RV'ing with Herb & Kathy

Welcome to Herb & Kathy’s Travel Blog

Featured by Herb & Kathy, posted in Blogging, Camping, Equipment, Learning, Sightseeing, Traveling, Working

Update: Sept 28, 2019 – We left D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery in Spearfish South Dakota on Sept. 18th, spent the next week enjoying Yellowstone National Park and are now at our next volunteer gig at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming. We’ll only be here for one week working with the Historicorps group helping to rehabilitate the historic Miller Barn.

When we leave here on October 5th, we’ll then make our way to; Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park, and Encinitas California before heading back to our RV lot at Rover’s Roost in Casa Grande, AZ. C’mon along ….

Welcome to our blog. I started writing posts and publishing to this blog as we departed on our maiden voyage in our (new to us) Airstream motor home.

As we traveled west and subsequently back east during the month of April 2016, I tried to take lots of pictures and post almost daily. The only time it may have been a few days between posts was due to the inability to get free and reliable internet WiFi connection.

All the posts in this blog are in chronological order with the most recent being at the top of the list. With the exception of THIS post. This post is called a “sticky” post because it stays at the top of the list all the time as a welcome and to explain some things.

So, whenever you come here, you’ll always see THIS Welcome post first, but then the next post will be the most recent that was written.

When you see BLUE text, that is a LINK. If you click on that link, you’ll be taken to another page (in a new window) to tell you a little more about what I was referencing in the post.
You can always click on any of the pictures to open them up in a larger viewer to see them more clearly
You can scroll down (and look at the right side) to see an area where you can “follow” our blog. Then you won’t have to keep coming back to see if there’s anything new, instead you’ll get an email when there’s something new posted.
We’d love it if you add your comments at the bottom of any of the posts. Don’t be afraid, if there’s something you’d like to say, just write it in the box and click on “post comment”.

That’s it for now, we hope you enjoy visiting the blog and catching up on our travels. We look forward to when we might be able to connect “down the road”.

We’d really appreciate it if you would do us the favor of helping us continue to publish this RV / Travel / Workamping blog.  Do you purchase any products from Amazon?  If you do, it would be great if you’d use the link in the sidebar or one of the links below to get to Amazon … after that you can change your search.  By making your Amazon purchases from our site, we will receive from Amazon a small percentage of your purchase and it doesn’t cost you any more.  We’d really appreciate your help.

Thank you,

Herb & Kathy

herbnkathy solar install

December 14, 2019 by Herb & Kathy, posted in Equipment, Traveling

While we were on the road this year, I made an appointment with Brian Boone to have our solar power system upgraded when we got back to Arizona.

We set the appointment for November 18th in Quartzsite. Brian worked for Discount Solar for ten years installing new systems before going out on his own.

Brian and his wife Sue are full-time RV’ers themselves and travel the country posting their upcoming locations on their Facebook page so other RV’ers can make appointments when it works for both.

Since our RV Park at Casa Grande is only 3 hours from Q, it was an easy drive for the day and a half it would take for the install. Brian was able to make arrangements with a local church to allow us to use their parking lot for the duration.

Our first night at the church parking lot

After arriving Sunday afternoon in Q, we had dinner at the famous Quartzsite Yacht Club where they had Karaoke and it was a blast!

I ordered all the equipment for the install from Continuous Resources back in October and had it delivered to me at our RV park in plenty of time to load up in the Saturn to take along with us to the install site. By doing it this way Brian doesn’t have to carry any bulky, heavy, and high priced inventory. He does however, carry a wide variety of cables, connectors, and hardware needed to complete the installation.

6 solar panels, 2 solar controllers, Inverter, remote panels, switches, and fuses

The next morning Brian and crew showed up about 8:30, set up their work station and got right to work.

We have our easy chairs set up ready to watch

Since Brian is having a little trouble with his knees lately he solicited the help of his friend Devin to do some of the work that would require kneeling and squatting.

We installed (six) 200 watt Hightec RCL-M200w solar panels on the roof, two Blue Sky 3024i controllers, two power disconnects, fuse, and a Magnum 2000 watt full sine wave inverter. Both the inverter and the solar controller(s) have remote monitoring and control panels wall mounted in the kitchen. We mounted these on the wall because we didn’t have any cabinet conveniently located that we could mount them into.

Our next upgrade will be to replace the four Trojan T-105 flooded cell batteries with four Battleborn Lithium 100 amp hour batteries but that’ll be a while since they are so pricey.

