Okay. Do not panic. So the groundhog saw his shadow here atop Gobblers Knob in Punxsutawney, Pa. The rodent, if you check the history books, has been right just 39 percent of the time since this little community in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains .
But that didn’t stop tens of thousands of people from all across the U.S. from traveling here, many in RVs, like us. While the campgrounds are closed, the local Walmart welcomed them. For us in our Roadtrek eTrek Class B, wherever we stopped
RVers love their GPS units. Can you imagine traveling without one?
But do you know that many of today’s most popular units can be customized to show the special places you are most interested in? Called POIs – short for Points of Interest – there are so many lists of them available now that downloading them to your GPS unit can make travel much more efficient and convenient.
You need to have a stand alone GPS unit that can connect to your computer to be able to download POIs. Tom Tom, Magel
Now I know how Class A motorhome drivers live. They spend lots of time checking their mirrors, looking for places to park that are big enough to handle their length and…. visiting gas stations.
As we are towing a 21-foot travel trailer behind our Roadtrek on a family caravan vacation trip to the Rockies, I’ve found towing very easy and parking not so bad as long as I don’t try pulling in to fast-food places with my 30-foot-plus length.
Truthfully, I’ve quickly gotten used to towing and with 1,
I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t sleep in the Roadtrek eTrek last night.
We spent the night in a motel in Escanaba, at the far western end of the Lower Peninsula’s northern Lake Michigan shoreline. I suppose if I looked around long enough I would have found a place to camp. But all the state and federal forests where we normally boondock up here in the UP were all but inaccessible because of unplowed roads.
Somebody told me there was an Indian casino a dozen miles out of town but they we
I think I have become a big fan of winter RVing.
And dog sled races.
Last year, we reported on the Michigan UP 200 dog sled race. Our friend and fellow Roadtreker Gary Hennes met us up there and told us about the Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon in Duluth, which is the longest such sled dog race in the Lower 48 states.
And so we went this year. We boondocked overnight in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere and I volunteered and worked on the communications team, using my amateur rad
Naples, Florida is the crown jewel of Southwest Florida, a west gulf coast town known for upscale dining and shopping, designer golf courses, awesome boating and fishing and the best weather in a state that is built around tourism and sunny skies.
It’s always 10 to 20 degrees warmer here than most other places in the Sunshine State.
Our destination for this trip was the Naples Motorcoach Resort on U.S. 41 just east of Collier Boulevard. Highway 41, also known as the Tamiami Trail, leads to the
Jennifer has one requirement as we travel: We find a place to work out.
She’s a fitness instructor by occupation, though lately, because of our near-fulltime traveling schedule, she’s had to cut back on the classes she teaches.
But that doesn’t mean she cuts back on her fitness goals.
We're on a very hectic Great Lakes Shoreline Tour that we’re doing for Verizon Wireles, so finding time to pull over and find a gym hasn’t happened as much as she’d like. I can usually tell when I better get her
RVers aren’t the only ones winding down the season this time of year. So is Mackinac Island, the summer resort island located in the Straits of Mackinac at the tip of the Michigan mitt, right where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron.
Next weekend, the place shuts down until spring, with only a single hotel, restaurant and bar left open to serve the several hundred full-time residents and the workmen who come in during the winter to renovate, repair and restore the hotels and shops. Many shops were
I always knew I was lucky to live in Michigan, the very heart of the Great Lakes. But until I started this drive along the shoreline of all five Great Lakes, I didn’t realize how fortunate I truly am to call this area home.
I also didn’t realize how interconnected they are. From a hydrological standpoint, they are all intermingled and pretty much part of one system. The water that passes the rocky northern Superior shore in Minnesota eventually makes its way to the sandy bluffs of Lake Ontario
My Roadtrek has been encased in ice and snow for the better part of a week now with several days of subzero temperatures. Inside, shielded from the wind with the sun helping to mitigate the extreme outdoor temperature, it was about 15 degrees.
So, I got to wondering, how long will it take to warm it up, if, indeed such a thing was possible?
Slipping on my boots, a parka and my fuzzy warm hat with ear flaps, I donned my Google Glass and set out to video a first-person experiment.
Everythin
Our favorite features on 2013 model Type B motorhomes
We spent most of the past week touring the 2013 edition of the Florida RV Supershow, arguably the nation’s biggest and best RV shows.
Some 1,100 RVs spread out over 16 acres were on display this year from just about every RV manufacturer in North America.
Since we concentrate our coverage on small motorhomes and Type B coaches in particular, we had lots of time to inspect the 2013 models from the leading Type B manufacturers.
