Frerx Adventures: RV-Dreams Rally Part 3

On Saturday, April 10th, the morning sessions were all on Tire and Weight safety for rigs so, since Ken had already attended similar classes at other rallies, we skipped out to clean the rig in anticipation of the afternoon open house.

We were able to watch from our site as several of the rigs lined up to go through the special wheel-by-wheel weighing that was offered at an extra cost.

Linda K is soloing now in this beautiful Dutch Star which came in comfortably underweight.

Howard did a presentation on researching and selecting campgrounds. This was pretty much a confirmation of what I’d already covered in my prior post here on RV Travel Planning 101. Full-timers have always had advantage of moving on Mondays or Tuesdays when they get get prime spots without need for reservations. H+L seldom make reservations but I have to wonder with so many park systems now moving over to online reservation systems like Illinois is doing, whether full-timers will begin to find themselves forced in to using these systems since there will be less and less first-come first-serve sites available. I’d love to see the cost benefit analysis these states are using to justify going to Reserveamerica.com for reservations since we are able to come up with a lot of reasons this is going to cost them revenue.

In early afternoon, Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour presented Every Rver Needs a Blog. This one presentation was worth the price of the rally for me since I learned about Live Writer a free Microsoft download that I can use to create my posts, including picture inserts while offline. Since we frequently have limited internet access this is a real God-send. When we get to a wifi hotspot, I can then simply do a publish from Live Writer and my latest post is uploaded. I’ve done this with the last 3 posts and it is really slick. It also provides the option of some need plug-ins such as the map I included on RV-Dreams Rally Part 1, which can be used to pinpoint our location visually for our readers. I was ready to start doing a happy dance all around the classroom by the time we left this session!!

It was then time for the Open Rig Walk-throughs. This is a time when people can volunteer to open their rigs for others to visit. We first did this at Life on Wheels back in 2006 and found it very beneficial to see how full-timer rigs looked ‘in the real world’ not on the showroom floor. We were one of the open rigs this time. They divided the 40-50 open rigs in to 2 time periods so that we did still get a chance to see some of the other rigs.

Since many of the attendees were also interested in SeaEagle boats, Ken also got out our boat for folks to see. I’m amazed that Linda and Howard actually carry three different models of SeaEagle boats with them.

There were many more fifth-wheels open that motorhomes but we still did get some interesting ideas on things like making our own privacy screens (thanks Gin and Syl!) as well as an impressive conversion done by our Canadian participants where they converted a bunkbed slideout in to a spacious craft desk and cabinet. It’s surprising what catches peoples eye. Many newbies were impressed by the simple table that Ken made for covering the steering wheel – we have seen this so often that we were surprised it caught anyone’s attention! We also got a lot of comments on our unusually large bedroom size and cabinet storage in the bedroom, as well as the color and quality of the woodwork—things we tend to take for granted when we live with it every day.

That evening there was a wonderful catered meal featuring grilled steaks and fresh boiled shrimp.

After the meal we had a ‘ Golden Oldies Sockhop” including some games and lots and lots of dancing. I haven’t danced that much in the last 10 years combined! But then, since Ken doesn’t do anything but slow dances, this was a venue where everyone just got out and danced without a lot of worry about partners!! I was aching the next day but poor Linda Payne with her bad knees really was in bad shape and could hardly walk. We all agreed though that the great time we had was worth the next days aches and pains!!

They singled out all of us oldies who had been voted ‘most’ something in our high school class, everything from most likely to succeed, to most athletic, best dressed or class clown. RV-Dreamers cross all the possibilities!