I exchanged e-mails yesterday with a couple who said that they have a very nice 1999 Newmar Mountain Aire that they absolutely love, but the coach is beginning to show its age and they were thinking about buying a new diesel pusher to replace it.

They said that after months of shopping, they have not found anything that they like as much as their Newmar. It has 85,000 miles on it, which is not much for a diesel motorhome, it runs fine, and they have maintained it very well. But the paint is faded, the interior is dated, and the carpet and furniture are getting threadbare. They asked me what I would do in their place.

I told them that if I had a rig I liked, and that I knew and trusted, I’d think very hard about investing some money and time upgrading it, instead of buying something new. If your present RV runs strong and you like it, and it just needs cosmetic improvements, you might be well advised to keep what you have and invest spending some money to make it nicer, instead of spending a lot of money for a new one.

New isn’t always better. I know several people with top of the line new or newer motorhomes who spend a good part of their time dealing with problems and trying to get repairs made, instead of enjoying traveling.  

Our dear friends Ron and Brenda Speidel present an excellent seminar at RV rallies with the title Don’t Replace, Refurnish that is always a hit with attendees. Ron and Brenda are very happy with their Winnebago Journey, so instead of buying something knew, in the last couple of years they had a full body paint job done, upgraded their window treatments, installed flat screen TVs, replaced the carpeting with wood flooring, replaced the shower, and several other upgrades. For a lot less than they would have spent on a new motorhome, they have transformed their very nice coach into a palace on wheels.

Jack and Julee Meltzer, authors of the RV Makeover Bible, have now brought their excellent reference out in e-book format, and anybody who is even thinking about trading in a good but older RV for a newer model really should read it before they go shopping. If you have an RV that needs some spiffing up, Jack and Julee have also started a new blog on RV upgrades that I’m sure will be helpful.

We know of several excellent companies that can transform a dated motorhome or fifth wheel into a showpiece for a fraction of the cost of buying a new rig, including Focal Wood Products in Nappanee, Indiana. Owner Carlyle Lehman built the custom desk units, table, and bookcase for our motorhome, and we were delighted with the quality craftsmanship, and the price. Carlyle also does custom window treatments, flat screen TV upgrades, and just about anything else you can think of.

A few miles away, Michele Henry at Phoenix Commercial Paint in Elkhart has built up quite a reputation with her beautiful full body RV paint jobs. We know RVers who have paid two and three times as much money to have their rigs painted, and the results are not as good as what Michele turns out.

Another reliable shop for upgrades is Bradd and Hall, also in Elkhart. Besides selling RV furniture by such well known manufacturers as Flexsteel, the company also offers many upgrade services.

Out in Mesa, Arizona, RV Renovators can do anything, from adding a slide room to completely refurbishing your home on wheels. We saw some of their work this past spring, and were very impressed with the quality of their work, and their dedication to customer satisfaction.

I’d feel comfortable recommending any of these companies to folks who have an RV that they want to upgrade, whether than spending a king’s ransom for a new one that may not be nearly as good as what they already have.

Thought For The Day – A walk through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

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A few readers have asked lately about operating a business on the road, and more specifically, how we run our business as we travel. While there are some websites whose owners go into depth about their finances, how much they need to earn, and how they plan to earn it, I really don’t feel comfortable doing so to that extent. But I will share some thoughts on our business model and on mobile businesses in general.

Over the years, Terry and I have built a successful business on the road publishing the Gypsy Journal RV Travel Newspaper, our books and RV guides, web publishing, and speaking at RV rallies and shows. As with any small business, we had some very tight times over the years, but we hung in there, we improvised when necessary, we adapted to the changing marketplace, and we listened to what our customers told us they wanted and tried to supply it.

We operate as a sole proprietorship, which is the simplest form of business structure. Each business form, sole proprietorship, partnership, subchapter S corporation, or a full corporation has it’s advantages and disadvantages. There is no “one size fits all,” so I won’t even begin to suggest which might be right for you.

Our motorhome and van are not registered to the business. If you are financing an RV, you’ll be hard pressed to find a bank that will loan the money to purchase an RV or automobile to a new mobile business, nor will they usually allow you to register it in your business name.

We had signs on our pickup with the name of our business on them, but on the advice of a friend who is an insurance agent, when we got the van we didn’t put signs on it. If we were to do so, and then got into an accident, who knows what our insurance company would say about a claim? Might they say that we insured the vehicle for personal use, and are using it for a business, and deny a claim? My experiences with insurance companies makes me very wary of giving them any reason at all to try to weasel out of a claim. 

We use QuickBooks Pro to keep track of our income and expenses, and I have found it to be an excellent program that is easy to use and adaptable to most business structures.

Okay, that’s how we do things. It might or might not be right for you and your business.

What kind of business should you start? That depends on you, on your skills and talents, on your interests, and on how much money you have to invest to get it off the ground. We know RVers who have successful service and sales businesses, or operate online businesses as they travel. We have also seen a lot of people come and go over the years, who just couldn’t make it.

