rv life

10 of Our Favorite RV Gadgets

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The more we do this and live this life, the more we learn. We learn, our needs change, technology changes, and new cool things come out all the time. We don’t buy the latest and greatest, and we prefer to live simply, so maybe this list is a bit lower-tech than you’re expecting. But here are 10 of our current favorite RV doodads, in no particular order: 1. Happy Campers RV Holding Tank Treatment This stuff is amazing. It has no smell or added perfumes, it’s a simple powder that deodorizes holding tanks. We use this in our black tank, but we also add it to the gray tanks on occasion, if we notice any kind of odor. It works within a few hours, and lasts a long time. Now that we have a healthy colony of bacteria taking care of our black tank, we only ever notice a smell …

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Our First Work Camping Experience (Might Be Our Last)

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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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Top 10 Reasons Why Traveling in an RV is the Best Way to Travel

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We’ve traveled a lot over the years, and we haven’t enjoyed any mode of transportation as much as we’ve enjoyed RVing. In light of COVID-19 and the recent surge of RV sales, which some are calling “covid campers,” here are 10 reasons why we prefer traveling by RV: Our own bed: We have our own bed, our own sheets and blankets, our own pillows, and we know they’re clean and washed without detergent that’ll cause allergic reactions. Traveling pre-RV was fun, but it was always so satisfying to get home to our own bed. Not we get to do that every single day we travel. Our own kitchen: This is especially important when traveling with celiac and food allergies. All the research, questions, and restaurant managers’ promises in the world can’t prevent the one food prep incident that ruins our whole trip. I do miss the days of discovering new …

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

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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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RV Park Review: Hwy 71 RV Park, Cedar Creek, TX

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We stayed at this Austin-area park from December 2019 until June 2020. We planned to leave at the end of April, but decided to wait to travel due to COVID-19. This was our first time visiting Austin, and we loved it. We found a couple great safe places to eat (see our reviews of Zucchini Kill and Always Hungry), the best co-op grocery store ever (the unfortunately named Wheatsville), the Dinosaur Park. Sadly, we never got to check out the Congress Avenue Bridge bats due to the pandemic and avoiding crowds, but there’s always next time. Hwy 71 RV Park is located on the east side of Austin in the town of Cedar Creek. The nearest town with grocery stores and services (including a Buc-ee’s!) is Bastrop. There’s also Bastrop Mobile Home and RV Parts, which just opened this year and David used frequently for working on clients’ RVs in …

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Where has the time gone?

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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.

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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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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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