docj

I'm sure you know this, but when you price something on Amazon, it may or not be supplied by Amazon, itself, or one of its "marketplace" vendors. Sometimes that isn't always easy to figure out. My experience is that a significant percentage of marketplace items are priced above other sources. Never assume Amazon has the cheapest price unless you've compared it to other sources. Lately, I've noticed that the delivered prices of heavy items on Amazon are being increased to cover shipping costs. That's not surprising, especially since Amazon would allow me to return those heavy items at no cost to me.

According to 2021 RVIA data, motorhomes account for <10% of all RV sales. Although MH's are a lot more costly than most towables, they account for only a smaller sliver from a numeric aspect. https://www.rvia.org/historical-rv-data

If you think about it, a hundred years ago local stores didn't have all that much stock and customers ordered through the Montgomery Wards or Sears catalogs to get what they wanted. Today, most local stores have only a limited selection of what is available in the marketplace and many of us use Amazon and other online sources to obtain the specific things we want to buy. Maybe the model that no longer works (if it ever did) is having large stores distributed through out the country each needing to have a fairly broad array of merchandise to sell. Large areas of retail space staffed with competent sale staff is expensive. Has anyone been in a Dillard's or Macy's lately to see the paucity of customers on a weekday afternoon? That's a clearly unsustainable model.

I agree but there's still a considerable resale market for the ~10-20 year old "relics" of that period. Considering that it's impossible to get a 40' DP with a >12 liter engine at virtually any price, let alone less than half a million $$, buying an old one for $50-100k seems like a bargain even when you factor in remodeling costs.

Here in Rockport there are enough RV sites to keep the prices down. But with apartment rentals going up, the RV site prices will surely follow. We're glad we own the site we have. As for medical and such, we have good docs for our basic needs; when something more is needed we drive to Houston which is less than 3 hours away. Not a perfect solution, but we've made it work.

Our town of Rockport TX has a very high percentage of residents living permanently in RV's and this isn't atypical from what I can see around here. There is a serious shortage of housing and rents for nice apartments are >$1500/mo which prices out lots of folks. The use of RVs as permanent housing is an issue I rarely see addressed in the press.

We can definitely identify with most of the reasons Scott cites. I'm glad to see that we are not the only ones who feel the way he does about #4. After >70,000 miles of RVing over >10 years, it's difficult to think of another place we really want to explore, especially with fuel prices where they are today. We haven't yet made the decision never to drive the coach again. We're hoping to be able to take some trips around TX later this year (if it ever cools off) but we know that our days of traveling 2,500 miles to Canada are probably over. But our situation is a bit different than many in that 7 years ago we purchased a site in an "ownership RV park" in Rockport TX and have been using it as a winter base ever since. We have ~3,000 sq ft of property on which my wife has a structure that provides her with a "world class" sewing center and which also gives us storage so we have a place for all the things that don't fit into a motorhome. We have lots of outdoor patio space and just enough garden to be attractive without becoming a burden. The community, itself, isn't a "resort" it's really just a place to live; we have few rentals an don't have expensive to maintain things such as swimming pools. So far we are content to live in our MH; we're so used to it. I'm currently in the process of shoe-horning a 48" OLED TV into it! Having the outdoor space and sewing center make it much easier to find room to "get away from each other"! LOL We haven't yet decided where we go from here; we could always put a "park model" on our lot and continue here, but that wouldn't really give us more space and would probably have a lot less built-in storage. As long as we can climb the couple of steps into the coach, it's not such a big deal. So far our health has not played a factor in these decisions but at our ages, one can never be sure. We'll just have to play it by ear!

Funny, you should mention that. I recently made a similar observation about people in Rockport TX where we live.

I no longer care about being just about the only one in a store wearing a mask. Our kids reported that having COVID, even after having had shots, wasn't a pleasant experience. If wearing a mask helps reduce that risk, I'm all for it.

That's what we continue to do. My wife and I each have had 4 shots and/or boosters. In April/May we managed to fly to see kids and grandkids and spent nearly a month in their homes. We were pleased to report that we didn't contract COVID during or after the trip, but pretty much all of our kids did a few weeks thereafter. Of course, they all have school-age children and are constantly exposed to what they bring home.

