PRODUCT REVIEW: Trailer Aid Tire Changing Ramp

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 AdminOver the years, we’ve purchased many RV products. Some are more useful than others. The Trailer Aid Tire Changing Ramp has proven its worth on more than one occasion. You can see it in action in our new video. The only thing really predictable about tire trouble is that you will eventually experience it. You don’t know exactly when or where it will happen. But someday you will be stuck on the side of the road with a flat or blown tire. It happens to all of us. It’s a guaranteed event. It happens to all of us. If you are towing a trailer and it happens, you’ll be glad you own a Trailer Aid Ramp. This ramp is specially designed to aid tire changes on travel trailers. Trailer Aid allows you to jack up your trailer without using a jack. After loosening the lug nuts on the failed tire, you simply pull your trailer onto the ramp with the good tire. The failed tire is lifted clear of the road, allowing for an easy tire change. Flapping bits of steel belted radial are not kind to your trailer. When tire professionals are working on our rig, we... Read more

Do you own a WEATHER RADIO?

Do you own a weather radio? It’s that time of year again, when our news is dominated by reports of severe weather nationwide. In recent years, we’ve seen heavy springtime tornado and flood activity. Sometimes the impact upon RV campers is heartbreaking. As much as we love RV camping, we all know that RVs do not offer safe shelter from severe weather. In fact, RVs are just as vulnerable to severe weather as any other vehicle. A powerful tornado can lift the largest Class A motorhome like a child’s toy. Even some thunderstorms possess straight-line winds between 100 and 150 MPH, winds that topple trees and carry dangerous flying debris. VIDEO: PROGRAMMING A MIDLAND WR300 WEATHER RADIO Tornadoes, floods, thunderstorms and lightning are not to be taken lightly. Each of these weather conditions can create life threatening situations. On our own website, Long Long Honeymoon, we have a Severe Weather Survival page with a list of Ten Tips for Surviving Severe Weather – plus a couple of instructional videos (one of which you seen here). It’s crucial that you stay informed of changing weather developments while you are RV camping. That’s why we own a MIDLAND WR300 Weather Radio. We bought it after experiencing severe weather in Michigan while camping in our Airstream. Overall, we have been happy with the WR300. It has never failed to grab our attention when severe weather is approaching. This sucker gets LOUD! The WR300 offers AM/FM functionality along... Read more

Printing Pictures with Picasa

I don’t print.  We live in an RV – there’s no place to put printed photo albums!  I love being able to share my pictures by uploading them to Picasa Web Albums / Google+.  (see Member Tutorial Video: Intro to Web Albums)  But that’s me.  I know that some people still like to have prints.  And, I have been known to print some pictures for my Mom to have.    Printing to Your Own Printer Just select the picture (or pictures) you want to print and click the Print button at the bottom of Picasa’s screen (see Member Tutorial Video Printing).  You will have options for print size, Shrink to Fit, printing captions on borders, printer setup options, and number of copies.  For a quick way to get something printed, this works great, but keep reading and I’ll tell you a much better way to print your pictures. Let the Pros do the Printing You will get much better results if you use commercially available photo-printing services like Walgreens, Walmart, Shutterfly, or CVS.  Many people know that already and they export their photos to a USB thumb drive and take them to the store for processing.  Oh no!  It’s so much easier than that!  Picasa will upload your pictures (the edited version) directly to Walgreens, Walmart, Shutterfly, and more.  Then you can go pick up the finished prints in an hour!  Or you can have them mailed to you – or whoever you want to get them. Here’s how:  Just... Read more

