Rallies and Seminars

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our E-mail Digest or RSS Feed. We will then send you the stories that are posted each day in an e-mail digest. We use a service called Feedburner for delivery of these emails. You will receive an e-mail from Feedburner after you subscribe and you must click on that email to activate your subscription. Thanks for visiting and enjoy all the information! RV.Net Blog AdminLast week, we were at the Gypsy Journal Rally in Celina, Ohio.  About 130 RVs gathered at the rally to meet, greet, and have fun, but also to learn.  They know that going to rallies and attending seminars is the easy way to learn. Learning the hard way is having 3 tire blowouts your first year on the road before figuring out how to manage your tire pressure.  Learning the hard way is having a minor traffic accident that punctures and ignites your propane system before figuring out that you should turn off the propane while on the road.  Learning the hard way is to lose all your travel photos to a computer problem before you figure out how to make backups. Learning the easy way is to take a seminar from someone with experience.  They don’t get much more experienced than Joe and Vicki Kieva.  You probably know of them because they’ve been writing a column in Good Sam’s Highways magazine for many, many years.  I found their website, RVKnowHow, very useful even before we first got our RV. They’ve been writing and giving seminars... Read more

Are you Online while Driving?

by Chris Guld, Geeks on Tour I remember when we had to schlep our laptop up to the RV park’s office and plug in to their phone line in order to use dial-up to get online.  Then came Wi-Fi.  You could browse the Internet from the comfort of your RV.  We even got a Datastorm Satellite dish that gave us high-speed Internet *wherever* we were parked – in the middle of the desert, or in the most remote national forest.  What luxury that was.  We live fulltime in our motorhome and we need to work to make our living.  Our work is primarily on our website so it’s important that we be able to connect wherever we are. Read more  Read More →

Six Words About Your RV Life

Hello intrepid travelers, Calling all wordsmiths, writers, witty individuals or families…can you condense your RV and camping experiences and expectations into six words? I double dog dare ya to share Six Words About Your RV Life!! Have you heard of the six word memoirs project from SMITH Magazine? In 2006 the fine minds behind SMITH Magazine offered aspiring writers, poets, those with something to say, and plain ole witty folk an opportunity to tell their story in six words. It’s said that Hemingway did just that when challenged to write a six word story. He came up with this: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  Thousands of others from the famous to the neighbor-next-door have submitted their six word story in several SMITH Magazine projects including a series on Love & Heartbreak. And this got me thinking about my own six word memoirs…stories about my life on the road, as an RVer. My motto and the RV Cooking Show’s tag line is a mere six words – “Love to travel. Love to eat.” I quickly realized we all have a story to tell, a short ditty to share – especially when it comes to our RV and camping travels. So, with much anticipation and excitement I am delighted to introduce a special six word series – Six Words About Your RV Life. Think about your adventures and see if you can craft a six word memoir about your RV vacation, lifestyle, camping experiences. Leave your six words on my RVCookingShow blog or right here on this RV.net blog posting – Six... Read more

Dalton Gang Hideout

The Dalton brothers were one of the most famous outlaw gangs of the Old West, and today visitors to the friendly little town of Meade, Kansas can walk in their footprints at the Dalton Gang Hideout. Read more  Read More →

Coyote Camping in the Southwestern Deserts II

By Bob Difley In last week’s blog I described how to find dispersed boondocking campsites (coyote camping) in the American deserts. Now that you know how to find coyote camping spots, the following tips will help to enhance and expand your desert boondocking experience: The best way to find dispersed campsites in the desert is to explore first in your tow or toad, checking the road surface for soft spots, lethal potholes, and muffler-killing rocks. Try to find roads that follow the less-eroded high ground rather than up a wash, where the surface could be sandy and soft. You can often find “desert pavement” on the higher surfaces, a naturally occurring tile or cobblestone-like surface that is very hard and supportive of even heavy rigs. And you are likely to have better views from the higher ground. Choose a spot, if available, that has been camped in before, rather than destroying desert plants in creating a new site. Haul as much water in Jerry Jugs or inflatable blatters (available at Camping World or RV and boating supplystores) with you as you can carry. Dump these into your fresh water tank as it goes down to give you extended staying time. Buy the type of sewer cap that has a fitting for a garden hose, which you can then lead off away from your site for your gray water to drain into (dig a deep hole and cover outflow with a layer of sand after each use). Never dump your black water except into an approved dump station). Solar panels work great in the desert, even... Read more

Kindle Book Reader is perfect for RVers

GeeksOnTour.com: I love to read, but I don’t get to do it anywhere near as much as I like. Books are heavy, so we don’t carry many in the RV. The hardest part of selling our house and getting rid of all our possessions was the bookshelves full of books. I have to *really* want a book to buy it, or I have to luck into a good find at a park’s lending/trading library. All that has changed with the Kindle. Read more  Read More →

