Readers have been asking me for an update on how we like our new to us Winnebago Ultimate Advantage motorhome, now that we have lived and traveled in it for almost six months, as compared to the MCI bus conversion we built and lived in for over eight years.

Overall, we are both very happy with the Winnebago, though we have had to make a few adjustments. We love having the extra room the bedroom and living room slides give us. However, we actually had more inside storage room in the bus, due to the extensive cabinetry that Miss Terry designed and built for it.

But, even though we had three huge bays underneath the bus, we still have more basement storage in the Winnebago than we did with the bus. The reason for that is that one entire bay of the bus was used for our holding tanks, which do not take up bay space in the Winnebago, and also because half of one bay in the bus held our house battery bank and inverter, and half of the third bay held our twin propane tanks, plus the fuel tank for our Onan gas generator.

We had a huge gray/black waste tank in the rear bay, and when we were parked in a campground with full hookups, we could turn a diverter valve and let the gray water run directly into the sewer, which meant we could go a long time without dumping the waste tank. In the Winnebago we have to dump the black tank about every seven days. We could probably stretch that if we were boondocking and being very careful, but the difference in tank capacity is really noticeable.

After our first night in the Winnebago, we could really tell the difference in insulation between the two rigs. We built a lot of insulation into the bus, and it was both quieter inside, and much warmer (or cooler, depending on the season), than the motorhome. But, the bus had a single rooftop air conditioner that was vented directly inside, which was much nosier when running than the ducted basement air conditioner in the Winnebago.

After driving across the country in the Winnebago, I don’t know how I lived with the tired old Detroit diesel in the bus for so long. These days I think nothing of cruising up long grades at 60 miles per hour, passing eighteen wheelers, instead of crawling along in the right lane with the radiator misters on at fifteen miles per hour, hoping some eighteen wheeler didn’t run over us. The Winnebago definitely has more power and gets better fuel mileage than the bus did, but I find that I don’t have as much confidence in the Winnebago’s exhaust brake as I did the Jake brake in the bus when going down steep grades.

Everything in life is a tradeoff. Terry misses the household style refrigerator, gas range with oven, and separate washer and dryer that we had in the bus. But, the larger kitchen area and the spacious bedroom/bathroom layout of the Winnebago is much more comfortable. She’s learning to live with the Winnebago’s microwave/convection oven, and the Splendide RV washer/dryer combo.

When you add in a lot of creature comforts and handy accessories, such as cruise control, automatic HWH leveling jacks, automatic Winegard rooftop TV dish, two gas furnaces, and a heat pump, for us the Winnebago comes out the winner.

Several readers have asked us if we will be at the Winnebago Grand National Rally in Forest City, Iowa in July, if we’ll be vendors, and if I’ll be presenting any of my seminars at the rally. The answers are yes, probably, and I don’t know. Yes, we plan to attend the rally, we’ll probably be vending (I haven’t registered yet), and I don’t know if I’ll be presenting any seminars. I haven’t been invited to do any, and the inquiry I sent was never answered. But if you are a Winnebago owner and will be at the rally, and would like me to do a seminar or two, why not give the folks in Forest City a shout or an e-mail? They have no idea who I am, since we have not had our coach that long, but if they see there is an interest, they might invite me to do a couple of seminars.

Speaking of RV seminars, while our schedule won’t allow us to be at the RVSEF RV Lifestyle, Education and Safety Conference in Bowling Green, Kentucky, June 3-6, Walter Cannon has come up with an excellent RV education program filled with great seminars. There is a 10% discount for anybody registering for the conference before March 1^st, so if you plan to attend, register now and save yourself some money on this excellent program. 

Thought For The Day – Virtue is the only true nobility.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

The strong winds that had been hammering northern Indiana Friday continued all night long, and continued through much of yesterday. There was no question about it; we were not getting out on the highway. We really, really wanted to be on the go, but we really, really didn’t want to be blown all over the road and waste a bunch of fuel fighting the wind.

