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Downsizing Home, empty nesters, freedom, Roadtrips, rv living, travel, Uncategorized, usa travel

A FEW IMPORTANT THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED IN OUR FIRST FEW WEEKS FULL TIME RV’ING – PART THREE

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Linsley and I are so glad that we stayed put in South Carolina for the winter, we have learned so much in this very short time.  We have also had a chance to learn about all the systems on our RV.  The following is part three of a three part insight into the things that Linsley and I have learned over the last 4 months of full time RVing that we didn’t know about before taking on this lifestyle.  We had done a lot of research before we made the leap into full timing, but we have learned so much more than we imagined in the few weeks since we started.  This may be only the tip of the iceberg in our learning curve, but for anyone thinking of starting full-timing, maybe it will be of value:

 

  1. You CAN full time RV without a car, but we have found that it is very inconvenient if you don’t have one. So, we bought a car at a local used car lot.  It is a 2004 Hyundai Sante Fe, and it runs beautifully.  It had some oxidized paint on it when we first bought it, and the hood looked purple rather than the jet black it was supposed to be.  So I searched on the internet to find how I could remove the oxidization, and found that it can be easily wet sanded off with a regular drill and some wet sanding paper (800 grit).  I did get a quote from a local paint shop to have the care re-sprayed, but it was far too expensive, so I decided to spray paint it myself.  I went to Auto Zone and found some black auto paint with a high gloss finish, and after masking up the windows and trim pieces, I sprayed the car with the black paint, and now it looks like a million dollars.  It is a little time consuming, but well worth the investment of time. We now have a pretty darn great car, with no car payment as it was cheap enough to pay cash for it, and no worries should it get chipped or scratched while being towed behind the RV on a tow dolly.

 

  1. Being newly retired, I have found that I’m needing something to do throughout the days. My answer to this is Workamping.  We have made some friends who worked at the campground we were staying at.  They gave me some pointers into Workamping.  There is a whole network (workamper.com) that find jobs for people traveling around in an RV, they provide job listings, training, and lots of resources for anyone who wants to join.  They have a Facebook network too.  They help with building a workamping resume, give employer ratings, allow you to post a position wanted ad in their online newsletter, and make the whole “finding a job on the road” thing relatively easy.  Workamping has other perks which are really great too, many campgrounds provide their workampers with full hook-up sites for the period of time they will be staying to work at the campground, together with laundry allowances, electric allowances,  free or very reduced passes to local events and attractions, and many more perks.  The great thing is that apart from the hours you work to offset the cost of your camp site for the period, many campgrounds also pay an hourly wage, which although is not a career salary, it does help out and pay for those extras you would like.

The one thing I would say about planning your workamping experiences, is to apply early and make sure you can fulfill the commitment you make.  It does mean that you stay in one place for the summer, or the winter, certainly more than a few days/weeks before moving on, but when you full time, sometimes it’s nice to be able to stay somewhere for a season, living in a beautiful place for longer than just a vacation, experiencing everything it has to offer, and getting to know the people you meet there.  I know for us staying here in SC, it has been a truly great experience, and the people we have met here will be friends for life now.

 

  1. Expect to have to clean often. The beauty of this is that cleaning the whole RV only takes about half an hour and it sparkles again.  I store my cleaning fluids in a bin underneath the RV so they don’t take up precious space inside.

 

  1. Our RV has carpet everywhere! Carpet is very hard to keep clean, especially when in an RV there isn’t room for a full size vacuum cleaner.  I have a small Bissell vacuum, which works pretty well, but it never gets the stuff deep in the carpet fibers.  I am going to remove the carpet and replace it with vinyl flooring which will be much easier to keep clean and fresh.  I know this project will be difficult, but it will be worth it.  I already had to remove the carpet from our bathroom, when the toilet overflowed in our first week, so should that ever happen again, it won’t be quite so devastating as it was with the carpet totally soaked in nasty poopy liquids from the black water tank.

 

  1. Whenever you can do it, let an insect bomb off inside your RV, many of our friends here have had a big problem with ants, but as I have made sure to let an insect bomb off regularly, we have not had any problem with insects, at least inside.  Insects can be a huge problem when RVing, as they can get into your heating unit, your hot water unit and your food, clothes, storage bins underneath the RV too.  Prevention is way better than cure and its pretty easy to make sure you don’t get any insect infestation anywhere.  We also spray around the outside of the RV to make sure we don’t have ant hills, or anything else anywhere near us or the RV.

There are many more things that we have learned these past few months, but I would have to write a novel to include everything.  As we continue on our fantastic journey, I will document some of the greatest things we have learned, and should anyone have a question, I am by no means an expert, but I am learning a lot of things that would have made the transition for us a whole lot easier had we known this stuff beforehand.  Please don’t hesitate to ask your questions……….

