Back on the Road

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Our next "gig" was in Gillette, Wyoming for the FMCA Convention.

I love the stretch of road that is highway 90 thru S. Dakota. It's been a few years since we've been up this way and there is a new attraction to see - the Dignity Statue. Friends on Facebook have been posting pictures of this beautiful statue, so I made sure to mark it on our map for a stop.

Then there are the crazy sights that have been here forever.

We made such good time on Highway 90 that we were able to rest a bit as we got ready for the rally by staying at the Elks Lodge in Rapid City. We stayed for 2 nights so we had time to go into town and do laundry, and go to the Office Depot to get some printing done for the rally.

Our parking spot at the Rapid City Elks Lodge RV park.

It's always nice to arrive at a rally early, and rested. And, thanks to being part of the RoadTrek group, we even had a site waiting for us with our name on it!

After getting parked, we rode our bikes to the main building and went inside to check it out, and there's our table with our name on it.  Life is good!

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Our 20 Year Wedding Anniversary: Scuba diving in the Cayman Islands

July 4, 1998 Jim and I made the best decision of our lives and started this adventure called marriage. We were in our mid 40s and knew what we liked: Computers, Scuba Diving, and Travel in general. Of those 3, scuba diving is the most special. To celebrate our 20 years, we had to go scuba diving! We picked a liveaboard trip in the Cayman islands on board the Cayman Aggressor. 

We took advantage of a flight/hotel combo and arrived in Grand Cayman 3 days before the boat's departure. That gave us a chance to see some of the sights on the island. Like the shops at Caymana Bay and the beautiful mosaic artwork on the walls.

Our hotel was the Comfort Suites, right on 7-mile beach. Our room did not have a view, but it was a short walk to the beach.

We also visited Cayman's newest tourist attaction, the Crystal Caves. From our hotel, we walked about a half-mile to catch a water taxi over to the north side of the island, then a shuttle took us to the caves. They were really quite impressive.

We were very happy to have good Wi-Fi in our hotel room because we had some work to do. Being the end of the month, we needed to get our July newsletter out. We even did a Facebook Live, Gabbing with the Geeks from our room.

Another day, we walked a couple miles in the other direction from our hotel to see the docks in Georgetown. We were able to watch the Aggressor as she came in to port with her previous week's divers. It's a pretty big boat, but when it passed in front of the cruise ships it looked awfully tiny. It holds 20 passengers. I took this timelapse video to show you.

We had a glorious week of great weather, great diving, really good food, interesting people. And, even a little bit of R&R.

Ain't love grand?!  20 years later and we couldn't be happier.

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We Pour at Four

From June 6-10, we were at the Glamarama RV rally in Allegan, Michigan. There were around 300 RVs there, but we parked in a section with just the Roadtreks. This is great because the President of the Roadtrek chapter of FMCA, Sherry Targum, makes sure that we have a space for group happy hours, and she "Pours at Four." Jim and I fit right in!



We were here to teach. We taught 4 seminars: Google Photos, Smartphone Basics, Technology for Travelers, and Create your Online Travelogue.
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Jim also took some drone video of the fairgrounds with all the RVs here. Part of our "Create your Travelogue" seminar teaches how to embed that video in a blog post, just like this!

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Between Rallies, President Lincoln, Outdoor YouTube show

We had a few days in between rallies, so I used the Roadtrippers app to find something fun to do. The Lincoln Presidential museum was right on the way. We've been there before (we've been to ALL the official presidential museums, but Lincoln's was one of the best, and we were happy to visit again. We found a fairgrounds RV park within bike-riding distance. Cool!


At the time, Lincoln was not held in the high regard that we have for him today;

This animated exhibit makes it appallingly clear how many people died during the Civil war. I don't know how Lincoln could sleep at night, and he was already prone to depression.

We had fun with our cool little electric bikes. Thoroughly enjoyed the Lincoln museum, and found a great little place for lunch.