We've been full-time for >10 years and have all the complexities of a MH owned by a MT-LLC, an SD mail service domicile and property we own in TX. We purchased a new car in 2020 and had absolutely no trouble getting the manufacturer's lowest interest rate despite all of this. FWIW we also bought a vehicle in 2014, even before we owned the TX property and has no trouble.

We use our Pandora subscription to provide music while we drive. We pay for the premium service which has no advertising. The phones connect to Bluetooth seamlessly in both cars. In addition, we can get news by opening YouTube TV on the phone and listening to one of the cable news stations. We subscribe to both Pandora and YouTube TV anyway so why pay extra for a different "in vehicle" music or news provider?

I hoping that they eventually will figure out something for cars; it's about time that new cars stopped coming with XM Radio hardware. I wonder what percentage of new car buyers keep their XM subscriptions after the free 6 month are over?

Even though your rig is fairly old finding replacements shouldn't be a problem if you can get the numbers. I had no difficulty finding replacement bags for the eight on my 2000 Beaver.

We have Coachnet; they proved their value to us in 2019 when we were stuck in axle-deep mud on Canada Day in a rural corner of Prince Edward Island. The owner of the RV park suggested the name of a local heavy wrecker and we were extracted from the mud in less than 2 hours! After that I'll be a Coachnet user for life!

Actually, prices today are 6.6x the prices in 1973 according to this inflation calculator posted by the Federal Rerserve Bank: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator

I hope you aren't directing that at me. I haven't posted anything about EVs in a couple of years. At present an EV doesn't fit into my lifestyle, finances, etc., but I'm not ruling out that maybe, in the the future, a city-EV might work as one of our our vehicles. But unless things really change, I foresee the desirability of retaining an ICE-powered vehicle for the foreseeable future. And, since I'm unlikely to be driving for ~>10 years, that probably means I'll have one for the rest of my life!

Tesla auto-pilot has also been involved in a fatal accident albeit not with a pedestrian. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/18/1073857310/tesla-autopilot-crash-charges#:~:text=Press-,Tesla driver is charged in a deadly crash involving Autopilot,killed two people in 2019.

I, for one, enjoy being part of the small population of SD. When we have needed to interact with a human, they have been pleasant and helpful. Last year we went to Sioux Falls to renew our licenses; total elapsed time <1 hour from "in the door" to "leaving with new license in hand."

Mine was pretty awful, also. I've read that some people disassemble some of the cabinetry.

The first time it was replaced I did it myself. This time, being 10 years older, I paid an RV technician to do it! 😁

We, too, have a kitchen sink in our slide and our original hose failed long before yours did (at around 10 years). The hose installed by the manufacturer was a "corrugated" one, with a relatively thin wall. I replaced it with the same diameter hose intended for use in outdoor ponds. We recently replaced it because of a buildup of sediment, but we didn't have any leaks in >10 years.

We've had Starlink at our homebase site in Rockport TX for about 6 months and it has been great. Until then our only internet connection was via cellular. We typically get 150-200 Mbps download speeds although they can drop suddenly and the past 24 hours have been particularly rocky. Some people blame that on yesterday's satellite launch, but that's not it since it takes them many weeks before the satellites are in position to be used. But it's a lot better than what we used to have. We've not going to take it traveling since I don't want to lose my "slot" in our cell. Furthermore, we have the older round version with the permanently attached Ethernet cable. No easy way to get it back out of the ~50 feet of conduit it is sitting in.

PLEX is a free media server that you can easily install on your laptop. It can index all your downloaded video and music files so they can be accessed by the PLEX Roku app. I assume there are similar PLEX apps for Firestick and Chromecast. We don't bother to record video but we do have >300 CDs stored that we can access using PLEX. We use those to supplement what we can get from Pandora.

Six years ago we purchased our lot at a park in Rockport TX. We have fee simple ownership of the property and have erected a 2-section structure--a heated/cooled sewing center and a storage shed. The park's developer had arranged for financing through a local community bank. We started with a 3-year term note and then converted that to a fully amortized one. As for insurance, that turned out to be more complex than I had thought. Fortunately, Roxanne at Miller Insurance was able to come up with a package that works for us. We have full-timers insurance from Progressive that provides adequate protection when the motorhome is present, but I wanted coverage for liability, structure and contents when we are away. Roxanne arranged that.