Jen

Cat wrangler. G-free 4 life.

Happy Pride Month! And a PSA.

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Here’s a rainbow we saw on our travels this week, directly overhead! Despite more people than ever staying home, police violence against Black people continues just as it has since the country was founded. People have reached a tipping point and are collectively standing up for justice because black lives matter. Remember the campsite rule: leave your site better than you found it. What can you do to leave this world better than you found it? The RV community (especially the RV community online) has a whiteness problem, and we need to change that. Find outdoorsy accounts/blogs/channels run by Black folks and follow them. Challenge 10-year age limits at RV parks (which disproportionately affects lower income RVers, and lower income people are more likely to be people of color). Reconsider your RV park reviews complaining about “long term residents” which is often code for “poor people” (who are more likely …

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When RV Life Meets Quarantine Life

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Like most of you, we’ve been isolating ourselves from most of the world in order to help “flatten the curve” and avoid getting or giving COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus). To be honest, we’ve kind of lost track of time and how long this has been going on. I was buried deep in the blur that is tax season when the pandemic hit the U.S., and while I work remotely, most of my coworkers work out of physical offices in Massachusetts. Since we’re already set up for remote work, most everyone was able to limit or eliminate their in-office hours, and clients were able to work with us digitally. We thought we’d be pushing hard to make the April 15 deadline, but once the deadline became July 15, things have become a whirlwind. David has been working hard as a mobile RV technician, and had been so busy that he had …

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The Unfortunately Racist Origins of One of RVers’ Favorite Words

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Content warning: this post contains racial slurs in the context of educating the audience about these slurs. For those already aware of what I’m going to talk about, this could be jarring and upsetting. For those unaware, I hope it will become jarring and upsetting by the end of this post, in order to encourage everyone to remove this word from their vocabularies. For International Romani Day (April 8), I want to challenge my fellow RVers to remove the following word from your lives: Gypsy. We’ve all seen it: Romanticizing what RVers refer to as “gypsy” culture and lifestyle. The idea of traveling wherever the wind blows, an irresistible wanderlust, your home is wherever you park it, the freedom to live life on your own terms. But here’s the hard truth: the original “gypsies” are the Romani people, and that word is a racial slur loaded with prejudices and bigoted …

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Kitty enrichment: snuffle mats!

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We learned about these snuffle mats from our newest friends and fellow animal-loving RVers, Traci and Terry. We are always looking for kitty enrichment toys to avoid boredom and to keep the younger boys from harassing the older ladies. These are primarily designed for dogs, but who says cats can’t snuffle, too? Everyone loves it! Even Miss Kitty got into it, and she expects her food to be served by full service wait staff on fancy China. We used to use foraging toys (old pill bottles with a hole cut out) in our sticks-and-bricks homes, but they’re a trip and fall hazard in a tiny space, so they didn’t come with us into the RV. As a bonus, snuffle mats are easy to wash (just throw it in the laundry). We chose got this snuffle mat for dogs, which has an adjustable string to make the mat more compact for …

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Moving Day Checklists for RVers

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We love our moving day checklists. There are so many different parts of moving day when you’re moving an RV, that it’s too easy to forget something minor that becomes a major hassle later. We double- and triple-check anything safety related (like hitching the trailer to the truck) with or without a list, but rushing to pack up the RV could mean getting to your destination with a gallon (or more) of water on the floor, the contents of your cupboards all over your floor, or just stinky because you forgot to take the trash out before you closed everything up up and traveled 300 miles on a 90-degree day. We use iPhone’s built-in Notes app, and have 3 shared checklists, so when one of us checks off a task, it updates the other’s list. There are other apps out there that work in similar ways, and this isn’t ideal …

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Always Hungry: Gluten-Free Food Truck in Austin, Texas!

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One of our favorite charming qualities of Austin is that there’s a food truck on nearly every street corner, and there are so many interesting restaurants in the region. We’ve been here since December, and to date we haven’t found a lot of dedicated gluten-free spaces, making Always Hungry a delicious date-night treat. Always Hungry is a little taco truck (technically a trailer) in the parking lot of the Spider House Cafe and Ballroom, run by two best friends with a knack for delicious corn-free Mexican-inspired food. The menu is short, and everything starts out vegan, with the option to add meat for the omnivores. We shared two little tacos to start: one with mushrooms, and one with jackfruit. Both are delicious and come with greens, guac, lemon cashew aioli, hemp hearts, pickled onions (which I generously gave to David), and cilantro (no thanks), on homemade almond flour tortillas. They …

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Zucchini Kill Bakery: Gluten-Free Vegan Treats in Austin, Texas!

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We haven’t been talking too much about our travels… it’s about time we started doing that, right? Well, we’re near Austin, Texas until the end of April, and I think we’ve found our favorite bakery of all time: Zucchini Kill, a vegan womyn-owned bakery in Possum Park, a vegan paradise in Austin. There are several vegan food trucks in Possum Park, but only Zucchini Kill is a dedicated gluten-free business. They’re also soy-free, mostly corn-free (except occasional corn starch and xanthan gum, which is technically a corn product), and none of the most common allergens. They do use GF oats in a very small number of their treats, and the workers have all be fantastic about letting me read the ingredients before we buy anything. In addition to adorable and delicious donuts, cupcakes, Rebel Swrrrls, and Cream Coffins, they sell CBD-infused sodas and sweets, incense, Zucchini Kill swag (I’m totally …

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RV Lock Keypad Replacement

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We installed an RV Lock keyless entry about a year ago, and we love it. We can hit the pool without worrying about where to keep our keys, we never get locked out, and it looks real slick on the rig. Unfortunately, the cover started to crack several months ago. We worried moisture would get into the lock and damage, it looked bad, and it could be considered a security risk because the most commonly used keys are the ones more likely to show wear first. We posted about it on our Instagram account, and am excited to report that RV Lock reached out to us to offer to send us a replacement face plate for the unit. They’d upgraded the materials used for the keypad and said the replacement should last much longer. The new plate looks thicker and sturdier than the cracked plate. We were also pleased to …

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RV Park Review: Eastbank, Lake Seminole, GA

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This one is brought to you by the “looks can be deceiving” department. We stayed at the Eastbank campground, maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, in August 2019. We made reservations for three nights, but ended up leaving after one. On the way up, there were some steep grades, and a lot of trees that were still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Michael. When we checked in, we were warned about sugar ants, and encouraged to spread poison around our site, as well as to wrap our electrical cord around the pole, to keep it off the ground and deter ants from finding an easy way into our home. When we found our site, we were stunned by the beauty of it all. The lake was like glass, the grass and trees so green, and the sky looked endless. Parking was a little daunting, as they’re back-in sites, and …

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