I now understand what John Denver meant by his song: I’ve now been Rocky Mountain High.
And like Denver, who penned the song shortly after moving to Aspen to celebrate his love for his new state and the awe-inspiring mountains, Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park made me want to sing, too. If I could only have caught my breath. For there, somewhere well above 12,000 feet, a quarter mile up a tundra bordered trail from an overlook off Trail Ridge Road , were three Bighorn Sheep, standing lik
“How’d you end up doing this?”
If I could have had a quarter for every time we’ve been asked that about our roadtreking.com RV blog we could buy another motorhome.
But since enough people seem to be interested….Here’s how:
This Roadtreking RV blog is a dream come true for me. Decades in the making, but now being lived out like one giant movie, seen through the wide expanse of my motorhome’s windshield as North America rolls on by. We can stop anytime, explore anywhere.
And we do, sharing it
Please do not call it a rally. There was no itinerary. No organized programs. And no nametags.
We all made our own reservations and the only coordinated planning was letting the word out on our Roadtreking Facebook Group that a bunch of us were going to meet on a particular weekend at a particular campground in Michigan.
It was more fun than any of us expected and a great example that great RVing times can be spontaneous and as easy as just showing up and getting together.
In all 10 coaches
As part of our blogging, we now have the ability to do live videos and interviews with folks of interest to the Roadtreking world. With that, we can answer questions, too.
The videos are broadcast as live events on the Net, but also available for later playback on demand from You Tube.
The first one I did was this week with my friends Jim and Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour fame. Many of you have met the Gulds as they’ve taught technoogy at various RV gatherings around the country.
Today, while t
Michigan’s UP is hemmed in by three of the Great Lakes. Everyone knows about Superior and Huron but the lake on the UP’s southern border has some great camping and exploring opportunities, too.
So. after three weeks of travel on our Verizon Great Lakes Roadtreking Shoreline Tour, we have now arrived at the fifth of the big lakes – Lake Michigan.
Lake Michigan touches four states and is the only one of the Great Lakes that doesn’t share a coastline with Canada.
We started out following it
This is the time of year folks are shopping for an RV and planning their first trips of the season. We have questions about both in this week’s edition of “How We Roll” in which Jennifer and I answer reader questions.
We travel in a Class B motorhome. I’ve written lots on why we chose a B. But if you have a large family, you may want something larger.
As for where we stay, we always opt for beauty and remoteness over crowded campgrounds.
We share more about both questions in the video.
Send
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
RVing in Hawaii
RVing is a huge pastime across the U.S. in 49 of the 50 states. The one exception is perhaps the most beautiful state: Hawaii. There just is not a big RV presence there. One exception is Al Waterson, a popular entertainer, singer and actor who tools around the island of Oahu in a 1995 Roadtrek 190 Versatile Class B [...]
Roadtreking - A Journalist takes up the RV lifestyle - People and Places Encountered on the Open Road
<a href="http://Roadtreking.com/rving-in-hawaii/?u
One of the places that has a special hold on me is the Everglades area of Florida, a wild, huge place filled with birds and wildlife as diverse as the flooded cypress and sawgrass prairies that make up the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States.
Every time I’m in south Florida, I budget time for the glades. I’ve ridden my bicycle along an eight mile paved loop at Shark Valley, cruising yards past snoozing gators with their huge tooth filled mouths open to cool off. There are air bo
The Gulf Coast is now recovered from the ravages of Katrina and the BP oil spill and is now celebrating Mardi Gras in communities large and small.
From Mobile to New Orleans and all in between, the fun starts as early as two weeks before the Fat Tuesday final day before Lent and if you time a visit right down here, you can take in Mardi Gras parades every day and many a night. RV parks are all along the coast in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and this time of year, when the weather can stil
I have a serious bone to pick with whoever calls Michigan’s Upper Peninsula a paradise. Not this trip. This RV adventure was a battle of the bugs.
And while it looks pretty out the window of the motor coach, venture outside and you are fair game for swarms of insects that see you as smorgasbord.
The mosquitoes and biting black and stable flies of the Lake Superior region are the worst they’ve been in years. Locals blame it on the unusually wet spring and summer we’ve had this year.
http://you
This is the time to “come up to da UP,” as the Yoopers like to say.
The flies and mosquitoes are gone, so are the crowds and the whole peninsula is bursting with bright yellows and reds as the annual fall foliage change explodes the hardwoods into jaw-dropping displays. And the sunsets are to die for.
This year, the color change is later than normal. We came up last Thursday and it was just starting. As we head back downstate today five days later, it’s clear that its moving fast now. This com
One of the things that so distinguishes an RV is its appearance and especially, the beauty of its paint job. All the manufacturers are working very hard to make their units stand out. To see what goes into painting an RV, we visited the Kitchener, Ontario, Canada factory of Roadtrek Motorhomes, the largest and best-sellingType B motothome manufacturer in North America. There, we are able to follow a unit through the painting process and video it all.