One mistake I see a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs make is to decide that since they see a lot of vendors selling waterless car wash, Chia pets, or solar lights, or XYZ widgets, they must all be making money, so they’ll sell them too. The market is saturated with a lot of products, which means that most of those vendors selling the same things are barely making a buck, if they are at all. Find new, unique, and useful products that shoppers can’t see at every other vending table and I believe you’ll have a much better chance of success.

The internet has become a big part of our income stream, and I think it offers many RVers the best opportunity to earn money with the least financial investment. Specialty blogs and websites serving a niche market can bring in revenue from display advertising, from ad networks such as Google AdSense, and through the sale of your own or affiliate products. We do all of them on our various blogs and websites and they all help our bottom line.

Recently we have seen a trend among some websites and blogs posting donation links and asking their readers to contribute. The feedback I have heard from the reading public makes me believe that this can do more harm to a website’s reputation and to the public’s perception of it, than the income they might receive. 

There is a misconception among many RVers that all you have to do is say you are in business, find a product and display it at a few RV rallies or swap meets, and you can write off all of your travels, the cost of your RV, campground fees, and anything else you spend. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. The nice folks at the tax office expect you to operate as a business and make a profit, not just play around at it.

And even if you have a viable working business, there are limits on what you can declare as legitimate expenses. I’m not an accountant, but you need to speak to one to understand what you can and cannot write off. 

Customer service, hard work, dedication, and innovation are all important to making a business work. But if there is one secret to success in any business, be it in a fixed location, or on the road, I believe that it is to give it your all, 100% of the time, no matter what happens or what obstacles you encounter.  And tomorrow, you need to get up and do it all over again. Eventually you outlive or outlast the competition.

On another topic, Bad Nick has been busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled And Yet They Did Nothing. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.

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When we arrived at the Kentucky Horse Park on Sunday the place was packed, but by yesterday it was almost a ghost town. There were probably only a half dozen or so other RVs on our entire loop.

With our business in Lexington finished, we had no reason to hang around any longer, and we were eager to get on down the road. So yesterday we left the Horse Park about mid-morning, and took Interstate 75 south for 166 miles to the Escapees Raccoon Valley campground in Heiskell, Tennessee. It was an easy trip, and took about three hours, including a stop at the Tennessee Welcome Center along the way.

In this area, the fall colors are really fantastic, and we oohed and aahed all the way.

We passed some pretty farms, and Miss Terry was busy snapping pictures with her digital camera.

When you’re rolling down the interstate at 62 miles per hour, you really don’t want to see this in front of you! Did somebody make a wrong turn? Should we scream now? Actually, the semi tractor was being pulled backwards by another truck, going the same direction we were.

The more I drive our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage, the more I like it. Just inside of the Tennessee state line, headed south, you climb up Jellico Mountain. We have been over this stretch of roadway many times in our old MCI bus conversion, and we’d just creep our way up in the right lane at 15 to 18 miles per hour, with our radiator misters on. I gave the Winnebago some extra throttle to keep from lugging down, the 350 Cummins turbo diesel just purred right along, and we topped out at 64 miles per hour!

Near Clinton, Tennessee, we crossed the Clinch River, once a major source of freshwater mussels and pearls. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the freshwater pearl industry was a major economic factor in this region of the southern Appalachians, but the damming of rivers, including the Clinch, by the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide electrical power, destroyed the mussel and pearl trade. I’d love to kayak this river one of these days.

We have not been to Raccoon Valley in a couple of years, but it has always been one of our favorite Escapees RV parks. Since our last visit, they have had a major upgrade to both the clubhouse and the RV sites, and we were impressed with the improvements.

Once we got parked and settled in, we went up to the clubhouse for the daily 4 p.m. social hour, which had a nice turnout. We saw a lot of familiar faces, including Art and Caroline Fennell, Mary Gallivan, Rich and Mary Coppens, and Wayne, the campground host. There were several others, but it’s late and I’m tired, so I’m afraid some names escape me right now.

We’ll be here a few days, getting the rest of the new issue mailed out, catching up on some chores, and just enjoying time with our Escapee friends. We’re headed for Florida, but we don’t have a schedule locked in. We want to stop in the Titusville area to see our friends Pete and Connie Bradish, and Tim and Ann Moran; I have some nephews and a niece in the St. Petersburg area that I have not seen in years and whom I want to get reacquainted with; we want to spend some time with Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, either in Fort Lauderdale, or at the Peace River NACO preserve; and no trip to Florida is complete without a stop at the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground in Bushnell. We also plan to spend some time in Key West, and paddling our kayaks in the beautiful blue green waters of the Keys.

We don’t have any place we have to be until our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma in March, and after having commitments all year long, we like that a lot!

Thought For The Day – Money can’t buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy.

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Several readers have written to ask why we didn’t visit Colonial Williamsburg during our recent trip to Virginia, suggesting that it would be a good story for the Gypsy Journal. We have also had e-mails from readers in the last couple of weeks wanting to know why we didn’t tour this place or that place during our week in Washington D.C., and asking how we choose which places to write about.

