Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

State Park of the Week (1/28/2013)

Lake Ouachita, (Mountain Pine, Arkansas). Read the reviews.

Last week’s park:
Fool Hollow Recreation Area (Show Low, Arizona). Read the reviews.

Also, Fridge Fans added to Projects.

Virtual RVing (or What-To-Do-In-Winter-Before-You-Start-Fulltiming)

Though the allure of the open road ever beckons part-time RVers like Jan & I,  it’s one thing to drive around Wisconsin in the summers and quite another to drive around North America.

We’ve been part-time RVing for 10 years and have driven our motorhome down many roads, but I think full-time RVing will be a different animal — at least in scale.

With the prospect of living on the road 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year . . . how much driving is enough? Too much? How long should we stay at a campsite? What will it cost? Where do we go?

There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I think there’s a way of preparing for this transition . . . Virtual RV Trips !

I can’t imagine that I made this term up, but here’s what I’ve been doing over long Wisconsin Winters. Armed with an Excel spreadsheet, I started with a start and final destination and then planned a trip using actual campgrounds along the way.

After creating about a dozen of these Virtual RV Trips, I learned a few things:

• I’d rather be taking real trips instead of virtual ones.
• With each new Virtual RV Trip, the amount of daily driving I did kept dropping. I tended to stay longer and longer at campsites.
• When I added the average temperature for each destination, this seemed like a good guide for both the Winter and Summer months.
• I started to get ballpark figures for campground costs.
• I learned a lot about campgrounds themselves . . . amenities, cost, locations, . . .

We’ll see.

Here’s a sample Virtual RV Trip . . . virtual_rving9

2013 WBAY RV & Camping Show

Went to the Green Bay RV show on Saturday instead of Sunday to avoid the predicted temperature drop — mid-30’s to single digit.

This was our 3rd or 4th RV show and it seemed well attended.

We toured both exhibit halls and it looked like most RVs on display were tow-behinds or 5th wheels. There were very few pop ups and Class As.

Nevertheless, we drifted to the only Class A dealer at the show, King’s Campers out of Wausau, WI, who had three Tiffin Class A motorhomes on display.

Phaeton 42LH

Two of the Tiffin’s were 4-slideout, Freightliner chassis diesel pushers: a 39-foot, 340HP Cummins 2013 Allegro RED (list $228K) and a 400HP Cummins 42.6-foot 2012 Phaeton (show pice $240K).

Loved the Phaeton.

The rear full bath is a great feature and this Phaeton also features a porcelean-tiled living room that includes a fireplace topped with a large flatscreen.

Phaeton Living Room

State Parks & other projects

Just finished adding a couple of projects from last year and also was able to finally get up the data I’ve been collecting on all the state parks. Not quite a labor of love, but the info should be useful when we start full timing.

Finally, I’m in less of a panic about how much Verizon 4G data I’m burning up . . . my latest estimate is that I’ll use less than my allotted 12GB/month. However, this is all very tentative. Kudos to Verizon for having a good notification system when you’re at the end of your data rope, and they also have some good online tools for analyzing data trends and downloading your data usage.

It’s been a while . . .

Between working on the RV last Spring, Summer, and Fall, and my day job, I’ve been remiss in my daily (or even monthly) blogging.

Anyway, the latest “project” is figuring out  what sort of Internet connection we’ll need on the road when we start full timing. Having a reliable Internet connection will be critical as we’ll not only need it for email and keeping in touch but also for paying bills and managing our money.

I’ve relied on a number of RV forums, especially www.rvnetwork.com (the Escapees RV Club), for help as there are a number of full timers on these sites who have been on the road for several years and know the ropes.

For the past couple of years I’ve used a USB 3G modem (U760) from Millenicom, a company who “resells” data services from Verizon and Sprint. We paid $60 a month for 20GB of data through Verizon. In 2013 terms — that’s a good deal.

However, I felt the need for speed, so a week ago we traded in our two, 5-year-old 3G AT&T iPhone 3s for two, new Verizon 4G LTE iPhone 5s . . . ZOW! Though the new iPhones are definitely cool, the increased data speed of a 4G LTE connection is a thing to behold. I did a couple of www.testmy.net speed tests and I’m averaging about 10 Mbps — compared to 1.0 Mbps using 3G.

The “gotcha” is that we’re talking more $$$. We’re using Verizon’s Share Everything data plan in which the more data you want, the more you’ll pay. At the moment we’ve signed up for 12GB per month for $110, and this doesn’t include the “fees” for our two iPhones and our new 4G LTE Pantech UML290 USB modem.

CradlePoint MBR95 with UML290 USB Modem

The UML290 USB modem is used with a CradlePoint MBR95 3G/4G wireless router. This router creates our own WiFi hotspot which allows us to connect Jan’s iPad and our other computers to the Internet via WiFi. Very slick.

However, this setup allows us to scream through a whole bunch of data very fast.

I hoped that 12GB would be more than enough until I looked up how much data we were using on our Time Warner wired connection.

It’s pretty clear we’re in for a Scarsdale data diet as we’ve been averaging about 50GB per month on Time Warner.

Time Warner Internet Data Usage