Although the job was finished Tuesday about noon in time for us to make it back to Casa Grande, we decided to stay a 3rd night because a bad wind and rain storm was headed our way. By early afternoon the temperature dropped about 25 degrees and the wind went from “still” to 20-30 mph gusts.

Look at the sky as the storm was heading in … eery

So we spent another night at the church and then headed on home on Wednesday.

If you’re considering installing or upgrading your solar system, I recommend that you check out Brian Boone’s Got Solar or Got Solar? Solar Brian on Facebook.

If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, you can easily do so by scrolling up to the top of any page and entering your email address in the block on the right side.

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel (herbnkathyrv) on You Tube.

If you’re curious (at any time) to know where we are at that moment then click the button at the top right of this page labeled “See Where We Are Now“.

We’d love to hear from you. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, you can send us a note. Again, thanks for riding along. ’til next time – safe travels.

We’d really appreciate it if you would do us the favor of helping us continue to publish this RV / Travel / Workamping blog.  Do you purchase any products from Amazon?  If you do, it would be great if you’d use the link in the sidebar or one of the links below to get to Amazon … after that you can change your search.  By making your Amazon purchases from our site, we will receive from Amazon a small percentage of your purchase and it doesn’t cost you any more.  We’d really appreciate your help.

Thank you,

Herb & Kathy

Holiday Greetings From Herb & Kathy On The Road

December 11, 2019 by Herb & Kathy, posted in Family, Friends, Sightseeing, Traveling, Volunteering, Working

Here’s our annual Jib-Jab Christmas greeting to you. We hope the link works for you. If you have any trouble viewing it, please email me at herbsells@gmail.com and I’ll send you your very own copy! Click here to see the short video

And for those of you that might have any interest (and ample time) to see what we’ve been up to in 2019 …. You are welcome to read on. If you make it to the end, we congratulate you!

We’ve just finished our third full year on the road and want to wish you and all our family and friends (old and new) the very best Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Although we miss being with our children and grandchildren along with our very dear friends back in Mount Gilead, this last three years on the road has been a wonderful learning and growth experience for us. We’ve been to so many places, made so many new friends that we continue to stay in touch with and meet up with, and learned so much through new experiences and interacting with new people and as a result we are so thankful and consider ourselves very blessed to be able to experience this full-time RV’ing lifestyle.

When (and if) it comes time for us to come off the road, we’ll have tons of great memories (and thousands of pictures) to remind us of the good times that have also brought Kathy and I closer together – remember – we live in a 300 square foot rolling house so it’s mighty easy to stay “close”!

It’s about 45 degrees out and so foggy I can’t even see down to the clubhouse.

But most of our days here at Rover’s Roost in Casa Grande Arizona are bright sun in the high 60’s or 70’s.

We want this post to serve as another way to not only wish you the best in this holiday season, but also to bring you up to date on what we’ve been up to in 2019.

It’s a cold, damp, and dreary day as I sit here writing this post at my “computer desk” that sits on the steering wheel of our rig.

We know some of you are already subscribed to this blog and see our posts as they are published while others see our occasional Facebook posts, and yet others only connect with us through email or on the phone or through texting.

I’ve been remiss in not posting very much the last few months because we’ve been severely limited with available low-cost wifi. That should change now that we’ve discovered a $25 per month truly UNLIMITED plan that will allow us to publish photos and videos along with streaming some of our favorite Netflix shows without having to worry about a speed or data cap. But more on that later …

January 2019 started with us still at our lease lot at the Escapees RV Club “Rovers Roost” in Casa Grande, AZ. We arrived in mid-October and immediately became involved in the functions of the club. This is a co-op park so everyone is expected to take an active role in some way for the betterment of the park and the enjoyment of all. We have 119 RV sites and only 2 full time employees. This keeps the costs low. Kathy and I ran the weekly Card Bingo, the monthly Birthday/Anniversary Ice Cream Social, organized and put on the Christmas Eve Party at the clubhouse, helped with others to spread gravel on some of the sites that needed it, and participated in as many social functions as we could. This was a great way to get to know the others and develop some meaningful and close friendships.

We started off the year with a 10 day trip to Quartzsite AZ to work at “The Big Tent” RV Show for the Escapees RV Club where we worked with 4 other couples selling club memberships.

As always, clicking on any of the small thumbnail pictures will open them in a larger viewing window so you can see better.

