It's cool how our life has evolved. We've been presenting seminars at every FMCA national convention since 2005. They do 2/year, so that's 24 rallies so far. They're usually one in the east and one in the west. Between the FMCA and the Escapees "Escapade" rally - that's what sets our primary travel itinerary each year. Then, in between rallies we play - or go home to Florida. We also fill in with other rallies, RV parks, senior centers, computer clubs, and even people's homes. Wherever people gather who like to learn about technology - you may find us there.
This time, the destination was Indianapolis for the FMCA convention. First stop - a friend's driveway in Gainesville area. We try to stay and visit Alex any time we're passing by. Now, with this little RV, its so easy! Alex likes to travel by RV also and she has a little Casita trailer. We think she would like the Roadtrek as well, so it was fun to get to show it to her. I wouldn't be surprised to see her get one sometime soon.
And, we lucked out while we were there, another friend, Mark Miale, was playing music at nearby
One Love Cafe. If you ever get the chance, go hear him, he's really good. Here's his website:
MarkMiale.com with lots of samples of his music.
Ok, now we're ready to get off to work! No other stops along the way so we're just in travel gotta-get-there mode. When this is the case we often stay at Walmarts and Cracker Barrels. We find them by using our trusty
All Stays Camp and RV app. It doesn't matter when we get there, no reservations required and there's everything we need in the way of food and supplies. At Cracker Barrel we get dinner AND breakfast!
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We didn't even need to use the special RV parking spots! We fit into any parking spot - and this one was more level. |
Another place we can stay for no extra charge is Thousand Trails RV parks. We pay an annual membership fee, and then can stay for up to two weeks each at about 50 different parks around the country. One of these was on our way and not too far from Indianapolis. We can also use our Allstays App to find these. See this highlight from our What Does This Button Do show that demonstrates how to do that.
Finding Thousand Trails Parks with Allstays.
We always like staying at Thousand Trails.


Even pulling into the FMCA rally was simpler with the Roadtrek. Parking us is always a bit of a problem because they have specific areas for Vendors, and for Attendees. But we're not vendors and we're not just an attendee. We are in a class almost by ourselves as Seminar Presenters. A few others are in this category - Wayne and Dahelia Hunt who teach the fitness classes, Al Hesselbart who teaches RV History, Roger Marble who teaches about Tires and Genealogy (that goes together like fish and bicycles?!) These are people that we see twice each year at FMCA because we're usually parked together. But, since there are so few of us, the parking crew is usually clueless as to where to put us. Now, when we drive in with a Roadtrek - they point "over there are all the Roadtreks!" Hey, that's fine with us. Roadtreks usually get electric hookups, are near the bath houses, and are near the activities because its understood that people traveling in these little motorhomes don't have cars to get around and generally like to have the shower facilities nearby as well.
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Roadtrekers are a social bunch |
One of the first people we ran into was Mike Wendland and his wife Jennifer. They run the website Roadtreking.com and he wanted to interview us about our transition to the small motorhome lifestyle.
Then it was time to get to work. We had to go to an Office Depot to get a bunch of stuff printed (using the remarkable
FMCA Office Depot discount) Then it's Jim's job to package the printouts with our USB drives of all our teaching content - videos and .pdf files - that we include with our special membership offer during the rally. And it's my job to review all our seminars and be sure we're ready for our presentations.
Here was our schedule:
Then it's a blur for 4 days of the rally.
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This is the hands-on class on smartphone photography. People learn by doing. |
Here's a sweet little slide-show / movie that Facebook put together of these days.