All posts by ggraham

Our history isn’t what I thought it was:(

I’ve been meaning to blog more often this year. It’s my year three goal, but I have to go back a bit first.

We are back in the Black Hills of South Dakota as we begin our migration away from cold weather. It’s actually still pretty warm here, although, the furnace has been on at night. My perspective of the western US is changing as I learn more about it.

I have become aware of my ignorance of our history as a nation. I haven’t told the story here, but I had a rude awakening that has changed me. I’m not usually emotional, until this event, and it seems to have affected me when it comes to thinking about treatment of all people.

Continue reading Our history isn’t what I thought it was:(

We Moved and Our Philosophy On Campgrounds.

Well, we left what became one of our favorite static spots. We were boondocking (dry camping) on a friend’s farm outside of Waunakee, WI. For nomads, we haven’t been very nomadic lately, since we spent most of May and June here. We are spending the summer in the Madison area of Wisconsin. Usually we spend about two months here in the summer visiting family and catching up on maintenance, etc., but this summer, we had so much going on we are ending up spending almost the entire time here.

Looking back across the pasture to where we spent two months. This was a great spot for us!

Continue reading We Moved and Our Philosophy On Campgrounds.

RV Living and Health Care

We are back in Wisconsin for most of the Summer this year. As you know, we live in our RV full time. One thing that is problematic for many of us who live this lifestyle is health care. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

One of the biggest bugaboos is insurance. Many states do not offer any kind of national plans. Wisconsin, for example, doesn’t have Blue Cross Blue Shield unless you get through your employer and your employer has to be based in a state that offers it!

So, we end up with health insurance through the marketplace, and thank goodness for that, or I wouldn’t be eligible for insurance. The problem is that the network, and in network doctors, are all in Wisconsin. That means, and so far, knock on wood, we haven’t used it outside of Wisconsin, that many things require pre-approval and there is extra expense involved for “out of network” doctors.
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Utah Night Sky

I started learning how to photograph the night sky so that I could try and capture the beauty of the sky in one of the few places left on Earth where it is actually dark at night. It is so dark here in Valley of the Gods, Utah, that when you step outside it takes a bit of adjustment to see at all, other than the stars above.

Anyway, after trying what seemed like a million different settings for my Canon Rebel T6i, I found a combination that worked really well. I got my info from an article on the web.  Astrophotography Tips

Basically, the most critical setting is the f-stop. It needs to be set so the aperture is as wide as possible, which means a low number. Then the ISO needs to be set low too. This seemed counter intuitive to me, but high ISO with long exposures creates a “noisy” image. Finally, the length of the exposure.

So, I set the ISO to 200, the F-stop to 2 and exposed the image for 30 seconds using the remote control. Here is the final product, with no retouching.

Bought an RV

I can tell you that looking for an RV is a pain in the ass. The problem is that they are spread all over the country and you could spend a small fortune looking at each potential candidate. There are lots of things that come in to play, and people don’t always represent what they have accurately, sometimes, they don’t even know what they have.

Well, after lots of searching, we found an RV in Iowa. It is a 2002 Newmar Dutchstar 3852. It has a 350HP Cummins with a 6 speed Allison transmission, air brakes, jake brake, good tires, and two slide outs, or as Terri calls them, “bump outs”. It met my needs in that it is made by Newmar, which is what we wanted, is a diesel pusher, has air brakes, a jake brake and is fairly low mileage, about 85K.

IMG_2134

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Looking for an RV…

We started by determining what type of RV we wanted. There are quite a few options but for full time RV life there are only two that we felt fit us. The first option, is the fifth wheel type trailer that connects to a fifth wheel hitch in the bed of pickup. The second, is the basic motorhome.

In both cases, it is best to have a vehicle that has a diesel engine. The diesels have the torque to pull heavy loads in mountainous areas and generally last longer than gasoline powered engines. The prices are significantly higher for diesel engines, but I think in the long run, they are worth the difference.

Continue reading Looking for an RV…

Jumping Off….

Terri, Gizzy and I are getting ready to make the leap from bricks and sticks apartment living, to nomadic life on the road in an RV. It is a little stressful trying to get everything organized and ready to go. It’s incredible how much stuff we have acquired in our 8 years here. You would think that living in an apartment would keep some of that to a minimum, but it seems we’ve managed to keep tons of stuff we shouldn’t have.

Well, that will definitely be less of an issue going forward since we simply won’t have the room in an RV to store everything we can in our apartment. All I can say at this point, is thank goodness we aren’t living in a house, I’m pretty sure it would be worse yet.

We’ll keep you posted on our travel plans and what we end up with for an RV, etc. Later.