Working the dream life for 17+ years.
Rave reviews and personal rants about the best and worst products, places, and people living a full-time RVing nomadic lifestyle
Bookmark this post and set aside time to watch this entire End of Suburbia program about peak oil with people close to you. Pending or not, crisis or melarkey, what’s most important is to listen to and realize who is saying the enlightening if not disturbing things in this documentary. Read Matthew Simmons’ Twilight in the Desert
Click the bottom middle icon at the bottom right of the YouTube player to view at full screen. Better yet, get the End of Suburbia DVD
We just received the funniest comment on any of our posts, from someone named Harvey. (Sorry RhodesTer.)
It made me laugh. And it reminded me of fellow workamper Al, who we met working here at Vickers Ranch.
On the post I wrote about trying the NextGen Gallery Worpress plugin, Harvey said:
“You got a picture of canned pork brains, and everybody wants to comment on what program you’re using!”
ROFLOLFYIETATBD! 😆
Regretting not seeing George Carlin in concert during our RV road trip.
Jim presents his state of the blog address on the one year anniversary of launching their full time RVing sabbatical road trip blog tribute with analysis.
Road trips can mean missing out on important family events.
Don’t forget to look up the lowest gas and diesel prices before hitting the road this summer! Use these tools and fuel cost estimator to budget for RV travel.
It was that funny RhodesTer guy who first turned us on to the whole Twitter thing. Though I must say, I was never really that turned on.
It was René who insisted we add the Twitter badge that shows what we’re doing at every instant.
I fought and stalled, but eventually conceded.
We compromised by placing yet another widget at the bottom of our sidebar. You see … Twitter is only good if you tweet.
Please allow me this brief moment to shout out to the entire world just how much I love my wife. Isn’t she beautiful?
Living together in a trailer on the road, it’s hard to surprise someone with anything. But since steel is the traditional gift for an 11-year anniversary, and Rene isn’t really into jewelry – the modern choice – perhaps I can steal her heart once again with a few heartfelt words.
I recently expressed concern to René about her dancing on the precipice at Black Canyon National Park. OK, she wasn’t dancing. But her scrambling made me nervous nonetheless.
In 1992, I’d just finished college, and in order to pay my student loans, I took a job as a receptionist at a big marketing firm. I was the lowest admin on the org chart, and it was an awful, demeaning experience. But little did I know that the skills I learned on that job would come in handy so many years later.
Here at Riverbend, we answer the phone when we aren’t giving tours, cleaning the pools or doing laundry. Although I do my best to sound cheery, I really hate picking up the phone; it just takes me back to that awful job. Many conversations are an exercise in Buddah-like patience, especially on busy weekends.
“Riverbend Hot Springs, how can I help you?”
I’ve had it with the whole TIPS ON PUMPING GAS email fraud. But enough people I respect sent me the famous GOOD INFO! message that I just had to look into it.
I was about to write about how I heard about not filling up when big trucks were filling much bigger tanks below the ground. But that was years ago. And an industry man told me way back then how the stations had filters to that took care of that. Now I’ve discovered the urban legend of tips on pumping gas to be mostly fraudulent.
I’ve determined that if I don’t write something short and quick with first impressions about new places we see, I never will.
There is so much to see and do on this journey – as I told a Canuck fulltimer yesterday – we could stay on the road for the rest of our lives and never see the entire country. And if I don’t jot down some basic observations about where we’ve been soon after we arrive, I will forget if there is any reason to return when the time comes to plant some roots again.
With that said, I go Pogo … we have made it to Okefenoke Swamp. And we have officially reached the South.
By the time I was about to write about dropping off my Powerbook at the Charlotte Apple Store for repairs, they had already called to say it was ready to be picked up. This came as a pleasant surprise considering they said it would take five to seven days to be fixed at the service center in Texas.
So our stay in Asheville – a few hours away, in the Smoky Mountain foothills – was cut a bit short, but the couple days we did have there was plenty to get a feel for the area.
This little wrench in the works also gave us time to realize we never care to live our lives along an interstate corridor. As we criss-crossed North Carolina, the incredible population density and mass consumption of this country became remarkably clear.
Jim discovers there is no Wawa store in Mawah, NJ.
Considering everything we can do with all the connectivity and communications technology of today, what’s really amazing is what we cannot. What happened to the last mile? Granted, escape is a great benefit of getting away. But one cannot expect to get away indefinitely unless totally self sufficient. Especially, if working from home means traveling full time. And why not? There is so much to see.
In other words, we must work, from the road. The biggest challenge of which is being connected. All the time. The defacto work week for the typical commuter is two days off, in a row, if you’re lucky. For those of us who commute from one line of sight to our satelite to the next, being cut off unexpectedly is a daily threat.
Entire idyllic communities like Humboldt county live in constant fear of losing their connection to the world. And they have high capacity fiber to the region. Well, one strand at least. My string is invisible and can be cut by any number of branches, including one.
The last couple of days of driving on New Jersey roads has been some of the most intense driving we’ve ever done.
L.A. traffic has nothing on this place. It’s a lot of narrow roads, fast street-level freeways with cars pulling into and out of driveways, and the most aggressive drivers outside of Manhattan. Jim’s hauling the rig like a seasoned pro, but I just grip the seat and clench my jaw. At least yesterday we got our own escort to get us out of New York.