Updates for RV Travel Issue 737, April 9, 2016

We've had problems with recent RV Travel newsletters. Our website has crashed twice in the last four weeks on Saturday morning, which is when most readers read newsletter. If the website goes down today (April 9) we will do our best to keep you updated of what's happening.

Next week (fingers crossed) we will be on our new server with a newly designed website. Our problems should be over.

If you landed on this page by mistake looking for today's RV Travel Newsletter, click here to read it. 

UPDATES (Pacific time):
All okay as of Friday, April 8 at 11:45 pm

Update Saturday, March 26, 2016

10:55 a.m., Pacific Time
RVtravel.com is a sick puppy today, Saturday, March 26, 2016. Everything was fine until about 9 a.m., when all of a sudden, the front page was taking a minute or two to load. At other times it would not load at all. Now (11:05). It's offline entirely.

This was a lousy time for this to happen. My essay this week is all about major changes taking place with our newsletters and website. I should be able to re-post it here by 11:15 a.m. (Pacific) this morning. I may also send it in an email later in the week for those readers who tried to read the issue today but couldn't.

Okay. . . got to find my essay to repost. Be right back.

Chuck

* * *

Okay, here it is (without photos or illustrations):

Editor's corner

With Chuck Woodbury 
 
One more report in this space about business stuff. I promise to get back to RV-specific topics (for the most part) in the future. But this is important and I must tell you. It's about how we are changing the way we display and distribute our news, articles and other information.

First — and please bear with me as this may seem like bad news to some of you — at the end of this month (this coming week) we are discontinuing our RV Daily Tips Newsletter. We started it four years ago and have produced nearly 850 issues. We thought when we began that by selling enough advertising in it we could replace some of the lost income from the closing of our RV bookstore. The store had been our main source of income for about 10 years, supporting this RV Travel newsletter and paying our salaries. Sadly, we never did better with the daily newsletter than cover our costs, even though producing it Monday through Friday demanded an enormous amount of our time and energy. In the end it stifled our overall productivity.

Another big problem with the daily newsletter has been that many of its subscribers tire of getting an email from us nearly every weekday. So they unsubscribe from the daily edition. But in doing so many inadvertently unsubscribe from this Saturday newsletter as well. The result is that we have lost hundreds of subscribers in the last few months, not good.

NEW, IMPROVED RV TRAVEL WEBSITE
With the time and money we will save from not publishing the daily newsletter, we are building a hugely improved RVtravel.com website. The current site, the one you are reading, is (we readily admit) mutt ugly and difficult to navigate. Even though we pride ourselves in being a quality source of RV information, our appearance is shabby and the function Stone Age.

Sometime late next month we will flip the switch on the new site. You will love it. This newsletter will look much the same, but the rest of the website will be brand-new, with all the articles and information easy to find (and all of it updated). And talk about information! We will have a ton of it!
We are busy now sifting through the archives of this website and a couple dozen of our other sites and blogs (some long gone), rounding up more than 3,500 articles (about 18 years' worth) to post to this website. It's a huge job. We figure that on average we can find, update and re-post about three to four articles an hour. So that's roughly 1,000 man (and woman) hours of work. I've been sitting at my computer every night for weeks finding, updating and posting articles. Members of our staff have been posting articles a couple of hours every day in between their regular duties. Our newly assigned RV Daily Tips writers are picking away, too. Slowly but surely we are gathering this massive amount of advice and information into one central location, RVtravel.com.

Alas, some of our articles from the past are hidden away in the far reaches of cyberspace and hard to find, some on websites and blogs we abandoned long ago. It will likely take months to find them all, update them, and re-post them to this site. But, wow! In the end, it will be worth all the time and effort!

In the meantime we are about to debut several video shows on our YouTube Channel. It's been my dream for years to produce more video as a way to present useful, valuable information about RVing in a different way than simply with words and photos alone.

I won't go into detail about the shows, but I can tell you that they will be entertaining and educational, most between 10 and 12 minutes on a specific topic related to RVing. We are also about to launch our tongue-in-cheek Spin and Win game show, which you will enjoy if you have a sense of humor. Even though it will be a bit goofy (mirroring my personality), we will have great prizes, some valued at more than $200.

You should see us when we are taping the show. Everybody is laughing so hard it's almost too much! I'm the host, sporting the ugliest, tackiest, most tasteless shirts known to mankind! My sweetheart, Gail, is our "Vanna," and is a hoot! When we get a formal schedule set for tapings, we'll invite our local readers into the studio to watch.

Finally, for those of you who pledged including those of you who do so on a monthly or annual basis, we will certainly understand if you "unsubscribe" now that we have suspended the daily newsletter. That said, I can promise that the amount and quality of information going forward will be far greater than ever before and I believe worthy of your support. So stay tuned. We are energized and I believe you will enjoy the fruits of our labors.

 

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT

Sign of the times: Grandma and Grandpa the potheads

This is an ad in my local weekly newspaper. Remember, I live in Washington state. 

The headline, as you can see, says "Laugh More. Live Longer." And there's Grandma and Grandpa smiling and laughing, rowing a boat! I mean, look at them! They aren't just happy, they're ridiculously happy!

But why, you ask? Is it because they're outdoors, getting some exercise? Is it because they love each other so much?

No. Not that. They're happy because they're stoned!

Look at the writing on the boat. "Recreational Marijuana." And below that the ad reads "Make It Your Mission to Enjoy Life A Little More Every Day!"

