a select group of twisted, sick people on my e-mail list.

But I really get tired of all of the stupid dire warnings of doom, the warm fuzzy stuff that is supposed to bring tears to my eyes, and the nonsense that anybody with half a brain cell could glance at and know is pure BS. I’m about to ban four or five folks from my inbox because they send me the same old junk over and over. I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I don’t have time for it.

I also had an e-mail from a couple who have a fifteen year old gas powered Class C motorhome that they want to try fulltiming in this winter, before they spend big bucks on their dream rig. But they had heard from a couple of “experts” that “most” RV parks won’t let you in if your RV is more than 10 years old. These same experts had warned them that if they showed up anywhere in a rig that old, nobody would want to associate with them. They were worried that it was going to be a long, lonely winter.

I would be willing to bet that these “experts” are either RV salespeople trying to hustle them into a purchase, or else elitist jerks whom we could all do well without. For years we traveled in a 1976 homebuilt bus conversion, and we were never turned away anywhere we went, and we have never had a shortage of friendly neighbors in any campground from border to border and coast to coast.

Yes, there are a few RV “resorts” that have, and exercise, the ten year rule, but those are usually not the kind of places where I’d want to hang out anyway.  And as for being shunned due to the age of their RV, it just doesn’t happen most places. Sure, there is the occasional snob, just like anywhere in life. But overall, fulltime and extended travel RVers are some of the friendliest, most open and accepting people you’ll find anywhere. They don’t care what you drive, or what you do or did for a living. All they care about is if you’re friendly, if you have a couple of good campfire stories to tell, and if you want to ride along with them to the nearest buffet, or do you want them to ride with you!

Thought For The Day -  A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when memory fails.

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My good friend Al Hesselbart, historian for the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana, is part of the support committee that is working to reorganize the Angel Bus project.

Angel Bus is patterned after the Angel Flight program, in which volunteer private pilots use their airplanes to transport medical patients to facilities for surgery, chemotherapy, dialysis, and other treatments. Angel Bus started back in 2000, with bus conversion owners providing transportation for patients with serious medical problems and their family members that needed to get a hospital or treatment facility a distance from their home. Unfortunately, the program ended after the death of founder Bill Conner.

Recently, Mercy Medical Airlift (MMA), a 30 year old charity that is the parent organization of Angel Flight, has taken on the Angel Bus project and is working to develop a network of volunteer motorhome owners who will provide transportation to those with medical needs and no easy way to get to a treatment facility, or back to their homes after treatment. Besides the Angel Flight project, which conducts an average of 2,000 missions a year, MMA also provides up to 8,000 airline tickets a year to patients and their families.

The Angel Bus Support Group is made up of volunteers who are working to spread the word about the Angel Bus project. They hope to enlist volunteers for the group, and to help organize Angel Bus chapters of national RV associations. An Angel Bus Chapter has been formed in the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA), and it is hoped that similar groups will be formed among the Escapees RV Club and the Good Sam Club.

Angel Bus volunteer drivers are only asked to provide transportation for a patient and his or her assistant or family member. Volunteers are not expected to provide  food or medical assistance. Most patients, including all children, are accompanied by an assistant and/or parent. Volunteers are briefed on each mission before committing to it, and can refuse any mission for any reason. Mission trips are usually under 500 miles, and longer trips are usually handled with a relay of volunteers. Typically, an Angel Bus volunteer will be assigned one mission a year, unless they volunteer for more.  Angel Bus is a 501(C)(3) charity, and all expenses incurred on a mission are tax deductible.

If you are looking for a way to contribute something to society, this could be a perfect project for either fulltime RVers, or anybody with an RV who wants to help somebody in need. Angel Bus missions are something that almost all of us could provide to those in need, especially fulltimers who are not usually tied to a tight schedule, and have the freedom to travel at will.  

I thought the original Angel Bus project conceived by Bill Conner was a great idea, and I’m pleased that it is being resurrected and will operate under the experienced direction of MMA. Visit the Angel Bus website to learn more about this excellent project.

Thought For The Day – Learn as if you will live forever; live as if you will die tomorrow.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally! 

Yesterday I ordered the rally T-shirts. So I can check one more thing off of our To Do list. In the past, we tried having several different colors of rally shirts, but we quickly learned what a can of worms that was. No matter what color we had, somebody wanted the same size in the color that we had just run out of. So we ended up buying way too many shirts, and were stuck with a surplus of them.

Since then, we sell shirts the same way Henry Ford sold his Model T – you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black. Well, actually, as long as it’s red, which is the color for this rally’s shirts. Please send me an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net to reserve your shirts, because they go fast. You can pick your shirts up at the rally and pay for them then. Cost is $15 per shirt for regular sizes, and 2X and larger sizes are $2 more per shirt.

