After saying our goodbyes to Dennis and Irma, the managers at Crossroads RV Park in Wells, Nevada, we left yesterday morning at 10 a.m. and drove east on Interstate 80. We only had 180 miles to go, so it was an easy day on the road.

Terry loves taking pictures as we travel, and she’s gotten really good at it. When we’re doing 60 miles per hour, it takes some practice to get a nicely framed, cleanly focused picture. Especially with a pocket digital camera. The great thing about digital cameras is that you can shoot all you want and it doesn’t cost anything. That’s one of the first things I learned about taking newspaper pictures – shoot a lot of film and your chances of getting something worth using are greatly increased.

Here is a dramatic rock formation Terry spotted on the other side of the highway. She found a bug-free spot on the windshield to shoot through and framed it just right.

And here’s another one that she took out the side window as we passed.

It was 60 miles from Wells to the Utah state line, and as we topped the hill at Wendover, we were greeted by a breathtaking view of the famous Bonneville Salt Flats spread out before us. We thought that the salt flats we saw the day before in Nevada were impressive until we saw this huge expanse of white wasteland.

If my dashboard thermometer had not told me that the outside temperature was 93 degrees, I would have believed we were driving through a snow covered prairie somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska.

The salt flats stretched out for over forty miles, and it was monotonous after a while. This apparently is a problem for a lot of drivers, because we saw several signs warning drowsy drivers to pull over.

We actually found the drive a bit intimidating for some reason. It was a nice flat road, but the place just felt hostile. Very little lives here, just a few scrub bushes. We never saw a bird or any other critter for the entire 40 miles.

We also saw constant mirages that looked like water on the roadway ahead of us, but when we got there, the road was always dry. We’ve seen this phenomena many times in the past.

As we continued east, big cloud formations built up on the horizon, and we thought we were in for a real storm, but nothing happened.

Then we got our first view of the Great Salt Lake. This massive body of water is 75 miles long and 30 miles wide, with a surface area of 1,500 square miles. The water’s salinity is sometimes as much as 28%, which is three to five times more than sea water.

We stopped at the Flying J at Lake Point, just east of Salt Lake City, to top off our fuel tank, and guess what? Just like in Winnemucca the day before, the RV island was closed. But this time the truck islands were not too busy, so we pulled over there. We didn’t really need fuel, but I wanted to have a full tank when we leave Salt Lake City in a week, and the Flying J was handy.

Back on the highway, we connected with Interstate 215 and took it north a few miles to North Salt Lake City, where we pulled into Pony Express RV Resort. We couldn’t believe it, but there is another Flying J at the same exit!

Pony Express is a very nice, new RV resort, a bit more upscale than our usual haunts, but it is convenient for me to do my genealogical research. We have a nice concrete pull through 50 amp full hookup site, with a great view of the Wasatch Mountains.

By the time we were parked, had the jacks down and the slides out, and were all hooked up, we were famished. So we went to the Empire Chinese Gourmet buffet, a few miles north, and it was very nice. We have been wanting a good Chinese buffet for quite a while now, and this one was a winner.

Back at the motorhome, we were disappointed to discover that even though we have a full five bars of high speed EVDO service, internet access with our Verizon air card is terribly slow. I took the card out of the router and put it directly into my computer to update its settings and location, but that didn’t seem to do any good. When I first switched to an air card a couple of years ago, I was very pleased with the service, but over time it has gotten slower and slower. Especially in busy metropolitan areas. Our speed in tiny Wells, Nevada the day before, was twice as fast as we have here in Salt Lake City. Posting the blog may be a real challenge.

We have eight or ten different people who want to get together with us while we’re here, and we’ll try to hook up with as many as we can, but there just isn’t that much time, since I plan to spend several days at the Family History Center peering up my family tree, and Terry has a lot of preparations to finish before we leave for Colorado next week.

Bad Nick has been quiet lately, but he’s back with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Do We Just Ignore Them? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

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We know many RVers who work in RV parks around the country to offset their traveling costs. Typically, they work a set number of hours per week in exchange for a free RV site, and any hours over those agreed upon for the site are paid at an hourly wage. Some workamping RVers return to the same campground to work every season, while others prefer to move about and see new places.

Workamping in an RV park can be interesting, and can help you save some money in camping fees. However, as I always say in my seminars on working on the road, as well as in my book Work Your Way Across The USA, if your goal is to make the most possible money in a given time period, often you would be better off to rent a site in an RV park on a monthly basis, and got a job at the local Home Depot or a restaurant in town. RV park wages are just not that good in most cases.

But if you want to do something a little bit different, and still earn money, there are many, many opportunities out there to make money and have fun that don’t involve cleaning bathrooms in an RV park, serving French fries in a fast food restaurant, or working in retail stores. Here are ten jobs that RVers we know have done that you may never have thought of.  

1. Beet Harvest – We have known several RVers who have worked the sugar beet harvests in places like North Dakota and Minnesota. Jobs include everything from driving trucks to sorting the beets when they arrive at warehouses. One website on the sugar beet harvest claims that some workers make as much as $7,000 in a month or less.

