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
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
Everyone knows we Michganders love to represent our state by showing our hand. Here, try it.
Take your left hand and extend it, palm facing out. That’s the Lower Peninsula, the familiar Michigan mitt.
Okay, now turn your extended left hand to the left, and bring your handdown to the right so the fingers are pointing horizontally to the right. That’s the Upper Peninsula.
Now bring up your right hand, palm facing you, thumb to the right. Put the left hand at the top of the right and…voila… a ma
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
It’s been a long and busy week with two big road trips this past week – one in the Roadtrek eTrek to Kitchener, Ontario, and a visit to the Roadtrek factory for some video work, the other to Pittsburgh, Pa., on another video project. While the Kitchener trip was blessed with great weather, the Pittsburgh trip led to some very white knuckle driving on the way back home when we unexpectedly encountered near white-out conditions from Lake Erie effect snow squalls just est of Cleveland.
It was a g
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
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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
I Hate it when RVers use construction generators
Now I have to admit that I’ve been one of the main encouragers as far as this boondocking movement goes – I have been telling folks to get out of...
Roadtreking : The RV Lifestyle Blog - Traveling North America in a small motorhome
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“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
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
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There’s a reason it’s called Superior.
There is no other lake like it in the world. It is truly immense, so big that it contains more water that all four of the other Great Lakes combined. You’d need two more Lake Eries to equal the water in Superior.
Superior is so big we will need two reports to cover it all for our Verizon Great Lakes Roadtreking Tour.
In the video above, we head out from Saulte Ste Marie, Mich., where Superior flows into the St Mary’s River and, eventually all of the
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
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
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 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
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,
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 [...]
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The temperature outside my Roadtrek in the driveway of our Michigan home was 34 degrees this morning.
That’s the coldest yet this season and a reminder that soon, there will be no putting off the fact that it needs to be winterized.
We still have a couple of long weekend trips planned and I am hoping that I can do them without pushing antifreeze down all the pipes. It’s funny, really, because even when the RV is winterized, there’s no reason I can’t use it. You just carry drinking water and us
