Charging your Electronics in your Camper
When we first started traveling in our camper van it seemed like we always juggled to keep our electronic devices charged. It was easier if we were plugged into shore...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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RV Sidetrip: Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve
Craters of the Moon is a U.S. National Monument and National Preserve in the Snake River Plain in central Idaho that is like no where else on earth, a volcanic...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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Dog Travels in a Class B
My dogs and I love to hunt pheasant. Each year we would go to North Dakota for a week and blissfully walk the potholes in search of prey. We do...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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Off The Beaten Path: Meat Cove
“Don’t miss Meat Cove!†It was a beautiful fall day on Prince Edward Island. We were talking to a couple who were full-timers in their Roadtrek. We were headed to...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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It sounds like it’s raining. But it’s not. It’s the sound of acorns dropping from the oak trees all around us as we boondock in the middle of the woods overlooking the Rifle River in northern Michigan’s Ogemaw County.
This is not a particularly pretty time of the year. The beautiful fall leaves have turned brown and now cover the ground. Only the oaks, with their shriveled up leaves and their dropping acorns, still have a covering.
Squirrels are running all over gathering the bounty. Deer, too
This is a jam-packed podcast with lots of very practical news and information.
In it we talk about another anti-RV town, how and when to winterize, along with lots of practical tips on all sorts of things connected with the RV lifetyle.
Last week, we had 41,697 plus downloads of the Roadtreking RV Podcast. I am overwhelmed by your support and kind words. Thank you. If you haven’t already, please subscribe via the iTunes or Stitcher links:
Episode 4 of the Roadtreking Podcast – How and When to
The month of October has surprisingly become huge for RV campgrounds, resorts and parks around the U.S. thanks to Halloween.
Maybe because for many in the northern states, its a chance to do one more trip before the RV has to be winterized and put in storage.
Instead of just one night – Oct. 31 – many parks dedicate the entire two or three weekends before Halloween to the big event.
We visited a campground near us this past weekend – Addison Oaks Park in Addison Twp., about 45 miles north of
It’s time for Episode 3 of Roadtreking - The RV Podcast.
I continue to be overwhelmed by the positive reponse we’ve had to the first two episodes. I hope you enjoy thosn one even more. After you’ve listened, will you do me a favor? Please consider rating and gving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.
Notes for Episode #3 of Roadtreking – The RV Podcast:
Episode released Oct. 15, 2014
OPENING DISCUSSION:
We had an in-depth conversation about free places to stay overnight and how many communiti
Episode 2
This has been such a blast to do. I’m thrilled by the response from so many who listened to our first podcast. I have dozens more planned!
This week, we have released two episodes, to get the ball rolling. Starting next week, a new podcast episode will post every Wednesday morning.
Jennifer joins me in this episode to help answer some questions.
Each episode of these podcasts comes as a direct result of our travels across North America in a small motorhome, reporting about the inte
Here it is, the first of what will be a weekly program: The Roadtreking RV Lifestyle Podcast.
Episode 1 - Roadtreking the RV Lifestyle Podcast
This has been a lot of fun to do.
This is a show that celebrates the RV lifestyle.
Whether you have in a Class B motorhome like the Roadtrek Jennifer and I travel in, a Class C, a Class A, a Fifth Wheel, a Pop-up, heck, even if you dry camp out of your car, or tent and are just thinking about getting an RV, this show is for you. We talk about the RV l
There’s never enough room. That’s the first thing about RVing we all think when we start RVing, isn’t it?
But there really is.
No matter what size RV we have, we all want to bring too much stuff.
Once we discover that, it’s a little easier to pack the essentials. Still, some times, you need a little more storage space. That’s why we recently replaced one of the two back seats with a custom sized armoire. It is a perfect match with the rest of the wooden cabinets inside our Roadtrek eTrek. And
I love getting reader mail and I do my best to answer them. But lately, as the fall RV RV shows start getting underway and lots of people are thinking about purchasing a motorhome and more new people are discovering this blog, the questions are somewhat the same. So I thought I’d share here the answer to the one question we get asked the most.
Q: WHAT WOULD YOU AND YOUR WIFE DO DIFFERENTLY IN BUYING AN RV NOW THAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WHILE?
A: The short answer is…nothing. We now have
That’s my old iPhone 5 on the left. The new gigantic iPhone 6 Plus on the right.
For as 10 million other people have done over the past two weeks, I’ve upgraded to the new and very large iPhone 6 Plus.
It’s massive 5.5-inch size was a big reason.
I spend a lot of time online. Too much, in fact. And my eyes and my thumbs appreciate the extra real estate the new iPhone provides.
The first thing I did after transferring all my apps and settings over to the new phone from iCloud (a process that
For the better part of four decades, there is one place that has lured Jennifer and me back again and again, multiple times each year: Mackinac Island, located in Lake Huron, at the eastern end of the Straits of Mackinac, between the state’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.