We now have almost 175 RVs registered for the rally, and more coming in every day. Shoppers will be happy to learn that we have 32 vendors so far, and many of them have reserved multiple booth spaces.

While we have had a chilly stay here in Apache Junction, Arizona, I guess I really can’t complain, compared to what folks are putting up with back east. I mean, if you had a choice, which would you rather do, shovel snow, or walk out your RV’s door and pick a fresh grapefruit right off the tree at your site for breakfast? Unfortunately, the cholesterol medication I take isn’t compatible with grapefruit, so all I can do is look at them and drool, but Miss Terry has been enjoying them ever since we got here.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about our commitment to protecting our readers’ privacy and that we never sell or rent our mailing list. We hate junk mail as much as you do. We dropped our Good Sam Club membership after one year, because they insisted on deluging us with junk mail from the day we joined. Solicitations to renew, to buy insurance, to buy campground directories, and on and on. To us, the benefits of the membership did not outweigh the hassles of their junk mail.

A few weeks ago, when we bought our new Winegard automatic rooftop TV dish, I let them talk me into joining Camping World’s Presidents Club for a discount on the dish. When I did, I specifically told them that I did not want to be put on their mailing list or to receive any junk mail. But guess what I got in our last mail forwarding? Yes indeed, a Camping World advertising catalogue! That’s the reason I was not a member of Presidents Club for the past 9 years, and why I won’t be again. What ever happened to respecting the customer’s wishes?

Yesterday we got our annual Thousand Trails renewal, and enclosed was a notice of their privacy policy, which said in part: “We are permitted by law to share all the information we collect…. (1) with companies that perform marketing services on our behalf, and (2) with other financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing arrangements. For example, we may share information with financial service providers with whom we offer products, such as insurance. We may also share all the information we collect, as described above, with other nonaffiliated third parties…. such as insurance companies for whom one or more of our affiliates acts as agents, and non-financial companies, such as firms that offer products and services of interest to our members, such as recreational vehicles and accessories, and products and services related to outdoor camping.”

The privacy policy went on to say that if we did not want them to share our personal information with anyone else, we had to either call or visit the Thousand Trails website to specifically tell them not to, and then “We will implement your request within a reasonable time after we receive it.”

I logged into the website and filled out the form instructing them not to divulge our personal information, but that really ticks me off. Why should I have to tell them to respect my privacy? I guess corporate greed has replaced customer service in every business there is.

Thought For The Day – It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

When we announced our ten year anniversary of fulltiming, a blog reader wrote to ask me what we would do differently if we had it to do over again, but knowing what we know now about the fulltime RV lifestyle. In thinking about it, there are several things that would have made our lives easier and saved us a lot of money and frustration in our early years on the road. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. So here’s my list of things I’d do differently.

1. Do more homework. I thought that I’d done a lot of research before we hit the road, but looking back, we sure had a lot to learn. I read several books on fulltiming, as well as all of the popular RV magazines, and learned quite a bit. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. If I were planning on becoming a fulltimer today, I’d read even more, spend a lot of time reading the various internet forums on RVing, and attend a couple of RV rallies as part of my research.

2. Join RV Consumer Group. The independent RV Consumer Group rates all RV makes and models for highway control, reliability, and value, and provides a wealth of information on what to look for, and what to avoid when making an RV purchase. I have had some people tell me that they don’t trust the RV Consumer Group’s ratings because they do not actually buy and test each individual model of every RV made. Instead they rely on a formula developed by their research. My feeling is that until somebody builds a better mousetrap, they are a valuable resource for RV shoppers. If we would have known about their material beforehand, we would have never purchased our first motorhome.

3. Buy a diesel pusher. There is no one best RV make or model to meet everyone’s needs. We all have different RVing styles and priorities. For our needs, a 38 to 40 foot diesel pusher by a quality manufacturer such as Allegro, Winnebago, or Newmar would have served us much better than the 36 foot gasoline powered motorhome we originally purchased.

4. Not buy a campground membership. Within our first month on the road, we purchased an expensive campground membership, which turned out to be a total waste of money. I always advise new fulltimers to wait at least a year before they buy a campground membership. It takes that long to develop your traveling style.

5. Join the Elks and Moose. My memberships in these two organizations have provided us many nights of free and low cost camping. Our membership dues and the donations we make to the lodges where we spend the night help them with their many good works in their communities, so it’s a two way street. I wish we had not waited several years before joining.