It begins as the van is bought into the sand
I’ll say one thing about our traveling this past year: No dust is gathering under the RV.
We received our new 2013 Roadtrek eTrek one year ago, in December 2012.
When I pulled into the driveway Thursday night after returning from an RV trade show in Louisville, the odometer read 34,156 miles.
We take off again today for a weekend trip to Western Michigan where we’ll visit Jeff and Aimee in Kalamazoo, our son and daughter-in-law. We’ll probably sleep in the Roadtrek in his driveway. We love ou
If you like driving your RV, drive it in Colorado.
Look at the photos.
Around every corner is another great, sweeping vista.
Today, we drove about 80 miles from Mesa Verde National park in the far southwest corner up Highway 145 to the Matterhorn Campground in the San Juan Mountains a dozen or so miles south of Telluride.
From the semi-arid canyon country to alpine forests, the drive couldn’t be prettier. Even towing that new AmerLite Travel Trailer I bought from American RV in Grand Rapids,
Tarry gunk still evident on Gulf beaches
More than two and a half years after the disastrous Deepwater oil spill by BP, tarry, gunky deposits of what appears to be dried oil are still all too evident on stretches of Northwest Florida gulfshore beaches.
“This is atrocious,” reports RT Campskunk, a fulltiming RVer in a Roadtrek 190 from St. George Island, Florida. “It’s just a shame. These were the best beaches in the country. I was used to tar on the beaches out in Texas and Louisiana where all
The one thing that I most dislike about this time of year is holiday shopping.
Usually, I’ll do anything to avoid a shopping mall. If God intended us to go traipsing through crowded shopping centers he wouldn’t have had Al Gore invent the Internet and online shopping.
So you can imagine Jennifer’s surprise this afternoon when I actually volunteered to drive her to the mall to look up some Christmas gifts.
I took my Roadtrek Class B RV motorhome.
Heh heh heh.
It’s a diesel, so it needs to
Just north of the Missouri “boot heel” is the small community of Sikeston, right off Interstate 57. It’s a great place to overnight. If you stay at the Hinton RV Park, they’ll arrange for a van to take you to dinner at a place you will not soon forget.
On our visit, we were with a group of 12 RVers, on the way to a Branson, MO rally. Our group came from Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Ontario and we were crowded driving in that stretch van the mile or so to Lambert’s Cafe, “Home of the Throwed Ro
That’s because the brand-new miniature K-cup coffee maker I bought for our motorhome didn’t work this morning and I was all set to celebrate our first night in our new Roadtrek eTrek with a hot cup of coffee.
Fortunately, the Kentucky Horse Park campground where we’re staying just off I-75 near Lexington, has a store and it was open, and they had plenty of coffee.
Crisis averted.
I had wanted to boondock on our first night to put the batteries and solar power features of this new motorhome
Climbing Pikes Peak in an RV
I’m often asked about the favorite things we’ve done in our Roadtrek eTrek. At the top of my list is mountain climbing. We used it to drive to the top of Pikes Peak, some...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
Source
It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S., a few weeks after our Canadian friends celebrated their nation’s holiday of the same name.
A tradition at our family is that as we gather round the Thanksgiving dinner table – and yes, we always do turkey and all the trimmings – each one of us says what we are most thankful for this past year.
Remember that old Irving Berlin song, “Count Your Blessings?” If we’re breathing and relatively upright – though football and ODing on turkey will probably render many of u
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
006 RV Podcast: The Migration of the Snowbirds
It’s underway – the annual migration of the Snowbirds , with an estimated 2-5 million RVers heading to the South and Southwest. That’s the featured topic in Episode 006 of...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
Source
Every week we get at least one question about how we use technology while traveling. In this edition of How We Roll in our RV, you get to see the way I stay connected all the time. Updating this blog, our Facebook Page and Facebook Group, plus the newsletter, means I need a reliable connection to the Internet.
I’ve written before about my tech gear and the the MiFi card I use from Verizon Wireless to create a 4G network in my Roadtrek Class B motorhome. And a few weeks ago, I added a cell phone
We love to take our Norwegian Elkhound, Tai, with us when we go Roadtreking.
Except for one thing.
His breath.
It stinks. Literally.
In the confined space of an RV, dog breath can get pretty disgusting. We’ve tried chicken-flavored dog toothpaste and brushing his teeth. It works a little. But chicken flavored dog breath is almost as bad as regular dog breath.
So it was with great interest that we just discovered something called Orapup – a dog breath brush.
It comes with a couple bott
