New! RV Travel Magazine Premier
We have produced a new RV magazine with new larger format video articles of road trips of your dreams. In this premier issue we travel the"Wonderful Ones" California Coast Highway 1 and Oregon Coast Highway 101. Paint your wagon and come along.

If This Is Friday... We Must Be Lost Somewhere In America
By Barry Murray, Editor

Today is my 68th birthday. A gift to myself shall be the recovery of unnecessary seconds squeezed out of the 86,400 tick-tick-ticks, per year, of day-to-day routine. Primarily, angry moments that threatens my longevity. 

This day also is an anniversary of declaring myself “semi-retired,” which means that Bobby and I have been full-time motorhome travelers for six-years.  Our survival mode, being citizens of miscellaneous, is to escape the phenomena of time passing more quickly as you accumulate years. Remember how long summer vacations were in grade school? Well, as workaholics we had been experiencing looking up from our computers at our brick and mortar ad agency to say “Merry Christmas,” to each other, and then —seemingly the very next day— asking, “Want to go watch the Fourth of July fireworks, one more time?”

For us, traveling —say 50 miles down the road every third day— has been the answer. We keep a journal so when setting outside in our “living room” enjoying a sundowner, while witnessing one of those incredible wilderness desert sunsets where — as Forest Gump stated, “It is impossible to tell where the land ends, and the sky begins,” — we can reminisce over other boondocks camps. The wonderful surprise is that often when thinking back to a really memorable day that seemed to have happened many months ago, by using our written record to settle a discussion about packing precious moments into our life — we are reminded that we had “changed that wallpaper,” only two weeks, and 150-miles ago.

When coming to town for repair work and supplies, and mentioning, while chatting with fellow retirees in a fancy RV resort hot tub, that we have actually been living in a motorhome for six years usually elicits a much bigger, “really,” than our back-handed bragging that we have done the Fairbanks to Florida run two times, and the Anchorage to Arizona trip, four.

It also happens that this publication is six years old. I had the idea, having been editor and publisher of a successful, high gloss “dead tree” print publication — Economic Currents— for four years, that continuing my magazine/advertising career (credits in LIFE, and Holiday, etc.) on a lesser level, while experimenting with the media online, would keep me alive. I was right about the passion through avocation part. What we didn’t realize was that I had picked the wrong industry. Not tourism, as both Bobby and I have a lot of experience marketing Alaska Travel, in our AlaskaTravelMagazine.com, and helping a daughter, way back in 1997, develop one of the first Alaska tour itineraries on the web at RainbowMtnAdventures.com.

Blindly we thought there was room for a video rich RV video publication, whereas the near monopolistic system in place makes money their targeting cash rich retirement funds with, “what to buy,” instead of, “where to go”. We were told at a RV time-share sales presentation that there is only one commercial RV park space, nationwide, for every 67 licensed RV's. Ouch! No wonder we like traveling on to “Golden Age Passport” campgrounds.

What almost stopped us in our tracks for awhile was that “the industry” somehow believes that our role as a lowly customer is to, “bring money.” This is proven by the weird axiom that paying for premium upgrades (maple cabinets , leather captain chairs, rear view cameras, and resort parks) is almost a guarantee that you do not get Total Quality Movement product (as in a GM, Ford, and Dodge chassis) value for your money.

As a very old “magazine man” I know that readers are the ones who really, TQM style, own a publication. This led to the dilemma of how to do a positive ‘sale’ of our chosen life-style, when so many things were working against us. For believability beyond photos and video, I have had to write from first-hand experience about actual events. Unfortunately, these are Jayco’s famous advertised  “bumper to bumper warranty,” on a Class A box that has no bumpers; and Baudry RV salesmen taking advantage of a forced stay for drug-out repairs in their abusively expensive RV Park, to further steal our time by continually trying to interest us in trading up to a larger machine; and the “old fashioned” Texas hospitality (sorry, I meant hostility) of the bureaucrats of the city of Alice, Texas, sending us, in the middle of the night for the lack of a commercial RV park to camp in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

We also had a problem in that advertisers needed to make any publication financially viable felt it more respectable to be seen in the free “dead tree” penny shoppers one finds in the laundry rooms of RV parks, that also had the latest scoop of where to shop in the “delightful little village of Blah Blah Blah.” Perhaps this really is a last ditch effort of some Industrial Age advertisers to avoid the transparency of the the Information Age Internet, but it did slow us down a bit. I am really looking forward to the day travelers can find commercial RV parks and/or free campgrounds online.