2. Canoe & Kayak Tour Guide – From the Florida Keys to Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, canoe and kayak liveries are busy all season long introducing tourists to the joys to be found on the water. It’s a great job for RVers who want to make some extra money and spend the summer (or winter) paddling. 

3. Working For Amazon – During the Christmas rush, online retailer Amazon.com hires many RVers to work at their fulfillment center in Kansas. The last I heard, the wage was $11 an hour, plus bonuses, with overtime available.

4. Dealing Blackjack – The gaming industry, in places like Las Vegas, Reno, and Laughlin, Nevada, provides many working opportunities for RVers. Jobs range from dealing blackjack to working as a customer greeter in casinos.

5. Driving Tour Bus – From Alaska to the Grand Canyon to Florida, tourist areas provide many employment opportunities for RVers. Driving tour buses, ranging in size from extended length vans to full sized coaches, is a good way to make money while spending time in places where the tourists pay big bucks to visit.

6. Fish Cannery – This is hard, dirty, smelly, physically demanding work, but one fulltime RVer we know spends a full summer in Alaska working long hours at a fish cannery, and he tells us he makes enough in a season to pay for two years of fulltime RV travel.

7. Working The NASCAR Circuit – Every race car driver, from the superstars to the new guy in the pits, have somebody selling souvenirs with their names and car numbers on them. We’ve met a couple of RVers who tow a vending trailer behind their motorhomes and follow the circuit, selling souvenirs to racing fans.

8. Selling Christmas Trees – This is obviously a seasonal job, and is hard physical work, but we have known many RVers who sell Christmas trees on lots across the country, and several have told us that they have made $8,000 or more in less than a month. Many times the same companies who hire RVers to sell Christmas trees hire them to sell fireworks for the Fourth of July, and Halloween pumpkins on the same lots. One couple we know made about $7,000 in two weeks selling fireworks this past summer.

9. Horse Wrangler – I make it a point never to ride anything you can’t put gasoline in, but if you are an equestrian fan and are comfortable in a saddle, you may find work as a horse wrangler, leading trail rides at one of the many dude ranches in the Southwest. The pay isn’t usually top dollar, but tips can be good, and if you love horses, it’s your chance to get paid for playing cowboy (or cowgirl).

10. Gas Line Survey – There is a long, ongoing thread on the Escapees forum, on working as a gas line surveyor, and the RVers we have talked to who have done this work all say that it’s a great way to make good money and get a lot of exercise in the process.

For more ideas on making money as you travel, check out my Working On The Road web page. What are some of the ways you have earned money on the road?

Thought For The Day – My wife does all the driving; I just get to hold the steering wheel.

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Yesterday started out windy here in Show Low, Arizona, but by noon it had calmed down quite a bit. My daughter Tiffany and her family stopped by for a visit in the early afternoon, and it’s always a treat to spend time with them.

My son-in-law, Jim, crawled under our Ford van to unbolt the winch we had mounted between our bucket seats to pull my motorcycle inside the van. With the bike gone, the winch was in the way, and Jim can use it on his ATV, so I told him if he’d remove it, he could have it. Jim also replaced a leaky gasket on the cap of the power steering reservoir on our bus, getting himself nice and dirty in the process.

Meanwhile, our two granddaughters, Hailey and Destiny, kept Terry and their mom busy, turning over rocks to look for bugs and taking a walk down to the playground here at Show Low Lake Campground.

Later in the evening we went to Tiffany and Jim’s house for a delicious pasta dinner Miss Terry made. My granddaughters have an endless supply of energy, and they just love crawling over their Grandpa. They are always coming up with something, including decorating me with their little plastic hair clips. The things I do to entertain those girls!

We have had a great time visiting our family and friends here in our old hometown, but Terry and I are both getting a bad case of hitch itch, and we’re looking forward to getting back on the road in a little over a week.

I’ve been looking at routes we can take to Sedalia, Missouri for the Escapade rally, and though we can get there in two or three days if we push it and take the interstates all the way, what fun is that? I think we’ll take Interstate 40 as far as Tucumcari, New Mexico, and then follow U.S. Highway 54 across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and into Kansas.

U.S. 54 will actually take us across Kansas and into Missouri, within an hour or so of Sedalia. But, depending on our schedule, we may detour north toward Kansas City for a visit with Terry’s cousin Carolyn Henley and her husband Mel on the way. I have been doing some researching on the internet and have found several places I’d like to stop along the way to gather stories for the Gypsy Journal.

Whenever we can, we always prefer following the U.S. Highways and two lane roads in our travels. They are never as fast as the superslab, but we enjoy the slower pace, and that’s where we have found the real America.

Let’s face it, a Denny’s restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona and a Denny’s in Toledo, Ohio are pretty much the same. My late friend Dave Baleria referred to it as Generica, the one size fits all cookie cutter land of corporate franchises that you can find at every interstate highway off ramp in the country.

We much prefer the small town diners and Mom and Pop businesses we find on the back roads. If you have lunch in any small town diner in America and do a little eavesdropping, by the time you finish your dessert, you’ll know who’s cheating on who, who just got their pickup truck repossesed, and who’s kid just got expelled from school.

And besides, the blueberry pie always tastes better in those places than the cardboard fare they serve in the chain restaurants!

Thought For The Day – Lead your life so you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.

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