Rambling Redwoods Campground and RV Park – Crescent City, California

We’ve slowed down our travels a bit for a few reasons. The first is Covid-19. We wanted to protect ourselves and slow the spread, and avoiding crowded areas was our best option. The second is David’s Mobile RV Service, which has many great clients who refer other great clients, and David has built himself an active business in the Crescent City area. We still identify more as tumbleweeds than redwoods, but if we’re going to put down some tentative roots, among the redwoods is where we’d like to do it. This campground might be the best-kept secret on the Northern California coast. Nestled in the redwoods along Highway 101, you can sleep among the trees and be part of the forest, but without giving up things like cellular service and easy access to groceries. We decided to hunker down for the winter here, and moved to a long-term spot back …

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Our Internet Setup as Full-Time RVers

We get asked this a lot, and it’s hard to believe it’s been over 2 years and we still haven’t talked about this! Internet access has become as important as access to electricity and water. As RVers, we rely on internet for everything from banking, to healthcare, to staying in touch with friends and family. We also require it for our jobs. Here’s how we stay online with our home and office on wheels: The first priority is some kind of cellular service. While many parks have wifi, and some parks have great wifi, they are the exception to the rule. It’s best to assume that RV parks will not have decent wifi, and even if they did have decent wifi, you should always use a VPN over a wifi connection shared with strangers. Connecting through a VPN can bog down an already slow connection. Cellular internet has become the …

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So what do we do, anyway?

One of the biggest questions we asked ourselves in the planning stages of full-time RVing was “how will we pay the bills?” We aren’t going to go into details of dollars and cents (there are tons of great posts out there about that, and despite blogging about our life, we’re actually fairly private people), but we’ll certainly give you a good overview of what we’re doing and how we got here. We did not have a house to sell when we decided to do this. We didn’t even have an abundance of possessions to downsize, because we’d already done that when we made a big move from Michigan to California about 10 years ago, following a fairly traumatic layoff. We are lower-middle class Gen Xers who have experienced poverty and housing insecurity a few times during our lives. We have shared one car for the last 7 years, and haven’t …

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Grocery delivery while RVing?

With food allergies and severe celiac disease, we don’t go to restaurants very often. Going out to eat requires a great deal of preliminary research and phone calls to restaurant managers, and even then it’s a gamble whether or not a business is going to be “gluten-free enough” for someone like me. Getting contaminated by a careless restaurant can cause me a health setback that will require weeks or even months of recovery. To play it safe, we cook at home almost exclusively, and have a great time doing it. One of the greatest things about taking our kitchen on the road is that we always have our favorite gadgets and snacks, and we know they will always be safe and clean. We think our Keystone Laredo 335MK has an enormous kitchen, with more fridge and counter space than my first apartment. It’s actually enjoyable to cook in it! Consequently, …

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The RV Archives

There’s such a wealth of information about RVing and long-term camping online. We are constantly researching. To my fellow RVers, I encourage you to do what you can to keep your sites online, even after you lose interest in blogging, quit RVing, or switch to posting solely on YouTube or other “siloed” service. (A siloed service is one which can only be used or accessed through a specific app or other limiting factor, like Facebook, Twitter, and yes, even YouTube, where posts can vanish at the whims of the services’ owners.) Many sites fade away. There are still some decades-old gems out there though. One of my favorites is Two Penny Travels’s computer setup from 1999. As I write this post from a 4-pound laptop tethered to a smartphone hotspot (at speeds of 45mbps up and 23mbps down), I think about Sam and Alice (of Two Penny Travels) and the …

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