We have found our niche, for now, of developing new media video-articles, that cross state borders exploring deserted sections of highway that have little advertising value. We hope you enjoy our example of leading the way, by following. I loved hearing from an English couple who had run out of roads to explore in Europe, and had bought an American rig (circa 1986) to explore places as the Oregon Trail, and Tombstone (a commercialized disappointment to them), that, thanks to us, they truly were appreciating the beauty of the dessert they found along Route 66. Pity the Dennisons were not able to accompany us into Death Valley. We also missed them on the Alaska Highway, but as they are true motorhome travelers, so I know we will caravan with us one day soon.

E-mail I haven’t been enjoying is an overwhelming response to my complaints, about such unknown things as the U.S. Forest Service closing campgrounds through contracting out to private management companies who seem to only hire ex-prison guards as campground ‘hosts.’ One reader suggested that the USFS employ the BLM, instead of FEMA/Haliburten style outsourcing.

As we are still traveling, and e-mail communication can be difficult at times, we have been seriously discussing putting a spam filter on any communication from other travelers regarding warranties. As Jayco has totally ignored my ranting's, why should your story be any different? I had been worried about lawyers response before opening the RV industry warranty game can of RV industry worms, with little realization there were so many other ‘loose's’ trying to play the warranty game. Perhaps we should be the ones hiring one of those sleazy class action firms?

The level of complaints is too the point that mentally we can’t deal with any of this anymore. Life is too short for bitterness.What I would like to happen is a younger, tougher-skinned, RV consumer advocate group to step forward with a non-profit RV Users Association. I would join and pay dues. I own the unused URL RVMotorhome.net. I would contribute this to the cause, as well as our complete complaint section, along with what advertisers we have here (as class action lawyers), to get out of having to run through my mind when escaping towards the freedom of the road, over and over again, “What have I done to make so many people mad, or think of me as such a complete fool?"

The real problem is I individually cannot report all of my worry about the future of RVing to the point where I sound paranoid. Want an example?  We pulled into a Loss Vegas RV resort advertised as “affordable,” so I could have some emergency dental work done.  Two of the previous three RV parks we had stayed at before in LV had been sold to real estate developers that had built acres of now empty investment houses. To find this “affordable” place that charges $45 per night, you go past motels that throw in a room, clean sheets, etc., along with a parking spot equally difficult to navigate, for less than $39.96. Granted this resort did have the nice touch of a an air machine —being the only accurate time to check all-important tire pressure is before driving 3-miles to a gas station— where I found, at .75¢ per tire, that the best it could pump was a dangerous 85-psi into my 19.5 Michelins. We stayed here long enough to go to a franchise office of a Gentle Dental that advertised oral surgery, where, after $125 for x-rays, I was referred to an oral surgeon, who also charged me $125 to replace the useless x-rays I had brought along. Recuperating, we made the mistake of not driving far enough away from the strip for groceries, to be safe. On Las Vegas Boulevard, in broad daylight, in a monitored big box food store parking lot, in the fifteen minutes it took to shop, someone bashed in the windows of our obvious senior citizen, motorhome towed, dingy. The police, in a city that reports fictitious CSI plots, as teen rage, on local CBS newscasts, were less than interested in taking a report of life imitating art.

Stop it, Barry. Remember your blood pressure. I understand too well the rage of being targeted for being a helpless(?) motorhome senior citizen. Just thinking about it sends my bear pepper spray trigger finger to twitching. I wish that 70-year old cruise ship traveler that recently, with bare hands, put a choke-hold on a mugger threatening with a gun, and a knife, on a beach in Costa Rica —accidentally killing the 25 year-old punk— would run for President. 

See. My rage totally got me off topic again. What I really need to focus on is a forthcoming how-to book leading upcoming baby boomer retirees to the delight of experiencing the best of what is left of the goodness of America. Believe me that you will not find it via freeways —that aren’t free— or dining at chain restaurants that are the same-o from Seattle to Savannah. And, as a rural Alaskan, used to bears peeking in the window of my log cabin, I can tell you absolutely are safer camping alone in a wilderness, than a crowded city. Hence, our escape-to-adventure pieces as, the backdoor route into Death Valley National Park.

I also have to admit that maybe my plans for developing an online travel magazine empire are a bit ambitious. I need help with this publication. I also need help with the other 49 www.YourStateTravelMagazine.com URL's, besides Alaska, we bought in a fit of ambition. Suggestions how to lease out(?) individual states, as www.TexasTravelMagazine.com, and still retain a standard accessible via www.USAtravelmagazines.com— both are not online at this time— will be listened to. E-mail me personally with, "Barry —Since You Asked!," as the subject line.

      (Click to Enter)