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

By Barry Zander, Edited by Monique Zander, the Never-Bored RVers A few days ago, I received a comment via email from Diane Lamirande of Quebec, Canada, that begins:  “I know you are seasoned travellers and you probably have this info already, but I am submitting just in case.  My husband and I travelled from our home city in the province of Quebec, to the Yukon and Alaska.  Our best piece of advice … buy the thick directory ‘The Milepost.’  INDISPENSABLE.” Yes, Diane and all RVers interested in traveling to Alaska, we too strongly recommend having “Milepost” handy when you plan and travel on your trip of a lifetime. BUT, NOW THERE’S ANOTHER INDISPENSABLE REFERENCE!! My website is officially launched, and, while still in the formative stages, it includes all the blogs I did while traveling to Alaska, complete with comments from readers. The site is ontopoftheworld.cc [cc is the new extension for “Cross-Country”] While more items will be added on a weekly basis, the primary entries are photographs taken on our journeys across North America in our recreational vehicle and articles published on the RV.net website that fostered hundreds of comments. ▪.  Richard Gregorie on August 20th, 2010 8:22 am  
Wow! We have just started RVing and your series was terrific. It will be a while before we will make such a venture, but you have given us something to look forward to. Thanks so much for taking the time to bring your great adventure into the homes of... Read more

VIDEO: Alaska Flood – Emergency Airstream Repair!

In 2012, we towed our Airstream on a 14,000 mile road trip. We traveled 5000 miles from Alabama, exiting the United States from Montana, branching through Alberta, and then along the Alaska Highway through British Columbia, and the Yukon, all the way up to the Alaska border. Then we drove around the Alaska interior (visiting Tok, Fairbanks, Denali, Palmer, Wasila, Anchorage, Homer, Portage, Seward, Glennallen, Haines, and Skagway) for another 3000 miles. Then we towed down the Cassiar Highway through British Columbia another 3000 miles to California. Then we made our way home over the course of another 3000 miles. According to our odometer, it was about 14,000 miles from start to finish. “Wasn’t that trip hard on your rig?” you may ask. Indeed, it was a bit hard on our rig. Although we never suffered a major catastrophe to our Airstream, nor did we emerge unscathed. (Our truck did suffer a catastrophe; more on that subject later.) Of course the general assumption is that the widely feared Alaska-Canada Highway (also known as the “Alcan”) is hell on all vehicles. It gained its legendary reputation in the 1940s, when it was carved out of Canadian wilderness by the U.S. military over the course of six frenetic months. What kind of 1700-mile road can you build in six months? Read more  Read More →

Using MovieMaker for your Slideshows and Videos

How many of you have a camera that takes video.  A bunch, right?  Now, how many of you ever put that video together with pictures and music and made a movie that you can enjoy showing to others?  Not so many, huh? Let’s give it another shot OK?  Windows MovieMaker 2012 is really quite simple if you take it slow.  Don’t try to import 2 hours of video and edit it down to a 5 minute movie right away.  Start by learning how to do slide shows with your pictures.  Windows MovieMaker is a free program from Microsoft, it is part of what was called Windows Live Essentials, now it’s just Windows Essentials.  If you don’t already have it,you can download MovieMaker here.  Even if you do have it, check the version, it was upgraded and improved in August of 2012.  It is now version 2012. Import the pictures with the ‘Add Photos and Videos’ button Drag the pictures into the order you want Set your timing.  Each picture can have it’s own duration, or you can select all the pictures and enter the duration for all of them.  The easiest way to select all is with the Ctrl-A shortcut.  If you don’t set your own duration, the default is 7 seconds – much too long. Set your transitions.  Same thing, you can do them one at a time, or all at once by clicking ‘Apply to All’.  Transitions are on the Animations tab. Just hover over each one and you’ll see what it does.  Once you click it, the selected picture will show a gray triangle on its left side indicating... Read more