 

Downsizing Home, empty nesters, freedom, Roadtrips, rv living, travel, Uncategorized, usa travel

A FEW IMPORTANT THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED IN OUR FIRST FEW WEEKS FULL TIME RV’ING – PART TWO

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Linsley and I are so glad that we stayed put in South Carolina for the winter, we have learned so much in this very short time.  We have also had a chance to learn about all the systems on our RV.  The following is part two of a three part insight into the things that Linsley and I have learned over the last 4 months of full time RVing that we didn’t know about before taking on this lifestyle.  We had done a lot of research before we made the leap into full timing, but we have learned so much more than we imagined in the few weeks since we started.  This may be only the tip of the iceberg in our learning curve, but for anyone thinking of starting full-timing, maybe it will be of value:

  

  1. THINGS TO BRING WITH YOU AS YOU START YOUR RV LIVING:

Bring with you the things that you will need.  We were under the impression that while traveling, everything had to be stowed away in cabinets, so a lot of the camping and cooking equipment we had, we sold off in the estate sale we had.  Now we find that we could have brought it and we are buying a lot of that equipment again.  We have found out that the luxuries you believe go with brick and mortar living can also be part of an RV lifestyle.  We were under the impression that we could only bring bare essentials with us, so that is what we did.  Don’t do the same thing.  If you think you will need a piece of equipment, bring it, we have met people whose RV is filled with plastic bins full of equipment for cooking etc, that once they get to a site, is all unpacked and left outside, around and under their RV and awnings.  This is the part that we didn’t know.  We do now!

  1. With winter coming on, temperatures started to drop and we realized that we didn’t know how or even if our heating worked in the RV. We knew it was gas heating, but weren’t sure how to turn it on.  Our new friend Doug (who has been such a fantastic help to us) came over and showed us exactly how to get the furnace started.  Looking back, it was so easy, I felt pretty stupid that we hadn’t worked it out ourselves.  You basically open the outside furnace and turn the switch to ON, then switch over to heat mode on the thermostat, turn it all the way up until the heating kicks on.  Once the furnace is blowing warm air, you can then set the temperature on the thermostat.

At the worst possible time this winter, our heating gave out and would run for a little while and then stop blowing warm air and revert to stone cold.  Our friend Doug (my hero), took the gas valve apart and replaced it with a new one we bought, we tried it and it worked for a short while and then the gas turned off again,  Doug took it apart again and checked the gas pipes had no blockages.  This is where I have to stress to you… DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF GNATS!  The gas pipe had about 6 dead gnats in it, but this was enough to restrict the flow of gas and cut the heating off.  We cleaned out the pipes and the heating has worked like a champ ever since.

3.   With storage at a premium, I decided to store canned foods (and well packaged foods that could withstand it), pots and pans, and various drinks in a plastic storage bin with a lid, which can easily be stored underneath the RV when we are parked at a campground, easily accessed when we need to get something from one of the bins, and quickly and easily lifted into the RV when we are traveling. This has made my life much easier inside the RV and given me so much more storage for things that need to be inside.  We don’t have big storage bins built into our RV as it is an older model, so the storage bins (from the dollar store) are ideal.  I found a few storage bins that are waterproof, and was able to put dried foods such as rice, pasta, even sugar (without it clogging), and they were relatively inexpensive from Walmart, which has made a huge difference in the amount of storage available in the kitchen area now.  I was able to fit them into one of our storage cubbies underneath the RV, so they are totally protected from the weather at all times.  I would highly recommend these bins for anything that wouldn’t stand up to any type of dampness.

  1.  MEMBERSHIPS

You can pay a fortune, and spend hours finding and booking campgrounds to stay at, but we have found that by having a few memberships, this process becomes much easier.  Not only does it help finding the campgrounds, but it also can save you a lot of money along the way.  We travel about 200-250 miles a week and then camp at a campground for the week, moving on to the next place on a Saturday morning, this gives us a very relaxed travel schedule and allows us time to explore the area we are staying at.  We find that this suits us very well, and our older RV thanks us for not trying to drive huge distances all in one go.

Passport America:  We joined Passport America and they have a great website where you can look up campgrounds all over the United States, get an overview of those campgrounds, and get their website, plan your route, and also in many instances enjoy 50% off the normal nightly rate at a campground that is affiliated with Passport America.  Now the 50% discount doesn’t always work in high season, but so far, we have received the 50%, so we can only rave about how great Passport America is.  Also, our friends joined passport America and because we referred them, they, and we received a 7 month free extension to our membership.