So we spent the day listening to music, cruising the internet and hoping that today would bring us better weather. About noon, our friend Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint stopped by to visit, and later on we went to dinner with Greg and Jan White. We all got a laugh about the fact that this was our third “farewell dinner” in as many days.

Back at Elkhart Campground, I spent some time studying our planned route, while Miss Terry decided to try making a batch of pumpkin cheese bread in her convection oven. This would only be her second attempt at baking in the oven, as she transitions from the gas oven we had in our bus conversion.

While Terry was using her electric mixer to blend the ingredients, we suddenly lost all electrical power in the motorhome. The Progressive Industries Electrical Management System (EMS) unit I got from Lawrence RV Accessories was showing 125 volts of power coming in. I pushed the button to turn our inverter on so we had power again from the inverter and battery bank, but the battery charger was not working.

I flipped all of the breakers on and off, went out to the campground’s electrical pedestal and flipped the breaker there off and on, but we still were not getting any shore power, just the inverter feed. If I turned off the inverter, we went dead again, though the EMS still showed incoming AC power.

Having exhausted my small store of knowledge, I called Greg and he came over. We ran through all of the things I had done already, and then Greg had me turn on our Onan generator. Still no power to the inverter, except what it was drawing from the battery bank. We both agreed that the problem might well be a blown transfer switch, which automatically switched between shore power and generator power.

After studying the books that came with our motorhome, I logged onto Winnebago’s website, where owners can download electrical and plumbing schematic drawings, along with paint codes and a ton of other valuable resource information for anything Winnebago has ever built.

With still no luck solving the problem at that point, Greg checked our inverter and pressed the reset button for the incoming breaker on it, and suddenly we had AC power again!      

Apparently all incoming shore power is routed through the inverter, which really doesn’t make any sense to me, because if the inverter goes bad, we’d be stuck with no power to the motorhome at all. The way I wired our bus, the inverter was a supplementary power source, and taking it out of the line would not disrupt power to the coach. But we have to learn all about living in a factory made unit again, including engineering designs that boggle the mind.

With power restored, Miss Terry finished making her pumpkin bread, and it came out looking great. She is her own worst critic, but even she said it was pretty darned good! I thought it was delicious!  

While I was enjoying a slice of yummy hot pumpkin bread, Bad Nick was busy with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled A Campaign Ad I’d Like To See. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, and leave the rest to God. 

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

When I checked my e-mail yesterday morning, I had a message from Verizon Wireless that an update for my Blackberry Storm was available, which was supposed to be the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread.

So, being the trusting soul I am, I plugged my phone into my computer, logged onto the Verizon website, and clicked the update button. The process took a few minutes, and then I got a message telling me the download was complete. Quick and easy, right?

Well, yes, except for the fact that the upload wiped out my entire contacts list. The photos I had stored on the phone are still there, even a couple of songs I transferred over from my computer a while back. But every telephone number I had is gone.

Yeah, I know, I could have backed up my information to my computer, but I never thought of it. So I’ll be spending some time digging out business cards and entering all of those numbers all over again. What fun.

There are many features I like about the Blackberry, but after using it for the last few months I have come to realize that my smart phone is smarter than I am by a long shot! I’m sure my seven year old granddaughter Hailey could probably make it do wonderful things, but I get a headache trying to figure what all the buttons are for.

It has been interesting to read all of the e-mails and comments from readers of yesterday’s blog Considering Our Options, about RV extended warranties. Some people feel that an extended warranty is a good investment, and just as many, if not more, seem to think they are not worth the money. I also heard from some folks who did buy extended warranties on their RVs, only to find that the companies issuing the warranties either did not honor needed repairs, or were very slow in paying. Like so much in the RV industry, there seem to be so many snakes selling extended warranties that you have to be very, very careful who you do business with.

I have had some comments from longtime readers who took me to task for buying a factory built motorhome because I have always said that “all RVs are junk and I’d never own anything but a bus conversion.” I don’t know when I supposedly said that, and in looking back over several years of past blogs and issues of the Gypsy Journal, I don’t find any such comment.