It’s a place where motor vehicles are prohibited and where RVs must be left on the mainland at the passenger ferry docks. On the island, the only transportation available is by walking, riding bicycles or by horse. Just 3.8 squar
One question we get a lot when we talk about our love of being off the beaten path and away from everyone is, “Why? What do you do there.”
This is as good a time as ever to try and answer that because, as I type, we are very deep in the woods, in the middle of the Pigeon River Country State Forest Area at the very top of the Michigan Lower Peninsula mitt, a 105,049-acre area so vast it rambles across Otsego, Cheboygan, and Montmorency Counties.
This is one of our top five favorite places to g
Since I released the post on the 10 lessons we’ve learned in our 75,000 miles of RV travel, several readers have asked for another installment.
So here it is. This one, though, has 12 things we’ve learned from the road.
1) GPS units are all unreliable – If you rely totally on GPS to get you somewhere, sooner or later you’re going to miss your mark and be lost. In my role as a tech reporter for NBC affiliates, I’ve tried them all – Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, Rand McNally, the GPS apps, Google, V
If you like gambling, you’ll probably love Deadwood.
If not, probably not so much.
After years of passing by on the way to the Badlands or Yellowstone and seeing the signs, Jennifer and I made a recent RV sidetrip to this town on the edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota. The entire city is listed on the National Historic Register. The city aggressively promotes itself as having done a careful, accurate restoration of a historically significant western city so we figured it was worth checkin
The story of the American bison is one of the most sad and captivating episodes in U.S. history. Once thought to be limitless in number – an estimated 50 million ranged across North America before European settlement – they were hunted to near extinction in the late 1800’s. Greed by hunters and a calculated political effort to eliminate the food and main staple of the American Indian tribes were the reasons.
From 50 million, the senseless slaughter left about 100 animals in the wild in the late
We just turned 60,000 miles on our Roadtrek Etrek as we pulled into our Michigan driveway after our latest trip, which essentially was four months on the road through 21 states, taking us from Cape Cod on the Atlantic to the far Pacific Northwest. When you add the 15,000 miles we drove in our first RV – a 2006 RS Adventurous – that now gives us 75,000 miles under our collective wheels.
We are no longer rookies.
Indeed, we’ve learned a few things.
And I’ve made some mistakes. But you’ll have t
Well, at least it’s not going to erupt anytime soon.
Probably.
This has been a strange year at Yellowstone National Park, which indeed sits atop a supervolcano. Two months ago, extreme heat from the thermal features below caused oil to bubble on a road surface and damage a 3.3-mile loop road that takes visitors past White Dome Geyser, Great Fountain Geyser and Firehole Lake.
A couple months before that, some yahoo posted a video on YouTube purportedly showing bison in the park supposedly evac
Apps. There are so many apps that empower our smartphones and tablets to do new and creative things that it’s almost impossible to keep up with them. This week, I have three new apps that you may have missed that you will surely want to add to your RVing collection.
The coolest photo enhancing app I’ve seen in a long time is Instagram’s new Hyperlapse, a very nifty little download that lets you create very smooth and fun time lapse videos. It takes a clip you shot on your iPhone, stabilizes it
So, what’s your worse nightmare about an RV trip? Having a mechanical breakdown in the middle of, say, Montana, at the start of a weekend?
Trust me, it’s not so bad.
I can say this because it happened to us last weekend, just as we were leaving Glacier National Park and the Many Glacier area, about as remote a place as you can find, where even the cell phones don’t reach.
This was the culprit … the sensor (black) at the right of the fuel rail.
There is one inescapable thing about RV trave
Craters of the Moon is a U.S. National Monument and National Preserve in the Snake River Plain in central Idaho that is like no where else on earth, a volcanic wonderland that is easy and fun to explore in one of the weirdest landscapes you can find anywhere.
And it’s perfect for Class B recreation vehicles.
Craters of the Moon formed during eight major eruptive periods between 15,000 and 2000 years ago. Lava erupted from the Great Rift, a series of deep cracks that start near the visitor cent
As we’ve traveled across North America, visiting wilderness areas and National Parks, one park consistently came up at the top of the list of must-visit places suggested by fellow RVers: Glacier National Park in far northwestern Montana.
Now that we’ve been there and spent most of a week exploring this dramatic and spectacular park, we know why.
But our adventure here didn’t start out well. We visited in mid-August, after school had started in much of the country. We thought the crowds would
At FMCA's Family Reunion in Redmond last week, I presented a seminar called Apps for the Open Road in which I share some of my favorite apps and online resources for RVers.
Now we RVers all have our favorite technology devices, with Android and Apple smartphones and tablets accounting for the vast majority. Most apps now come in versions for different platforms. Most, but not all.
I am a pretty diehard Apple fan. Though I’ve used Android gizmos, I keep coming back to Apple, especially the iPho
