My parents lived in an RV for a while, shortly after they retired. The one thing I feel safe to say that I learned from them is that there’s a lot to know about RVs before one complacently heads off into the universe in one. So I’ve been looking for blogs about them. First thought: learning is such a different process today than it was twenty years ago. I know we all know that, most of us probably appreciate it on a regular basis, but seriously, so much knowledge exists at my fingertips about so many things. It’s mind-blowing.
But I found a site that’s been helpful, Hitch Up and Go, a huge list of all the blogs on RVs that have been submitted to the creators. By huge, I mean huge, at least several hundred of them. I’ve been slowly but steadily working my way though, looking at each one and then sometimes following links to other places, and it’s fascinating.
The list is like a microcosm of the blogging universe. It includes a tiny smattering of professional blogs, people who are clearly making a living via their online presence and maybe even a pretty good living. It includes a larger group of people who clearly wanted to earn money online, maybe even do, but their blogs don’t look professional and the money they’re making is probably only from sidebar ads. Then there are the active blogs, people who are writing about their lives on the road. Some of them are fascinating, some of them not so much, and some are both on consecutive days.
A fair number are very dry: listing every road they went on, every place they stopped, the people they met, without telling much in the way of stories about their experiences. But those are personal blogs, so maybe they’re saving information for themselves. Still, for a reader there’s such a difference between “We went out for dinner with Tom and Mary. The food was okay.” and “We had dinner with Tom and Mary, old friends from our days in Poughkeepsie. Tom’s retired now from his job at the bottle-cap factory but his collection of bottle caps is impressively weird. For dinner, we ate Mexican at a little place down the street. It looked like a dive, but their chips were delicious. Not so much the refried beans.” Details! Not only important details, but details that give context & meaning. I’ll try to remember this if and when I start to write about traveling — no lists of roads taken without at least trying to say why it matters.
The interesting ones, though, are the dead ones. Plenty end with an ending post, a good-bye as the former travelers settle down. Sometimes it’s sad. One woman ended her blog with the story of her husband’s death and it was heart-wrenching even though it was the first thing I’d ever read about them. But so many just sort of stop. Some day in some month, some year, they wrote a post and then… never again. Sometimes that last post is “I’m sorry it’s been so long, here’s what’s going on.” You get the idea with those that the author has gotten bored with blogging and can assume that they didn’t pick it up again. Other times, though, the post is just another day in the life and then… nothing more. I’ll never get to know what happened to that person. Since I never knew them anyway, it obviously doesn’t matter — but it’s still just an interesting experience. Blogs become books with no endings, stories that never finish. Ghost blogs.
Poor Zelda keeps sticking her cold, wet nose under my arm saying please, can’t we get up, and it’s 8:30, so she’s been incredibly patient with me. So off I go! But reading random blogs has been fun. Maybe tomorrow — or someday soon — I’ll link to the good ones that I’ve found, because there are some people having great adventures and writing entertaining tales about them out there on the internets!
It can be unsettling when things end like that. Another unsettling thing was a blog I followed where she posted daily happenings in her life and then she morphed in to a kind of preaching everyday. I hated the preaching and missed her daily stuff. Of course people change in weird ways in real life, too.
I think people who want to make money from their blogs sometimes evolve into posting the same type of thing every day, because all the “business” advice about blogging says that’s what you’re supposed to do. Consistency is supposed to be good. I, of course, do not pay attention to that stuff. Hmm, which reminds me, I made really good pot roast yesterday, I should save that recipe because it worked incredibly well.
My second husband was always irritated with me because I would never cook anything the same way twice and I never wrote things down.
I usually do that, too. But sometimes when it works really well, it’s worth trying to remember what was good about it. Yesterday’s pot roast had no salt in it but a generous helping of garlic powder and I added baby carrots about an hour before it was time to eat. The carrots were incredibly good — cooked, flavored with pot roast, but still tasting like carrot. And the pot roast was very moist but still flavorful. I’ll never remember those two details because the lack of salt was for a friend who can’t have salt, so guest-specific, and the carrots were just a matter of not having big carrots and not wanting the baby carrots to turn into mush. But so good!
My husband and I purchased a 5th wheel trailer to move our furniture, etc. up to our new home, 500 miles away, We’d purchased land, designed a new home and realized that if the current house didn’t sell before the new house was finished, we’d need a place to live. It worked just as we planned and I have to say that I have some truly wonderful memories of living in that RV. We stayed at a campground at the east edge of town that happened to be attached to a gliderport. Our space was usually along the back row, parallel to the runway, What fun to watch the planes take off and land, and the area between our area and the runway was filled with prairie dog homes. I began feeding them leftover bread and peanuts. What a hoot — what a wonderful time! And across the road from the campground were fields where carrots, onions, potatoes and beets were grown. I was able to walk through the field with grocery sacks, picking through the leavings, I tell you, there’s nothing like fresh vegetables taken from the field, There was so much produce left behind by the harvesting machines that it was disturbing to me, knowing there were so many people who could use that food. We met a lot of very nice people by just staying there — other people came and went so we never really got to know them, but one camping club stayed there and we made friends with several of the members — they even voted to have us join their club!! We didn’t, and now we don’t have an RV so wouldn’t be able to participate, but it was fun at the time, There’s one group (can’t bring the name to mind right now), that has written a book on living in an RV and living ‘on the road’ as it were, When I find it, I’ll let you know,
That sounds like such fun! The fields sound amazing. I’ve stayed with my parents in their RV many times, also stayed in the RV with my dad driving it somewhere and parking it for me, and taken one trip where I did it all myself (only one little scrape on the way!), so I know I like the experience. But RV maintenance is a big job and I’ve never had to care about that. And staying for a couple of weeks is so different than planning a life in an RV. But it’s going to be fun!
I love that there are so many blogs about so many topics – truly something for whatever I am into at the moment. Right now that’s personal finance (I know, so drab, and yet) and I’m finding so much good info, so much well-written stuff – but it was the same when I was really into nutrition, or Disney World, or a bunch of stuff. Enjoy the blogs! (And I loved this post.)