After reading yesterday’s blog about working on the road, several readers e-mailed to ask me why I did not include freelance writing and blogging as a way for RVers to earn money.

My focus in yesterday’s blog was on jobs available to RVers other than traditional workamping in RV parks. Writing and blogging fall more into self-employment, and if there is enough interest I will post a blog on small businesses that can be run from the road.

But, to answer the questions I was asked about writing and blogging, it is another way to earn a few bucks, but freelance writing is far from steady work. I’ve sold a few magazine articles over the years, but most of my writing income has been generated through self-publishing.

While there are a very few folks who make big bucks blogging, and a few more of us who make a few hundred dollars a month with our blogging activities, most blog publishers are lucky to make enough to cover their internet bill every month, if that. If you can find a good blog topic, and if you can write consistently enough to post on a regular basis, over time you could make money at it. But it doesn’t happen overnight. For more on writing, blogging, and self-publishing, check out my Publishing 4 Profit website.

On the topic of writing consistently enough to come up with regular blog posts, sometimes it’s easy for me to come up with something to write about, but other times, when we’re stationary for a while, I don’t think you really want to read that we got up, had breakfast, visited with family, came home, cruised the internet, blah, blah, blah, day after day. That would fast become about as boring as somebody showing me pictures of their grandkids, or telling me about their cat. A little goes a long way. 

I’m curious as to what kind of blog posts you enjoy and want to see in this blog. Do you like those posts on our day to day activities? Posts about places we visit in our travels? Posts on the RV lifestyle in general? How about posts on earning money on the road, or volunteering? Tell me what you want to read about.

But please, don’t ask me for technical stuff, because that’s just not my area of expertise. There are a lot of excellent writers who cover the technical side of the RV world, including Mike Steffan, Mark Polk, Mark Nemeth, and Gary Bunzer, to name just a few. But if you took my advice about anything technical, you’d probably get into trouble really fast!

Of course, Bad Nick always seems to have something to write about. Check out his newest Bad Nick Blog, titled “Undocumented” = Illegal and leave a comment. 

Thought For The Day – Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

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We know many RVers who work in RV parks around the country to offset their traveling costs. Typically, they work a set number of hours per week in exchange for a free RV site, and any hours over those agreed upon for the site are paid at an hourly wage. Some workamping RVers return to the same campground to work every season, while others prefer to move about and see new places.

Workamping in an RV park can be interesting, and can help you save some money in camping fees. However, as I always say in my seminars on working on the road, as well as in my book Work Your Way Across The USA, if your goal is to make the most possible money in a given time period, often you would be better off to rent a site in an RV park on a monthly basis, and got a job at the local Home Depot or a restaurant in town. RV park wages are just not that good in most cases.

But if you want to do something a little bit different, and still earn money, there are many, many opportunities out there to make money and have fun that don’t involve cleaning bathrooms in an RV park, serving French fries in a fast food restaurant, or working in retail stores. Here are ten jobs that RVers we know have done that you may never have thought of.  

1. Beet Harvest – We have known several RVers who have worked the sugar beet harvests in places like North Dakota and Minnesota. Jobs include everything from driving trucks to sorting the beets when they arrive at warehouses. One website on the sugar beet harvest claims that some workers make as much as $7,000 in a month or less.

2. Canoe & Kayak Tour Guide – From the Florida Keys to Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, canoe and kayak liveries are busy all season long introducing tourists to the joys to be found on the water. It’s a great job for RVers who want to make some extra money and spend the summer (or winter) paddling. 

3. Working For Amazon – During the Christmas rush, online retailer Amazon.com hires many RVers to work at their fulfillment center in Kansas. The last I heard, the wage was $11 an hour, plus bonuses, with overtime available.

4. Dealing Blackjack – The gaming industry, in places like Las Vegas, Reno, and Laughlin, Nevada, provides many working opportunities for RVers. Jobs range from dealing blackjack to working as a customer greeter in casinos.

5. Driving Tour Bus – From Alaska to the Grand Canyon to Florida, tourist areas provide many employment opportunities for RVers. Driving tour buses, ranging in size from extended length vans to full sized coaches, is a good way to make money while spending time in places where the tourists pay big bucks to visit.

6. Fish Cannery – This is hard, dirty, smelly, physically demanding work, but one fulltime RVer we know spends a full summer in Alaska working long hours at a fish cannery, and he tells us he makes enough in a season to pay for two years of fulltime RV travel.