Our site was walking distance to Lincoln's tomb, so we did that too.

And, just hanging out at our site was nice. Notice the cell tower in the background? So did we! Blazing fast Verizon internet, so we decided to hang around one more day and do our What Does This Button Do? show from outside the RV.


The only problem was wind. Usually, just a little bit of wind makes it impossible to get good sound. This wind was blowing things over, but Jim's new Zoom microphone with the "dead cat" cover did a great job. Here's the episode:

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The 12 volt "Van Life" lifestyle

Over the years of traveling by RV, we've evolved. From wandering, to sightseeing, to working on the road. This summer, my husband and I - as GeeksOnTour - are on the road for 5 months and are booked to give seminars at 7 different RV rallies. As we travel, we are making our living from our website. We've grown into our name - this summer we are Geeks On Tour more than ever before. Check out our map above.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida is home. "A" on the map is where we start and stop. Our transportation, home, and office is a camper van made by Roadtrek.

It has all the comforts of home, just in miniature!

No hookups? No problem.

We can have our wilderness and do our work too. We spend months at a time in our Roadtrek camper van. Most of the time we park at places with hookups. That means we plug the RV in to a power source, and now we have air conditioning, TV, and power plugs for all our computers, coffee makers and anything else we need.

The other day we parked at a campground in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. It is a rustic, National Park campground with no hookups.  We parked, got the bikes (electric folding bikes by ProdecoTech) down and went for a ride to the lakeshore.

Lots of beauty, a little exercise, gorgeous weather ... we really enjoyed it. While we were out we found a "Gourmet Grill" for dinner. When we got home (to the RV), we had work to do. We need power. Here's how we get it:

• Propane: powers the refrigerator, hot water heater, stove, and furnace
• 12 volt: powers the lights, powers receptacles in the dash where we charge our mobile devices at any time
• Inverter: converts battery power to 110 for two of our electric wall outlets. All we do is turn the Inverter switch on, then we know which outlets are live and plug our computers in there. Our inverter is not powerful enough to run the coffee maker or the air conditioner.
• Generator: as long as we have over 1/4 tank of gas, we can turn on the generator and have as much power as we need. Just as if we were plugged in to shore power. Coffee maker, A/C, hair dryer - everything.
  

Self-Contained

What about water and sewer? We have holding tanks for that. When our fresh water tanks are full and our black and gray water tanks are empty, we can live comfortably for about 5 days. We've gone 7-8 when we have use of a bath house.

What about Internet?

Ahh - there are entire books written about that! I'll just give you our short answer. We have a Verizon unlimited plan on our old Samsung phones. We turn those phones into hotspots so our computers can connect. Here's our video on how to do that.

If you look closely at the first photo above, you'll see a cell tower in the distance behind our Roadtrek. That's what we like to see! We had screaming fast Verizon Internet there - 60Mbps down/37Mbps up! We even had enough connectivity to do our live YouTube show from that location - see Episode 144. Even at the Dunes we had good speeds, 10-20 Mbps. Here's an article to learn more about Internet speeds. Rarely do we find a location in the US where Verizon doesn't give us at least enough check email or post to the website. If we do find ourselves in such a place, we also have T-Mobile service we can try or Project Fi from Google. If nothing works, we can't stay!

There you have it, whether we're in our house in Fort Lauderdale, or in our Roadtrek working on the road, it makes no never-mind to us. We have everything we need. Let the tour continue!

List of Rallies, Tour dates. Numbers from map above:

1. Escapade: May 27-Jun 1
2. FMCA Glamarama: Jun 6-9
3. FMCA International Convention: Jul 18-21
4. Safari 30th Anniversary: Aug 27 - Sep 1
5. Discovery Owners 20th Anniversary: Sep 10-15
6. RV Travel Club Grand National Rally: Sep 26 - Oct 3
7. Workamper Rendezvous: Oct 15-19

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