Several factors play into it, including our personal interests, the time we have available, whether or not we have covered something similar in a recent issue, and whether or not the attraction, museum, or whatever will give us complimentary admissions, and a media kit to help us develop a story.

We have no interest in theme parks, so you’ll probably never read a feature about Dollywood, Disneyland, or Silver Dollar City in the paper or the blog. Besides which, those places have been done to death. When possible, we prefer the lesser known attractions and places to visit. That’s not to say we don’t hit some major stops along the way – in the new issue of the Gypsy Journal we have stories on the National Holocaust Museum, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Newseum, and the American Indian Museum, to name a few.

Terry and I love history, and we could easily fill every issue with just stories about this famous Revolutionary War or Civil War battlefield, that old fort, and those historic homes. But not everybody is a history nut, so we have to try and temper our interests and include different kinds of stories to make the Gypsy Journal meet a wide variety of interests.

Some readers wanted to know why we didn’t tour the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while we were in Washington. Well, first of all, we just didn’t have the time. And, we have done stories in the past on the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida; the Pima Air Museum in Tucson; and the Mid-America Air Museum in Liberal, Kansas. Not to mention a couple of rocket museums along the way. 

We also have a policy of not paying to tour an attraction that we are then going to write about and give thousands of dollars worth of free publicity to. We visit a lot of places in the course of a year, and paying $15, $20, or more each for the two of us to get into all of them would not fit into our budget. We’d have loved to have visited Colonial Williamsburg and included a feature story for the paper, but they declined to supply us with media passes, or even a media kit to work with. Hopefully we can work something out with them the next time we’re in that area.

This may sound like we’re looking for a handout, but that’s not the case at all. Every publication, indeed every business, has a budget that they work within.  When we work together with an attraction, we both win. We feel that we give the places we write about a lot of excellent exposure, and judging by the feedback we get from them, they do too.  If an attraction or museum won’t provide us  media passes, and we don’t have a deep enough interest or desire to pay to see it, we’ll look for someplace else to write about.

There is never a shortage of places for us to discover, and the good news is that if we don’t got to some attraction this time around, we have a great excuse to go back again someday!

Thought For The Day – Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.

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My annual checkup at the V.A. hospital here in Lexington, Kentucky was scheduled for 10 a.m. yesterday, but we arrived a half hour early, and within about 5 minutes I was in an exam room where a nurse took my vitals, and then she took me in to see my doctor.

He read over my file, we talked a little bit about some little problems I’ve been having, he entered an order for refills on a couple of prescriptions, and told me to have a nice winter. The next stop was the lab in the basement, where they drew blood, told me they were out of flu shots, and sent me on my way. We were back in the van and headed home by 10:30. They sure do work fast there!

It looks like I’ll be kicking around this old rock a few more years at least, and that’s good news, because there’s a lot I still have left to see and do.

I’m still not completely decided about switching to the Tucson V.A. hospital for my primary care, because the folks here in Lexington have taken very good care of me. It’s just not very convenient to get here at times.

I really wish Lexington had more than one RV park, because we really don’t care for Kentucky Horse Park. It’s always crowded, and at $28 a night for a back-in water and electric RV site, it’s certainly no bargain. There are other RV parks south of Lexington, down around Berea, but by the time you pay for gas to run back and forth, you don’t save any money. At least it’s a short drive from the Horse Park to the V.A. hospital.  

Back at the motorhome, I got the new digital issue uploaded and sent e-mails to our digital subscribers with a link to access it. For some reason, a couple of e-mails bounced back, so if you subscribe to the digital issue and didn’t get the e-mail, let me know and we’ll figure out what went wrong.

A few days ago I wrote about my first impressions of the new Droid Incredible phone, and somebody e-mailed to tell me that they had heard the battery life isn’t great. That’s true, compared to the Blackberry Storm I had before, the Droid’s battery goes down somewhat faster. Especially if you are using a lot of apps at once, such as the GPS, or the Bluetooth. I don’t use the Bluetooth at all, and I keep the GPS feature turned off if I’m not using it, and I can go about 24 hours between battery charges, unless I spend a lot of time talking on the telephone. When I got the phone, I also got the accessory 12 volt battery charger cord, and I have found it useful, especially when using the GPS in the van.

Somebody on the Escapees Forum posted some info about out a new app for both Droids and iPhones called Allstays Camp and RV, which lists all kinds of great information, including WalMart and Sam’s Club stores with RV parking, Cracker Barrel restaurants, truck stops, highway rest areas, private and public campgrounds, Camping World stores, RV service facilities, and so much more that I can’t list everything here.

The app uses Google maps to locate things in your immediate area, with filters so that you only see the things you want to see. All you do is select a location, and it navigates you right to it! At $3.99, it’s a heck of an investment. I downloaded it to my Droid and have used it already. 

Isn’t technology a wonderful thing!

Thought For A Day – Every path has some puddles.

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