These happy seniors, ex-hippies perhaps, are senior potheads. Once, long ago, they may have been hippies who smoked pot and hoped the local cops wouldn't show! Now, no problem: in Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Alaska, recreational pot is legal!

I can choose from two stores within about 5 miles of my house. Another one is opening soon that I can walk to. Once there, I can buy a joint (a whole lot stronger than the wimpy stuff from back in the '60s) or pick up a marijuana brownie or cookie!

Who would have thought?

That ad cracks me up!

Why I am more comfortable writing to my peers

Two weeks ago, in my essay in the RVtravel.com newsletter, I wrote that after much thought I had decided to focus my writing to an audience of my peers — those of the Baby Boom generation now in their 60s.

A recent RVtravel.com reader survey revealed that 94 percent of the readers of the newsletter are older than 54. I noted that I sometimes feel that those younger readers — more than a decade younger than me — grew up in a different world. The popular culture of their youth is different than mine.

A reader named Sam responded: “I’m a younger RVer, 50 years old, and been telling my other friends about your great site. I always look forward to reading it and you always have great information. Please don't give up on us younger RVers.”

I wrote back to tell Sam that there will always be plenty of useful information to readers of all ages. It’s just that I am most comfortable writing my essays for my peers, who better understand where I’m coming from. We have traveled through time during a dramatic, challenging, fascinating, confusing and even scary period of human history.

My mother and our trailer, late '50s.

My experience, of course, was that of growing up in the 1950s in a white, middle-class family in a mostly all-white suburb of Los Angeles. My father was a hard-working executive, who had a few ulcers — common then, almost accepted as routine — an executive badge of courage. Like many of his generation, he had returned from World War II, where in his case he flew a B 24 Liberator on 35 missions over Germany. His mission when he returned home was to marry, buy a house in the suburbs and raise a family, providing to his children more than his parents had provided him.

So, that is where I come from. Many others, in at least white America, were raised in similar circumstances. My peers who came along a decade or two later entered into a different world. I was finishing up high school when today's 50-year-old was born.

Those Americans were toddlers in the turbulent '60s. They were not watching TV when Bobby Kennedy was shot on live television. They weren’t horrified when radio bulletins announced that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. They didn’t sit glued to their TV alongside their crying mother, waiting to learn if JFK would survive his gunshot wounds.

They weren’t an adult during the protests on college campuses for Women’s and Blacks' rights. They were not adults during the riots in Watts.

They were not young adults during the Vietnam War, when a very unpopular military draft took a lot of guys away from their lives, and ultimately snuffed their lives entirely — many of whom did not believe the war was just. They were not around when returning soldiers were treated (very unfairly) like second rate citizens, even spit on. Compare that with today.

A 50-year-old was nine when the last American was drafted into military service. He didn’t sit nervously by his radio to listen to live Vietnam-era draft lotteries to see if his number (birth date) would be selected, determining whether he would go to war or stay home if he wished.

Today's 50-year-old, and those younger, didn’t watch Elvis shake his pelvis or the electrifying, long-haired Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show. They didn’t learn how to kiss a girl from watching Ricky Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet Show. They didn’t grow up thinking family life in America was like that of Ward, June, Wally and the Beaver. They didn’t grow up watching black and white TV.

Unlike me, when they were children their doctor did not charge their parents extra for a house call — $8 instead of $5 for an office visit.

They didn’t have air raid drills in their elementary school, where they ducked under their desk (like that would really protect them from the blast of an atomic bomb). They weren’t a teenager during the Cuban Missile Crisis when my peers and I went to bed frightened half to death that we would not survive the night.

They were toddlers when my peers and I sat spellbound at our TVs as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface of moon, biting our nails that they would make it. Nor did they scan the skies years earlier to see Sputnik, the first satellite, launched by our enemy The Soviet Union.

They were still kids during Watergate. Today’s 50-year-old was eight when Nixon stepped into the Presidential helicopter and waved farewell to America and his political career.

They were not camping on their own when camping was free in all U.S. Forest Service campgrounds. I remember as a summer fire fighter in 1968 putting up little boxes at campsites for campers to put in a dollar to stay. When I was young there was no such thing as a motorhome. The first Winnebago was sold the same year as today’s 50-year-old was born.

I grew up in a town with a Main Street. Malls were years away, Wal-Mart ever further into the future. My buddies and I could get into the local movie theater for a quarter if we got there before six. We could watch both films, and then again if we wished.

Someone who’s 50 today was not an adult before copy machines, faxes and answering machines. To make copies of what we wrote, we used carbon paper typed on clunky manual typewriters. By the time today’s 50-year-old entered the workplace, computers had debuted.

Most of my peers were 50 before we owned our first computer. If we had a few hundred dollars we could buy an external hard drive with a whopping 20 megabytes of extra storage. We grew up mailing letters. Email? What was that? If we wanted speedy delivery we spent a few cents more for an Airmail stamp. Fed Ex? Years away.

Today’s 50-year-old could use a hand calculator to solve math problems in school. We could only dream of such devices.

But, yes, Sam and I are both RVers and thus have one big shared interest. It’s just that as a writer, now in my “senior years,” I am most comfortable reflecting on what's happening with me as an older person and the world in a way that readers only my age can truly appreciate. The people who have traveled through time with me will understand my thoughts far better than those younger. Like I said in my essay, there are plenty of RVers in their 30s, 40s and early 50s who write on the Web, who can speak to their peers far better based on their shared interests and experiences.