Jennifer and
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
Every place, it seems, has its own ghosts and mysteries. So it is just north of the tiny Upper Peninsula town of Watersmeet where, for generations, people have gathered at the end of a gravel road to watch some mystery lights.
The lights appear nightly, year round near a crossroads community called Paulding. The first reported sightings were back in the 1960s and various investigations have been inconclusive, though a university team from a Michigan Technological University claimed the lights w
We’ve shared this on our Facebook group but thanks to a reader’s suggestion, I thought I’d better post it here on the Roadtreking blog as well: Roadtrek has made it easy for owners of its various models to keep up with the best operating practices and learn exactly how their motorhomes work by putting new revised editions of its owners manual online.
They can be accessed directly from the company website at http://www.roadtrek.com/manuals.aspx.
The manuals, in convenient .pdf form for easy pri
The active RV season in the north is on limited time as the cold weather approaches, but before many of the RVs are put to bed or in storage, many RV parks around the country are hosting special Halloween get-togethers and site decorating contests.
And the parks are filling up.
At the Addison Oaks County park near our Michigan home, where we walk our dog several times a week, the Halloween weekend turns into quite a spectacle, with contests, trick-or-treating and prizes for the best-decorated
We’ve sure enjoyed the warm weather down along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and throughout Florida the past few weeks except for one thing: Bugs
The mosquitoes are hatched down south. As are the No-See-Ums, Biting Midges and Sand Flies.
They are particularly bad at night. With the warm weather, that means it can get pretty hot inside a camper van or Class B motorhome. We could have run the air conditioner. But that’s pretty loud. And it tends to make it too cold late at night.
So we rolled d
Taking “selfies” and sharing photos and videos with our smartphones is worldwide phenomenon these days and there are lots of apps available to help you take them and share them. But one in particular stands out to me for RV use.
It’s called Voyzee and as you can see in the accompanying video, it lets you select your photos and videos, edit them together, add music as a soundtrack and titles to your images. You can even do your own voiceovers. Then, you share it on social media. You can do all
The snow is gone and the 5-foot-high banks that formed a wall along the driver’s side of our Roadtrek eTrek has melted away.
As I look at it sitting there on it’s special little apron in the driveway, I can almost hear it calling: “Take me someplace fun. Now.”
When I snapped this photo yesterday, it got me wondering how and where most of you keep your RVs when at home. Most of the bigger Type C and Type A’s, of course, need to have lots of room, and that usually entails a storage facility.
Bu
Anticipation, they say, is half the fun.
I think there’s a point there. Thinking, planning, dreaming and looking forward to the next trip is indeed pretty exciting.
And as Jennifer and I look at the calendar, we have a lot of miles we’ll be traveling in some pretty diverse places.
Here’s what’s on our Roadtreking road map for the next month:
Northern Minnesota – A Jan. 23-29th winter camping trip to Duluth, MN via Michigan’s UP from, and then north to the Canadian border as we do reporting
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
It was a day of superlatives as our Roadtrek eTrek literally took us to the heights of RVing – climbing Pikes Peak.
Making it even better because it was our wedding anniversary and we were spending it with family in one of the continent’s most beautiful regions.
Pikes Peak surely is the most accessible big mountain on the continent, with a first rate road all the way up, despite some hairpin curves with little or no shoulder or guardrails. The only issue we had was on the descent, where at the
With the Mercedes Sprinter chassis still driving the big spike in Type B motorhome sales, RV manufacturers are continuing to innovate in design and options as they get ready for the 2013 RV season.
At the big Florida RV Supershow in Tampa this January, most of the North America big Type B makers were showing off their new models front and center.
We thought it would be helpful to take a look at the interiors of the leading Type B Sprinters.
As you’ll see, despite the same space, there are big
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
Upgrading your RV to solar power
Advances in power management and solar power have made big news in the RV world of late, especially with the new eTrek and CS-Adventurous models built on the Mercedes Sprinter chasis by Roadtrek Motorhomes. New and efficient power control and management systems have put these advanced new Class B motorhomes on many a wish list [...]
Roadtreking - A Journalist takes up the RV lifestyle - People and Places Encountered on the Open Road
<a href="http://Roadt
Two-and-a-half weeks of the Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013 in two-and-a-half minutes – that’s the just-finished movie version (see below) that highlights the recent Roadtreking caravan that was our family vacation to Colorado this summer.
We traveled in four vehicles: My Roadtrek eTrek pulling a 21-foot travel trailer, followed by a Roadtrek SS driven by my son and, following us all, my daughter and her family in an SUV.
We made a great circle tour of Colorado. Here are some of the