Dinner out with Ron & Judy who we had met at the ABQ Balloon Fiesta 2018

In February we took our home on wheels down to Tucson where we joined a couple thousand other Escapees at the annual Escapade for fun, forums, food, and entertainment.

On our way back to Rovers Roost after Escapade we visited; Mission San Xavier Del Bac, Titan Missile Museum, Sonoran Desert Museum (with the Raptor display), and the Saguaro National Forest where we camped for 3 days at Gilbert Ray Campground.

A rattlesnake slithering by our camp chairs

We pulled out of Casa Grande on April 1st so we could get up to our spring camp hosting job at Fort Peck Montana by around April 15th. We were to serve as camp hosts at the Army Corp of Engineers Downstream Campground during the “shoulder season” up to and including Memorial Day weekend. After that we were free to move on (or stay as we liked)

Along the way we visited a lot of places on our bucket list and I’ll include a few pictures here in photo galleries (with captions so you know where it is).

We visited both Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks along with a short visit to Best Friends Animal Santuary in Kanab, Utah.

After leaving Bryce, we continued our venture north and stayed at our new friends (whom we hadn’t met yet) at Hinkley, Utah. They had purchased the once-upon-a-time Latter Day Saints Millard Academy. This family acts as a host family on boondockerswelcome.com They took us on a tour of their home and we enjoyed a quiet night with one other RV couple camping in the staff parking lot next to the gymnasium.

We visited Flaming Gorge Dam while we spent a few nights at the Rock Springs Wyoming Fairgrounds to get off the road during the first winter storm of the season. It was an extra treat because we met other RV’ers Mike and Judy (who we will see again in the spring in Alabama) along with attending a pool tournament and a special rodeo for the young’ns!

Up the road a piece we stopped for the night at Kaycee Wyoming. Kaycee is the home of world famous professional bronc rider and country singer songwriter Chris LeDoux. We learned about the “Hole In The Wall Gang” and got to watch a bronc riding school for the young boys and girls. Turns out they attend school only four days a week with Fridays off school so that they can practice their bronc riding skills. They don’t have a high school football team … they ride horses instead!

We arrived at Downstream Campground at Fort Peck where, unknown to us beforehand, due to some construction in the area, there was no electricity. That’s OK as we have an on-board diesel generator that we ran for a few hours each day to charge our house batteries.

As we finished up our stint at Ft Peck, we decided to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary by taking the Amtrak from Glasgow to Glacier National Park. We stayed a couple days, rented a car and saw the sights near Whitefish and Kallispell driving in from east Glacier, around Flathead Lake and up to West Glacier.

After returning from Glacier we said goodbye to our new friends and drove on over to North Dakota where we visited the little town of Medora and Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

We then headed down I-85 to our next “home” (for 3 months) at D.C. Booth National Historic Fish Hatchery in Spearfish South Dakota where we served as tour guides doing interpretive work.

Arrival celebration dinner with our good friends Matt, Sherry, Jack & Nina

While in Spearfish at the hatchery, we were able to see MANY sites that the Black Hills has to offer including visiting the Cities of Deadwood and Lead, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, the Sturgis Bike Rally, Badlands National Park, the 1880 Train ride that runs from Keystone to Hill City SD and much more thanks to our VIP pass that got us into all the attractions and museums in the Black Hills. We even went ATV’ing (on a crappy rainy day) for the first time in our lives!

Everybody has to go to Wall Drug at least once, right?

A really special treat we had while in the Black Hills area was our day trip over to Sioux City Iowa and Watertown South Dakota. At Watertown, we visited with our granddaughter Madison, her fiance’ Brandon, and our new Great-Granddaughter Kallie! At Sioux City we met up with our very dear friends Mike and Kim .. then the four of us hit up Blue Bonnie Headquarters for an ICE CREAM!

At the end of our 3 month volunteer commitment at D.C. Booth, we said goodbye to our new friends and headed out for a slow route toward Arizona for the winter.

Our first stop was Yellowstone National Park. We visited the park for a little over a week, had beautiful fall weather (and colors) and had some nasty weather too. My blog post with more on this trip with pictures can be seen by following this link.

After Yellowstone we moved on south to Grand Teton National Park and the National Elk Refuge at Jackson (Hole) Wyoming. On the refuge we volunteered with Historicorps.org to restore the historic Miller Barn on the refuge. You can learn more about our experiences there by following this link.

We left Jackson WY and headed across Nevada on what is known as “The Loneliest Road In America” (US Route 50) through Ely NV and on to Reno, Carson City, and Virginia City – both old gold mining towns.