Yes, I have said many times that the quality of most factory built RVs is pretty sad, and I have said that a lot of junk has been foisted off on RV buyers by a lot of companies. However I have also said many times, in print and in the seminars I present at RV rallies, that there were four companies whose rigs I would be comfortable owning. Those companies are Heartland, Tiffin, Newmar, and Winnebago. When we started looking for a rig to replace our MCI bus conversion, they were on our very short list.

I love our old bus, and I will always be a fan of bus conversions. For cargo carrying capacity, safety in the event of a crash, longevity, and overall ruggedness, there has never been a stick and staple motorhome built that can compare. When we moved from the bus to our Winnebago, we traded down in those respects. No question about it.

However, our needs have changed. As our granddaughters have gotten older, the bus has become very crowded when they came to visit. We really wanted a coach with a slide. We also do not see ourselves doing nearly as much dry camping as we have in the past, so the huge holding tanks, battery bank, and solar panels on the bus are no longer a necessity.   

Yes, we had many wonderful years in our bus, and it carried us many miles in comfort and safety. Just as it will whomever owns it next. And though we have moved on, we’ll always look when we hear an old Detroit diesel roar to life. Once a bus nut, always a bus nut.

Thought For The Day – It’s frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

It seems like we had more rain and cold weather this past summer than we did sunshine. October hasn’t changed that. While we were in Celina we had several rainy days, and though we got a break while we drove back to Elkhart Thursday, it started raining just about the time we finished getting set up in our site at Elkhart Campground. It poured all night long, and most of yesterday it continued to rain.

Somebody posted a thread on the Escapees forum yesterday saying it was raining where he was, and asking what fulltimers do with their time on days like that. I replied that we sleep in, make love, have a leisurely breakfast, sip hot chocolate, watch TV, surf the internet, read books, talk, take naps, and call friends and family. Then I added that I hope it rained again today!

Maybe it’s because of all those years I spent living on the Washington coast, where we averaged well over 120 inches of rain a year, but I like rainy days, as long as we don’t have to travel on them. Eventually I do get cabin fever, but a drizzly day now and then is very relaxing. 

I told Miss Terry once that I’d like to spend an entire winter on the Northwest coast sometime, when the pace is slower, and we could enjoy watching the storms rolling in over the Pacific Ocean. I wonder if we can put a fireplace in our motorhome?

Yesterday we did venture out in the afternoon to drop off some orders at the post office, then we met Bill Joyce and Diane Melde for dinner at Mancino’s, our favorite pizza place here in Elkhart. By the time we got back to the campground it had finally stopped raining, and the weatherman says we can expect clear skies for most of the next week, though it’s going to be chilly, with daytime temperatures in the 50s and nights in the mid-30s.

Once things dry out around here a little bit, we want to spend some time getting the bays in our Winnebago better organized. My buddy Ron Speidel taught a seminar at our Gypsy Gathering rally about how to organize your storage bays, and though I didn’t have time to sit in, I’ve taken a few tips from observing how Ron has things in his Winnebago Journey.

We were pretty ruthless in purging things as we moved from our bus conversion into the motorhome, and got rid of a lot of stuff. So our bays are not crammed full, but we still have a few things to discard, and then we want to rearrange things to make accessing them easier.

Yesterday we also stopped to check out our bus conversion. Now, I know it’s an inanimate object and incapable of emotions, but I swear, it looked real sad sitting there, when it was made to be out rolling down the highway. We are very pleased with our new RV, but we love that old girl. We put in every screw and strung every inch of wiring, and she carried us a lot of miles over the years.

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about solar power, and that we had decided not to transfer our solar panels from the bus to the Winnebago. But the solar setup we installed on the bus sure does a great job. The bus has been sitting for about three weeks and is not plugged in, but with just the solar panels supplying power, our house battery bank was fully charged. Someone asked if we ever had problems running our house style refrigerator off the inverter and battery bank when dry camping, but with this solar array, we never had to worry. It does the job.

Thought For The Day – They say wine improves with age. As I enter my golden years, I say age improves with wine!