Escapees:  Escapees help with finding campground locations, route planning, they provide some discounts, but they also have a mail forwarding service, roadside assistance, and in order to be able to vote and renew your drivers license etc, they can provide a domicile address in a state that is full time RVer friendly (which most states are not), which enables you to travel further afield without the necessity to keep driving back to the state you are domiciled in to renew tags, licenses, voter registration, etc.  Escapees also list campgrounds which are owned by Escapees members (Co-Ops).  These campgrounds are renouned for being very comfortable, and because they are owned by people who RV full time, are very well set up to address the needs of full time RVers.

Good Sam:  We joined Good Sam for a few reasons, the main reason for us was that they provide great roadside assistance services.  Should we get stuck with a flat tire etc. in the middle of nowhere, they will actually bring a tire to where we are or tow us to somewhere we can have a new tire fitted.  It is important to have great roadside assistance and towing when you are full time RVing because when you think about it, your vehicle is your home, and has so many things that can go wrong at any time, you need to have a plan that will cover most, if not all eventualities.

These are the memberships that we have, it may be in the future, that we will join more RVing clubs, but for now, we feel we are well covered between these three.

 

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A FABULOUS DAY OUT IN SOUTH CAROLINA

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Do you love farmers markets and flea markets?  I recently went to the biggest farmers/flea market that I have ever seen.  It’s called the Anderson Jockey Lot, and it sits on 65 acres with more than 2,150 spaces. The average daily attendance is 30,000 to 60,000 people.

I was like a kid in a candy store and couldn’t start walking around taking in everything fast enough!

The Anderson Jockey Lot main entrance

I went with some friends that we met at the campground we are staying at, and we had a great time.  I have to say that to see everything there, you would probably need to go every day for at least a week, if not more, so the parts we were able to get to was only a fraction of the whole place.  Many of the vendors are inside under huge metal buildings that all connect together.  On every corner, there were peanuts being roasted, and the smell of roasted peanuts filled the buildings like a warm hug. 

The Jockey Lot outside vendors

There were vendors selling all kinds of wares, from phones, to baseball hats to animals (including chickens, dogs, cats, rabbits and a whole host of other animals).  There was also, thank goodness, a vendor making fresh doughnuts….. I cannot resist them, and I absolutely didn’t this day!  Hot chocolate, freshly cooked doughnuts, fresh air, and good friends, what more could a girl want for? 

Now if you knew me, you would know to never go to buy fresh vegetables with me, because I get very excited over gorgeous fresh veggies.  And this day was no different, there were outside vendors who had a huge selectin of veggies between them, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.  There were veggies that I had never seen before, and I couldn’t resist buying more than I have storage for in our RV.  I figured I would just have to prep them, freeze them and use them at a later date. 

All kinds of fruit and veggies locally grown and beautiful
Amazing veggies

I was in heaven, my day couldn’t get any better…… I would have been more than happy to come home when we left the Jockey lot, but my friends weren’t ready to come right home, so we decided to go to a local winery and check out some of the wines local to this area.  Now, I had never been to a winery before, because I’m not really a wine drinker, but I thought it would be lovely to be able to cross this experience off of my bucket list.

We headed off towards the mountains to a winery that a couple of our friends had been to before we arrived in the area, it was very laid back and we all felt relaxed, even before we had had any wine! 

City Scape Winery

City Scape Winery in Pelzer, SC was a peaceful, tranquil place.  It was rustic and homely, but their wines were delicious.  We tried six different wines varying from dry white wines to red and even a chocolate raspberry wine. 

The only downside for the whole visit were the yellowjackets which were out in force on this day and for some reason found me to be particularly appealing!  I was plagued by the viscious little flying beasts.  They were literally all over me and when I had to get up from the table several times to try to escape them, they followed me wherever I went.  One even decided to take a bath in my glass of wine, which I wouldn’t have minded, except for the fact that he did it BEFORE I had sipped any to try it.  I wasn’t about to try this wine with a yellowjacket swimming around in it.

I also fund out a year ago that I have a very nasty reaction to a sting from yellowjackets, so I was very wary.  That, fortunately, did not take away from the wonderful experience we had at the winery.  They also served a couple of local cheeses and jams with some really delicious crackers.  All in all, it was a perfect day, and we all had a lot of laughs and made a lot of great memories, which to me makes it a perfect day.

City Scape Winery tasting patio

The friends we have made are totally awesome, and we will be friends for life now.  They have become like family to us, and we are so blessed to have met such wonderful people.  When we started full time RVing, we had no idea that we would meet so many wonderful people on our travels.  We are all so different, but we also have in common the passion for living in an RV full time and traveling around the country.  Linsley and I are finding out that this way of life is so much more than we had ever expected it would be.  Each and every day we experience something new and there is a lot of laughter, fun and love in our lives, oh and lots of great food too.