7. Working The NASCAR Circuit – Every race car driver, from the superstars to the new guy in the pits, have somebody selling souvenirs with their names and car numbers on them. We’ve met a couple of RVers who tow a vending trailer behind their motorhomes and follow the circuit, selling souvenirs to racing fans.

8. Selling Christmas Trees – This is obviously a seasonal job, and is hard physical work, but we have known many RVers who sell Christmas trees on lots across the country, and several have told us that they have made $8,000 or more in less than a month. Many times the same companies who hire RVers to sell Christmas trees hire them to sell fireworks for the Fourth of July, and Halloween pumpkins on the same lots. One couple we know made about $7,000 in two weeks selling fireworks this past summer.

9. Horse Wrangler – I make it a point never to ride anything you can’t put gasoline in, but if you are an equestrian fan and are comfortable in a saddle, you may find work as a horse wrangler, leading trail rides at one of the many dude ranches in the Southwest. The pay isn’t usually top dollar, but tips can be good, and if you love horses, it’s your chance to get paid for playing cowboy (or cowgirl).

10. Gas Line Survey – There is a long, ongoing thread on the Escapees forum, on working as a gas line surveyor, and the RVers we have talked to who have done this work all say that it’s a great way to make good money and get a lot of exercise in the process.

For more ideas on making money as you travel, check out my Working On The Road web page. What are some of the ways you have earned money on the road?

Thought For The Day – My wife does all the driving; I just get to hold the steering wheel.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

The bad weather that had been predicted rolled into central Arizona right on schedule, with cold, a gloomy sky, and rain. Monday was a gray day in more ways than one for me.

I got an e-mail first thing in the morning that one of my oldest and dearest childhood friends, Dan Connell, had passed away Friday in our old hometown of Toledo, Ohio. I’ve known Dan since I was thirteen, and could not begin to count all of the adventures and misadventures we had together. The news took me by surprise and really broke my heart. Dan went through a bout of colon cancer a few years ago, and seemed to come through it okay. But a few weeks ago his cancer came back, and he went fast.

Terry and I stopped to visit Dan and his special lady, Patty, while we were in Ohio for the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA) rally in Bowling Green, in July At that time he said the doctors had told him he was completely cancer free, and he felt great. We had a good time sitting on his back porch swapping stories of all the silliness we got into as youngsters, and reliving those carefree days from so long ago, when we were ten feet tall and bulletproof.

I’ve lost a lot of friends in my life, and it always hurts, but Dan’s passing has really hit me hard. When you lose friends that you meet as adults, you miss them, but you don’t have that long history of growing up together that you do with childhood friends. And it reminds you that you, too, have to make that final last journey someday. It also reaffirmed for me that life holds no guarantees, and if you love somebody, you should not allow one day to go by without telling them so. Don’t let petty spats, words said in anger, or just the everyday pace of life keep you from doing that. Tomorrow may be too late.

About mid-day yesterday, longtime readers John and Karen Knoll stopped by to visit, and to pay for their registration to our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma. John and Karen are spending the winter at Meridian RV Resort, and they keep telling us how nice it is. We’ll have to stop in and check it out one of these days.

All afternoon the sky got darker, and the temperature continued to drop. It sprinkled off and on, and during the evening it started to rain steadily. It looks like we’re in store for the same all week long. Like I said, a gray start to a gray week.

Thought For The Day – Do it now, there might not be a later.

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Yesterday morning Terry’s parents, Pete and Bess Weber, stopped by to visit on their way home from church. Pete had only seen our Winnebago once, a few evenings earlier, but it was after dark, and he couldn’t see much of the outside. So he spent some time walking around checking it out before coming inside, and I think he was impressed.

A few minutes after Pete and Bess arrived, Terry’s sister Lisa also stopped in to say hello. I really like Lisa and always enjoy visiting with her. She’s a lot of fun, has a good sense of humor, and is drop dead gorgeous too! What a combination!

As I wrote in Sunday’s blog, we got an engine bay fire suppression unit and refrigerator compartment fire extinguisher from Mac McCoy at Fire and Life Safety a while back, but we have not had the time and good weather to install them. Yesterday both came together, and we decided to get the job done, so once our visitors left, we got busy.