6. Avoid Camping World. It took us a couple of years to realize that just about anything we can buy at Camping World can be found for less money at many other retail locations and online.

7. Not join Good Sam Club. From the day we joined the Good Sam Club we were flooded with junk mail wanting us to upgrade our membership and buy some other product or service they offered. The small discount we got on camping at Good Sam parks was not worth the cost and hassle of the junk mail they sent us.

8. Buy a Blue Ox towbar. When we started fulltiming, we purchased a Roadmaster Falcon 5250 towbar, and fought with it for years. The release buttons were very stiff to push to disengage the arms, and if our dinghy was not perfectly straight , we could not unhook it. A few years ago we upgraded to a Blue Ox Aventa tow bar, which releases with levers, and we have found it to be a much more user friendly product.

9. Research health insurance issues. When we changed our legal domicile from Arizona to Texas, our insurance agent assured us we had full coverage, and we took his word for it. Eighteen months into our fulltime lifestyle, Miss Terry was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and our insurance company denied the claim. As it turns out, there was a 24 month exclusion for cancer, and even though we had the policy long before we started fulltiming, the clock started ticking all over again the day we switched addresses. A bridge policy to cover the gap would have saved us a fortune.

10. I would have started a blog earlier. I’m a dinosaur, and when people first started talking about blogging, I did not pay any attention. Since then, my thinking has obviously changed. Blogging has become an important part of our income stream, and the commissions we receive from those little ads you see on the blog help us pay our bills. But even if we did not have a business, or any ad income, blogging is a great way for RVers to stay in touch with their family and friends, and to record their travels.

So there are my Top 10 Things I’d Do Over. I’m curious, what would you experienced RVers do differently if you could start all over again?

Thought For The Day – Don’t go to bed angry. Stay up and plot your revenge.

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More bad news for the RV industry. Yesterday it was announced that Monaco Coach Corporation had given termination notices to the remaining members of their workforce. Most of those employees had been on furlough since Mid-December, 2008.

In an article on www.cnnmoney.com, the company says it is still hopeful of some way to resolve their financial issues. But when you consider that their stock opened at 46 cents a share yesterday and closed at 6 cents by the end of the day, it doesn’t look good.

You may recall a blog I wrote on February 5 on my predictions for the RV industry, in which I said that the companies that ignore their customers’ needs would go by the wayside.

I said in that blog that Monaco was a company I could not recommend to new RVers, based upon the problems owners of their coaches have shared with me over the years.

You have to figure that when people are sticking things like this on their coaches, they’re pretty ticked off!

With so many companies closing up, and even more in trouble, you have to wonder who’s next.

But there is also good news on the horizon. A while back I reported that Walter Cannon from Recreational Vehicle Safety Education Foundation (RVSEF) is holding an RV Lifestyle, Safety and Education Clinic at the Wildwood Conference Center at Harrisburg Area Community College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania September 13 – 16, 2009.

For people who wanted to attend Life on Wheels, which closed recently following the death of its founder, Gaylord Maxwell, this is a great opportunity to attend an excellent lineup of classes on all aspects of the RV lifestyle. Walter has asked me to present several of my seminars at this new event, and I know that some of the other Life on Wheels instructors will be there too. We’re looking forward to seeing a lot of you there. Contact RVSEF at the link above for an e-mail announcement about the new program.

When our latest mail delivery caught up with us, a couple of people who ordered books or subscriptions asked that we not share their mailing addresses with anyone else. Never worry about that. As fulltimers RVers, we know what an expense and hassle junk mail is. We respect your privacy, and we never sell or share our mailing list with anyone.

It ticks me off enough getting spam in my e-mail. Having to pay to get junk mail forwarded to me, or paying a mail service extra to sort my mail and throw it away, really makes me mad.

We did business with a commercial mail house called Lake Michigan Mailers in Grand Rapids, Michigan one time last year, ever since then, I have been getting solicitations from them, as well as a ton of e-mail. I have asked them repeatedly not to send me their junk mail, and they just ignore me. How quick do you think I’ll be to ever spend another nickel with this outfit?

One reason we don’t belong to the Good Sam Club is the mountain of junk mail they bury their members in. Within a week of joining, ten years ago, we started getting junk mail from them. I requested that they take me off their junk mail list, and was ignored. Finally I wrote a nasty piece about them in the Gypsy Journal and sent a copy to the president of the club. Miraculously we were off the mailing list! But we never renewed our membership because I don’t like an outfit that ignores my needs so they can try to sell me something.

I learned a long time ago that when any company or organization mistreats me, voting with my pocketbook is the best response.

Thought For The Day - We have to learn to be our own best friends, because we fall too easily into the trap of being our worst enemies.