Tips on how to take great travel photos

By Bob Difley Nearly everyone who travels–and what RVer doesn’t?–likes to document their trips with journals and photos. With the rapid advancements in digital devices, the Internet, and social media, travel documentation has become both instant and easy. Instead of journals there is now blogging, sending instant reports to friends, relatives, and followers. Social media permits photos and short text descriptions instantly across the internet. And digital cameras, tablets, and smart phone cameras used with apps like Instagram permit even the most amateur of photographers to take photos of the places they visit and post them with a couple clicks or button pushes for all to see–and admire. But the biggest advance–the game changer, as Kodak followers can tell you–has been the invention and adoption of the digital camera. Film is gone except for special applications–and so is film expense. With digital you can snap away with complete disregard for the cost of the film and processing that will follow every photographic episode. Now it’s possible to take your travel photos from every vantage point, to experiment with different angles, shoot from ground level or from rooftops, change your speed or depth of field, take dozens of shots of the same subject to see what works–then delete all the ones that don’t. And it doesn’t cost a penny to delete even 90% of your shots just to get the right one. And one of the truly neat... Read more

Pictures of Anastasia Island State Park in Florida

It’s places like this that give me joy in using my good digital SLR camera, and then viewing and editing the pictures later in Picasa.  The picture of the two of us is of particular interest since we were all alone on this beach, and we didn’t have a tripod.  How did we get that picture?  The answer is at the bottom of this post. Anastasia Island is a Florida State park on the beach at St. Augustine.  We only stayed there one night, but we made our way to the beach at those all-important photography times of sunset and sunrise.  I can’t stop looking at these pictures and just feeling love for the world of beauty that we live in.  I took over 250 pictures!  With help from Picasa’s Side-by-Side editing feature, I chose the 49 best and then edited them so they look even better.  I hope you enjoy them! The better way to view the pictures is to follow this link to the pictures on Google+, then click on Slideshow.  That will show them full-screen. My Favorite Picasa Editing features: Just one example of Before and After editing in Picasa.  I hope you agree … the one on the right is better! Crop: most all of my pictures need a crop I’m Feeling Lucky: I always click on I’m Feeling Lucky. Sometimes – especially with sunsets – I don’t like what it does so I click on Undo Straighten: my horizon always seems a bit crooked when taking ocean pictures! Graduated Tint: to make blue skies bluer, or sunsets... Read more

Using Picasa’s Search to Find your Pictures

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksonTour.TV If you have thousands of pictures of your travels, you need some way to find them.  I look to Google for all my search needs, so what better place than Google’s photo software, Picasa, to turn to for searching my pictures? One of the reasons I use captions on all my good pictures is so I can find them even years later.  I keep most of my 40,000+ pictures on an external hard drive, but they all show up in Picasa’s Library so I can view any digital picture I’ve ever taken as long as I can find it! // // // ]]> Let’s say I want to see a picture of that cool Stonehenge place we visited in Washington State.  I just type Stonehenge into the search box, next to the magnifying glass in the upper right corner.  Picasa will instantly match whatever you type by looking at captions, folder names and descriptions, file names, tags, people, albums, and more.  Since I entered captions on all the good pictures of Stonehenge, my search will produce results.  Notice that it even finds that we were there 2 times, once in 2004 and again in 2010.  I didn’t have to know that, it found all pictures with the word Stonehenge in the filename or caption. Back to View All When Picasa finds matches, it filters the pictures in the library to just those that match. It will appear that all your other pictures are gone. Let’s say that, in my thousands of photos, I have a few hundred with the word ‘beach’ somewhere identifying them. If I search for... Read more

VIDEO: How Do Astronauts Go to the Bathroom?

Note: We’re currently exploring Alaska (shooting a feature length documentary about our journey). In the wake of Neil Armstrong’s death, here’s a look at our visit to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, in which we answer the pressing question: “How do Astronauts go to the bathroom?” Don’t forget to wink at the BLUE MOON this weekend! Also, if you are interested in LLH and our travel antics, we encourage you to visit and “LIKE” our Facebook page. Like us! Really like us! The author's ebook about RV camping can now be borrowed FREE in the Amazon Kindle Lending Library (for Amazon Prime members using real Kindle devices). Even if you don't have Amazon Prime, it's only $2.99!  Read More →

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