Preparing Your RV for the Colder Months Ahead

As summer winds down, it’s time to prepare your RV for the cooler weather ahead. Fall and winter are really great times to take in the changing seasons on the open road. But when it’s time to turn in for the evening, the overnight temperatures can plummet, especially at higher altitudes, resulting in increased propane usage, interior condensation, and other plumbing-related issues.  And then there is that freak snow storm you wake up to that while beautiful, can catch you off-guard, leaving you unprepared to deal with freezing temperatures.  If you plan to camp well in to the colder months, here are some ways you can make your cold weather RVing ventures less of a chilling experience. 1. Examine your RV’s plumbing to determine what measures may be needed to prevent damage from freezing temperatures. Some RV’s have plumbing exposed to the outside elements. In this case, you should wrap the exposed plumbing with heat tape and foam pipe insulation. . 2. Part of the plumbing system includes the holding tanks. Some RV’s have enclosed holding tanks that are heated by the RV’s furnace through heater ducting to the holding tank areas. As long as the furnace runs occasionally, the tanks won’t freeze unless it’s very cold (below 20F). For those tanks that are not heated and/or enclosed, tank heating pads can be affixed to the bottoms of the tanks. These are very easy to install, thermostatically-controlled, and come in both 12-volt DC... Read more

RV Cooking Show – Lovely Lake Tahoe & Luscious Grilled Fruit

I simply can’t believe it! Labor Day weekend is here already…the official end to my favorite season – summer. There’s only one thing to do in this case…enjoy the wide open out-of-doors at the campground or RV park of your choice and get grilling! We’re spending this holiday weekend in South Lake Tahoe and what a treat it is. In this episode of the RV Cooking Show – Lovely Lake Tahoe and Luscious Grilled Fruit – I’ll show you some of my favorite Tahoe hot spots – historic estates, a gem of a bay, Lake Tahoe’s only outlet, and my favorite Lake Tahoe beach. There’s so much more that I couldn’t fit – visit the show page on my website for lots more about the area. By now you know I love farmer markets and South Lake Tahoe has a terrific one. I stopped there and was lured in by the fresh, fragrant fruit of the season – peaches, plums, strawberries, and figs (the nectarines looked great but were not ripe enough). This inspired me to share one of my favorite old time grilling tricks – fresh fruit, brushed with a honey-balsamic glaze and grilled to perfection. That being said, the RV Cooking Show crew set forth to deliver a special Labor Day weekend recipe that we’ll bet becomes an old standby for you, too. Enjoy! I’d love to know what you think about this episode of the RV Cooking Show, where you’re camping and what you’re cooking this Labor Day weekend, and any other thoughts, ideas or comments you’d like to share. Leave a comment below! Happy... Read more

Presidential Museums and Blogs

by Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour: If you are interested in American history, as we are, you will love visiting Presidential Libraries/Museums. We make a point of visiting them whenever one is nearby. In our 6 years of RV Travel we have visited 11 Presidential Museums. Reagan’s museum wow’ed us with the actual Air Force One airplane and a panoramic view of the California hills. We saw the humble beginnings of Herbert Hoover in West Branch, Iowa: And got close and personal with the Lincoln’s in Springfield, Illinois. We can relive any of these visits because the stories and photos are all on our Blog. Without the blog, I have no way of telling you when we visited any of these places! With the Blog, I can give you dates, maps, photos, and links to more information about the places we’ve visited. Sometimes I spend several hours revisiting some part of our travels and being reminded just how special this fulltime RVing lifestyle is. I would keep the blog just for myself, even if no one else ever looked at it. But, it is also a wonderful way to share our travels with family and friends. They never need to wonder about where we are or what we’re doing. Since we post to the blog several times a week, they actually know much more about our life than when we lived around the corner. But, how do you find our blog posts just about Presidential Museums? After all, we’ve been keeping this blog since April of 2003. We have over 1,200 post pages. I make sure to apply... Read more

There Is Magic In This Shower Head

So how do you really like showering in your RV?  Even when using a city water connection without a regulator, a shower can still result in a less than a “pressure-packed” experience. Low water pressure from the shower head is most often caused by the poor design used by most RV manufacturers, save for the high end luxury models. For some reason, they all come with this tiny little hole inside the shower head which is supposed to help save you some water. Well, they definitely do but as a consequence, you can barely rinse the soap out of your hair! You could try and modify the standard shower head to remove the restriction and that can help. But there is another way to magically increase the output pressure of your shower head. Replace it with an Oxygenics Body Spa shower wand. The shower head uses a venturi effect to raise the pressure output  and provide you with a much nicer showering experience. This mod is so easy that you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. Just unscrew the standard shower head and screw the magic one on. The output is also adjustable, providing a low pressure trickle to a full blown high pressure spray. At the base of the wand is a circular adjuster you simply twist. The only drawback of this mod is that you lose the ability to completely shut off the water supply. The standard shower head allows you to almost stop the water flow using a valve on the back of the head. This feature doesn’t exist on the magic wand. So you might... Read more

Next Page »