Jennifer and I love watching things grow, planting them, tending to them and then – with our vegetable garden – picking them when they are fresh and ripe and enjoying them.
We’ve planted a garden for many ears but the last two years, because of our travel schedule, we’ve returned home from RV trips to find it mostly shriveled up from lack of water or, unpicked, gone to seed.
Nevertheless, there we were this week, getting the vegetable beds ready again, hoeing, weeding, improving the soil and p
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
The Making of a Roadtrek: The Movie
If any of you have been to the Roadtrek factory in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada for a tour, you would have an idea of what it takes to build a Roadtrek,...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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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
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
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 use a lot of cameras while we travel North America in our Roadtrek RV. One of my favorites is the GoPro Hero, a very tiny high def camera that I can mount to the side of my vehicle, wear on a bike hemet or attach to just about anything.
The folks who make the camera just released some free editing software called GoPro Studio. I couldn’t resist downloading it last night and throwing in a few of our driving shots from this summer. The music comes with the template you download, so no complaint
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
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,
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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
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
Last night in Iowa, I was complaining abut the gnats.
Tonight in South Dakota, it’s the Frankenbugs.
The bugs have only gotten bigger as we’ve moved west
Honestly, I dont know what they are. Way bigger than a gnat. Some are beetles, or what we used to call June bugs. But there are so many and they are so big that as we drove down I-90 in South Dakota, they hit the windshield with an intensity that sometimes sounded like hail.
Jennifer said it was a bugout.
You can see from this photo and t
The Morefield Campground at Mesa Verde National Park is nestled into a scenic canyon some four and a half miles off US 160 from the park entrance. With 267 sites, it seldom fills up. That’s because all but 15 are for dry camping only and of the 15 with full hookups, none accomodate RVs over 45 feet in length. The Class A congestion that turns so many other campgrounds into “tinominium “complexes is refreshingly absent here.
Each site has lots of space between its neighbors and native Gambel oak
