Where are we now? Traveling from Arizona to California

Our plan was to spend the winter in Arizona, then head back to Northern California after tax season ended. In Arizona, we could visit my parents and David could work on snow birds’ RVs. Plus Arizona is nice in the winter (for about 2 months, anyway). In January, after a couple months in Goodyear, AZ, we decided to move closer to Quartzite for the rest of our stay. We booked a month at a small sleepy little park where David had worked a couple jobs. But the day we arrived, a very friendly orange tabby and self-appointed welcoming committee came up to our rig and taunted our cats. Even Lillian, an endlessly laid back and friendly cat, had reached her limit, growling through the screen door at him. After the first night, the cat tried to get into our rig, which caused a scary fight between our cats, and no …

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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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How to Maintain a Healthy Black Tank

As a mobile RV tech I have addressed many black tank problems, ranging from simple clogs to tanks that have fallen off their supports. An RV black tank has a very important job to do and works well when it is given the proper tools and conditions. The black tank is not complex, and works by breaking down the solid waste into a slurry, allowing it to exit the tank without clogging. The solids are broken down by bacteria and lots of water. Some of those bacteria give off methane, others do not, and methane is one of the chemicals that gives black tanks their unpleasant smell. The key is to encourage the less-stinky bacteria to flourish and keep the stinky buggers away. Given a good environment and enough water, the solids are broken down within 24-48 hours.   Here are some questions I’m frequently asked about black tanks: I …

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Our First Work Camping Experience (Might Be Our Last)

Our first work camping gig didn’t go quite like we expected, but does anything go as expected during a pandemic? We could write a novel about our experience, but we’ll just share some highlights. First, a disclaimer: this is our personal experience, and our personal opinions. We are not speaking as representatives of Kamp Klamath, its owners, managers, or other workers. This is specifically our experience as temporary volunteer campers at this campground during the summer of 2020. This isn’t a review of the campground itself, or a discussion of the kind of experience a guest can expect to have. This post is only a personal account of our first work camping gig on our personal blog about our full-time RV life. This opportunity at Kamp Klamath in Klamath, California came at the perfect time: David was struggling with the altitude of Questa, New Mexico and we knew we needed …

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RV Park Review: Mountain Valley RV Park, Tehachapi, California

This was only going to be a two-night stop-over on our way to Northern California, but we ended up blowing a bearing and spending a week here during July 4th. While we were sad and frustrated about the breakdown, this was a really great place to be stranded. Mountain Valley RV Park is located at Mountain Valley Airport in Tehachapi, California. It’s not a real airport, though: it’s for gliders! They’re the cutest and quietest planes to live near, and it was a lot of fun to watch them take off and land during the day. As an added bonus, the grassy part of the air field is filled with prairie dogs! This park does not have full hookups! Note that their “full hookup” sites on their website are not water, sewer, and electric. They have water and electric at these sites, but tanks must be dumped at their dump …

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RV Park Review: Sierra Hermosa RV Park, Questa, New Mexico

Sierra Hermosa RV Park is a small, wonderful park near Carson National Forest in Questa, New Mexico, with an extremely friendly owner. In fact, when calling RV parks in the area, Bobby was so friendly that he was our deciding factor. We were looking for a small, quiet vacation spot where we could relax and recover from a very busy time in Austin, and I was going to be able to take a little time (very little) to breathe before diving back into covid-extended tax season. The park did not have many sites, and the spaces were well spread out. We were backed up against a field filled with the cutest little prairie dogs, which the cats loved to watch all day. The day we pulled in, our neighbors gifted us the most delicious fresh cherries we’ve ever had from their tree at home in Albuquerque. (These cherries were so …

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Where has the time gone?

It’s been a busy 3 months since our last post. All things considered (hashtag 2020), we are doing well and hanging in there. We have many updates to make! Since we left Austin, Texas in June, we’ve been to New Mexico and Northern California. We’re still in NorCal right now, in the middle of fire season and a pandemic. Jen survived the extended tax season (and is now going into extension season), and since RVing is one of the safest ways to travel and vacation right now because of the pandemic, David has been extremely busy repairing RVs. For the last 2 months, we were at our very first work camping gig (stay tuned for a blog post about that), where we had lousy cell service and no internet access. Now that we’re back in civilization with cell service, we plan on doing a lot of updating and catching up. …

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Happy Pride Month! And a PSA.

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

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

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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