The refrigerator compartment fire extinguisher can be mounted either vertically or horizontally. The compartment is accessed from a cover on the outside of the motorhome, and it took a couple of attempts at placing it before Terry decided to mount the extinguisher standing upright at the rear of the compartment. Not sure about drilling holes into the side of the compartment, because we didn’t know what was on the other side of the wall, Terry instead took Mac’s advice and mounted the extinguisher with industrial strength Velcro.

The engine bay fire suppression unit mounted to the bulkhead on the top of the engine bay. This bulkhead is accessed from the floor of our bedroom closet, and once the removable floor panel is out, was held in place by four bolts. We drilled four holes for the mounting brackets, bolted the unit in place, and put everything back together. Again, we had to call Mac to be sure we were mounting the unit in the correct location.

Overall, just figuring out exactly how to mount the extinguishers, and unloading the closet to get to the floor and the bulkhead below, took longer than actually installing them. Both of the units are automatic, and are activated when the temperature inside the compartments reaches a certain level, so there was no wiring to connect.

We have seen a lot of pictures of RVs burning, and they really go up fast. We’ll travel and sleep a little easier now that we have these new safety devices installed.

With nasty weather predicted for this week, we will probably just take it easy, do a lot of reading and cruising the internet, and I’ll get some writing done. For the last month or so, we have had very spotty service on our Verizon air card, and the last few days it has really been frustrating.

From reading a couple of internet forums, it seems like a lot of RVers are experiencing slow service and dropped signals in different areas of the country. There have been several suggestions on how to remedy this, and I have tried them all, from updating the air card firmware to setting it to Broadband only so it won’t automatically switch to the slower National Access when both signals are available. Nothing has really worked. I suspect that as more and more people are getting cell phones and air cards, the situation will only get worse. Hopefully the techno geeks will come up with something to help get service back up to the reliability levels where it used to be.

While we were busy installing the fire extinguishers, Bad Nick was busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled My Mother, The Pedophile. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Being ‘over the hill’ is much better than being under it!

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

It figures. We left cold, rainy Alabama and went to Texas, where it was just as cold and rainy. So we left there and came to Arizona, where it was in the 70s, with plenty of sunshine. So guess what the weatherman says we can expect this coming week? Temperatures in the low 60s and up to seven inches of rain by the end of the week!

It’s that darned cloud that hangs over my head. I managed to outrun it for a few days, but it’s caught up with me. Like they say, I can run, but I can’t hide.

After having some of Miss Terry’s delicious homemade bagels for breakfast yesterday morning, we celebrated our anniversary by wandering through the huge Mesa Marketplace indoor swap meet. It took over two hours to see everything, though after the first row or two, it was pretty redundant.

There are a lot of vendors, but most of them seem to get their merchandise from the same wholesalers, because stall after stall had the very same things on display. The same sunglasses, the same clothing, the same CDs, the same kitchenware.

We were looking for a Pegs and Jokers game, having gotten hooked on the game when Ron and Brenda Speidel introduced us to it a few months ago at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally. There were a dozen or more vendors selling Mexican Train and several other games, all the same at every stall, but nobody with Pegs and Jokers.

Terry did wander through a couple of kitchenware booths and found a few things that she’s been looking for. I get bored pretty quick looking at spatulas and sifters, so instead I stood outside and watched the girls go by. But I didn’t complain, because I know an artist like Miss Terry needs the proper tools to create the delicious food she does, and I get to eat it. And besides, some of the girls strolling by were very pretty!

After doing a little more shopping at a couple of other stores, we stopped by Terry’s parents’ house and spent some time visiting with them. Then we went out for dinner to celebrate our anniversary, and talked about all of the good times we’ve had together, and all the good times we look forward to sharing in the years to come.

We appreciate everybody’s e-mails and blog posts congratulating us on our anniversary. You all make us feel very special.

Today is the last decent day we’re supposed to have for a while, and we want to try to install the engine bay fire suppression unit and refrigerator compartment fire extinguisher we got from Mac McCoy at Fire and Life Safety. You’d be amazed at how many diesel coaches are destroyed every year by fires that begin in their engine bays, and in their refrigerator compartments. We want to prevent that from happening to our motorhome!

Thought For The Day – Life may not be the party we hoped for…but while we are here we might as well dance!

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally