When we started fulltiming, a veteran road warrior told me that you’re not a real RVer until you have accomplished most, if not all, of what he called RVing’s Top 10 experiences. We must be slow learners, because after eleven years on the road, we still have a couple to go. So are we real RVers yet?

1 – Boondocking: To truly experience the freedom that the RV lifestyle has to offer, at least once you should spend a few days or even a week or two boondocking, also called dry camping. I define boondocking as living without being hooked up to a water source or electrical outlet, living off my RV’s systems. The feeling of independence you get when you sever the campground umbilical cord is something you must experience to understand. Whether you prefer to camp for weeks on end on BLM land in the desert or just cross the country spending the night in the parking lots of RV friendly businesses like WalMart, boondocking can save you a lot of money, and once you get used to it, it is lots of fun!

2 - Quartzsite: If you spend any time at all around fulltime or snowbird RVers, before too long someone will ask you if you have been to Quartzsite yet. Located on Interstate 10 about 125 miles west of Phoenix, Quartzsite is a sleepy little Arizona desert town of a couple hundred people most of the year. But every January, thousands and thousands of RVers descend on Quartzsite to boondock on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the surrounding desert, and to attend the big Quartzsite RV Show and the numerous flea markets, rock and gem shows, and other events held every winter. It’s big, it’s crowded, it’s dusty, and it’s fun! Some people love it and some attend once and seek quieter activities for future outings. If you have not been to Quartzsite yet, you owe it to yourself to experience it at least once.

3 – Rainbows End in Livingston, Texas: Rainbows End is the Mecca for serious RVers. National Headquarters of the Escapees RV Club, literally thousands of RVers “live” on Rainbow Drive in Livingston, the address of the Escapees Mail Service. Rainbows End includes a very nice RV park, the club’s National Headquarters, and CARE, the adult care center the Escapees created to provide assistance to retired RVers and those recuperating from illness or surgery. RVers come to Rainbows End to license their vehicles and become “legal” Texans, to tour the club’s mail forwarding service, to meet friends, and just hang out with like-minded folks.

4 – The Rally: RV rallies offer the opportunity for fun, fellowship, and education, and the biggest RV rally is the Affinity Group’s annual mega-event, known simply as The Rally. Thousands of people come to camp, shop the vendors, attend seminars, enjoy entertainment from top named performers, visit with old friends and make new ones. This year’s event will be in Louisville, Kentucky July 22 – 25.

5 – Escapade: Though not on the huge scale of The Rally, the annual Escapees Club Escapades are events no RVer should miss. You will meet lots of nice people, attend some excellent seminars, and enjoy the entertainment every evening. This year’s Escapade will be in Goshen, Indiana September 12- 17.

6 – Slab City: Located on an abandoned military base in Niland, California, Slab City is a popular gathering place every winter for RVers who come to boondock and enjoy what many call the last great bastion of freedom in America. Populated by serious RVers, snowbirds, eccentrics who live there year round, and an assortment of colorful characters, Slab City is another one of those places you either love or hate. Check it out once, and draw your own conclusions.

7 – Elkhart Indiana: Home to at least half of the RV manufacturers in the country, Elkhart, Indiana has a lot to offer RVers, from factory tours to RV surplus stores, displays of some of the earliest RVs at the RV Hall of Fame Museum, RV rallies, and lots of fun exploring the Amish countryside just east of town.

8 – Highway 101, Oregon Coast: This is surely one of the most spectacular drives in the United States, offering beautiful ocean vistas, charming fishing villages, beach combing, whale watching, lighthouses, and memories around every bend in the road.

9 – Padre Island: Every winter RVers come to Padre Island National Seashore, near Corpus Christie, Texas to dry camp at Padre Island National Seashore. A $10 annual permit is required, and water and a dump station are free. There is no time limit, and many RVers stay the entire season.

10 – The Alaska Highway: This is the ultimate RV destination for many. A trip up the Alaska Highway includes adventure, wonderful scenery, wildlife, history, and memories to last a lifetime. The road is not nearly as bad as some people would want you to believe, but the experiences you will have are more than anyone could ever describe.

Well, are you a real RVer? How many of these Top 10 can you lay claim to?

Thought For The Day – If God is willing to forgive us, why do we sometimes find it so hard to forgive ourselves?

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How do you travel? Do you make a beeline for your destination by the quickest possible route, or do you casually meander along until you get there? Do you plan your stops ahead of time so you know where you’ll be every night, or do you worry about where you’ll spend the night when you get tired of driving for the day? Do you go from membership park to membership park, getting the most out of your annual dues?

Are you a planner who gets almost as much enjoyment in anticipation of your journeys, or do you like to be surprised by what you find along the way?

It’s only February, but we are already thinking about our summer travels. With a great big old country out there to explore, it’s hard to decide where to go next.

For several years our summer travels were dictated by our teaching schedule with Life on Wheels. We traveled a lot of miles, but it was always to the same places, and usually along the same routes. While I love teaching, the same old routine had stopped being fun. We’re ready to do something different.

Our Winnebago gives us the ability to travel some routes that we were not comfortable tackling in our bus conversion, and there are a lot of places in the Rocky Mountain west that we’d like to explore. So we may spend some time in Colorado and Wyoming. I’ve never been to Yellowstone and some of the other western National Parks.

Or we may go to the Pacific Northwest. We love the Oregon and Washington coast, and we haven’t been there in a long time. Then again, we really want to go to the big Winnebago Grand National Rally in Forest City, Iowa in July, so that would cut short a trip to the Northwest. Hmmm…. Branson? We haven’t been there in a long time. Our options are open, and our schedule is set in Jello. That’s the way we like it.

Our favorite mode of travel is to have some general idea of where we’re going, but no concrete plans on where or when we’ll be at any given time. We seldom make advance reservations, unless we’re going to be in a high traffic area where it might be hard to get a campsite otherwise.

I do a lot of internet research on areas where we’ll be traveling, and put together a list of places we’d like to see. We also get a lot of tips from our readers, and whenever we cross a state line, we try to stop at the State Welcome Center and pick up tourism brochures to give us more ideas.

When we’re going from Point A to Point B, we don’t stop in RV parks every night. I can’t see paying somebody $20 to $30 or more just for a place to park overnight. That’s why we have a self-contained RV. Between WalMarts, truck stops, city parks that allow free camping, casinos, Elks and Moose lodges, and VFW posts, we can always find a place to stop for the night. A few times we have taken readers up on their offer to park in their driveway for a night or two. If we do stop overnight at an RV park, it is usually a Passport America campground.

Once we arrive at a place where we want to spend a few days, we find a comfortable campground to settle into, and make day trips in a 75 to 100 mile radius to explore the region, in our van.

That’s the method that seems to work for us, but there is no one right way to live the RV lifestyle. It’s all abut what works best for you. So, how do you travel?

Thought For The Day – Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

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It’s okay if you find yourself humming the tune to Maria’s song from The Sound of Music, given today’s blog title. But I thought I’d share some of my favorite things in the RV lifestyle, from my favorite truckstop to my favorite campground, to name just a few, and why they rate so high with me. I’m curious how my list compares with yours.

Favorite Truckstop – I love the Iowa 80 Truckstop in Walcott, Iowa. Billed as the “World’s Largest Truckstop,” this place is so big that they have two or three semi tractors on display inside the showroom! Along with every kind of gadget and goodie a trucker (or an RV driver) could ever want or need. Not to mention a 300 seat restaurant with a 50 foot salad bar, a movie theater, game room, barbershop, dentist office, garage, big rig wash, CAT scales, a Wendy’s and a Dairy Queen! What’s not to love?

Favorite Campground – Hands down, that would be our present location, Elkhart Campground in Elkhart, Indiana. Located in the RV Capital of the World, you can find anything and everything related to RVing in the surrounding area. We have been coming here for so many years that the owners, Bob and Gita Patel, have become part of our extended family.

Favorite Escapees Park – Raccoon Valley in Heiskell, Tennessee. We love the surrounding area, the friendly people, and the twice weekly jam sessions by local bluegrass musicians.

Favorite Corps of Engineers Campground – We have never stayed at a COE campground that we didn’t like, but my very favorite has to be Toad Suck Park, near Conway, Arkansas. The name alone makes it a winner, but our huge RV site with 50 amp electric and water, located right on the bank of the Arkansas River, was wonderful. We loved sitting and watching the riverboats pushing barges through the locks at the dam adjacent to the campground.

Favorite Snowbird Roost – This is another easy choice. We love the area around Rockport and Aransas Pass, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. It’s affordable, slow paced, the people are friendly, the seafood is plentiful and cheap, and if you enjoy fishing and kayaking, you’ll be in heaven.

Favorite Route – There are many that we have loved traveling, from historic Route 66 across the country, to U.S. Highway 2 across Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula, but the very best has been U.S. Highway 101 along the Oregon coast. There are breathtaking vistas around almost every bend in the road.

Favorite Big City – We try to avoid big cities whenever we can, much preferring the slower pace of small town America, but two big cities we have loved have been Boston and Washington, D.C. It’s a hard choice, since both are loaded with the history we love exploring, but since I can only have one favorite, it would be Washington. From museums to monuments to famous buildings, we could spend weeks in D.C. and not see it all.

Favorite Museum – We’ve been to many wonderful museums in our time on the road, but my favorite of them all has been the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where we saw so many of our nation’s historic documents  and artifacts on display.

Favorite Free Overnight Parking Spot – We never miss the chance to stop at the Cabela’s Outfitters store just off Interstate 90 in Mitchell, South Dakota. They have a dedicated parking lot for RVs, complete with a dump station, and it is within walking distance to a restaurant, Super Wal-Mart, and a Menard’s Home Improvement store.

Favorite Fast Food Restaurant – How could I not end this blog with at least one place to eat? We think the Cheddar Butterburger at Culver’s Restaurants can’t be beat. Whenever we have been in an area where there is no Culver’s, we stop at the first one we see when we enter their market area.

Thought For The Day – If it wasn’t for my faults I’d be perfect.

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Yesterday was a gray and gloomy day in the desert. Heavy clouds and a chilly wind reminded us that while we may be in Arizona, it is still February.

During the morning we did some banking, mailed out a stack of orders that had come in last week while we were busy with our rally, and ran a few other errands. Then we went back to the bus, and I tried to work on the computer for a couple of hours, but I just couldn’t concentrate. It was a good day for a nap and I was getting droopy, so finally I stretched out on the couch.

While I was being lazy, Miss Terry did some laundry and made up a batch of dough for homemade pizza. We love pizza, and I’ve never found a restaurant that can make pizza like my bride does. I woke up just as she was taking a scrumptious pizza out of the oven for dinner. Yummy!

I wrote a few days ago that we plan to spend some time in the Pacific Northwest this summer, and I logged onto the Thousand Trails website and booked us a total of six consecutive weeks at Thousand Trails and NACO preserves in two week intervals along the Oregon and Washington coasts. We’ll start at the South Jetty preserve in Florence, Oregon; then move on to the Pacific City campground in Cloverdale; and from there we’ll go to the Long Beach preserve in Seaview, Washington.

We love the Pacific coast, and some of our favorite memories of our fulltime RV lifestyle are those from our first summer on the road, when we spent several weeks meandering down Highway 101, exploring the beach towns, lighthouses, and working fishing villages from the tip of the Olympic Peninsula to the California border.

It was here that Miss Terry was first introduced to the banana slug, one of the slimiest and most disgusting creatures you’ll ever encounter. The Pacific banana slug can be over nine inches long, and that’s a lot of ugly!

I still remember the first time I spotted one of these snails without a shell, and decided that it would make great fishing bait. What fish could refuse such a fat offering when I stuck it on my hook and threw it into the water?

Have you ever actually touched a banana slug? If not, take my word for it. Don’t do it! It took me forever to get the sticky goo off my fingers?

We also want to get up to Port Townsend, Washington to spend some time at the Escapee park there. Port Townsend is a picturesque little town, with a lot of history and plenty to see and do.

There are a several other places we want to visit, including the beach town of Seaside, Oregon and historic Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River; as well as Westport, Washington, with it’s charter boats, commercial fishing fleet, and beautiful lighthouse.

The last time we were in Lincoln City, Oregon we actually saw a couple of gray whales playing in the harbor, and we want to go back and see if we can spot some more!

 Thought For The Day - Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.

With our rally over, and Life on Wheels now gone, for the first time in a very long time, Terry and I have no place we have to be and nothing we have to do for the next seven months. I have to tell you, that is a nice feeling! It brings to mind the early days in our fulltime RV lifestyle, when we literally pulled up to an intersection and did a mental flip of the coin to decide right or left, north or south.

As I have written before, if I had to define the fulltime RV lifestyle in just one word, that word would be freedom. The freedom to go where we want, when we want, unhampered by schedules and timelines. We’re looking forward to enjoying some of that freedom in the coming months.

Our next real commitment is our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally in Celina, Ohio, September 28 – October 3. Between now and then, our plans are written in Jello. Next week we’ll make a short trip to San Diego with my daughter and her family to take the grandkids to Sea World. After that, we plan to spend some time wandering around here in Arizona. Eventually we’ll begin meandering toward the Pacific Northwest, an area we love and have seen entirely too little of in the last few years.

Half a lifetime ago, I got my start in the newspaper business in the small towns along the Northwest coast, and I have missed that area. Except for a brief two week visit five years ago, we have not been there since our first summer on the road. It’s time to go back. We have no real destination in mind, anywhere between Brookings, Oregon and Port Townsend, Washington is fine with us.

Though we spent much of our lives living in the deserts and mountains of the Southwest, Terry and I love being around the ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. We feel at home anywhere there is salt water, a beach, working fishing ports, lighthouses, and fresh seafood.

We really have not used our Thousand Trails membership enough to make it cost effective, but we knew the time would come when we could start exploring more of the country, and this summer we plan to hit several of the Thousand Trails and NACO preserves along the Oregon and Washington coast.

While we don’t usually like to make reservations, in popular areas like this, we know we’ll have to do so to some extent. But between the above mentioned membership RV parks, Elks and Moose lodges, VFW posts, and our Passport America membership, I’m sure we’ll find plenty of accommodations.

Thought For The Day - One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.