agesilaus

In my youth I worked in a State Mental Hospital, while waiting to start college. I saw plenty of these people when it was legal to detain them. The same types you see on the streets now for the most part. They will not work, are alcoholic and on drugs if they can get them. Engage in petty and not so petty theft. But are generally non threatening. Back in the day they kept them in state institutions, the Florida version was dormitories. They could work part time if they wanted. They got free med care, meals, education and entertainment. They had a swimming pool. But they could not leave. There were a few violent patients and they were kept in a locked ward. That's all gone, the hospitals torn down, after a certain party which controlled congress for 40 years ran some legislation thru that put these people on the streets. Theoretically they were supposed to get care in local centers, but the reason these folks were locked up was that they are completely irresponsible and unless forced they will not cooperate, they especially dislike taking medications and won't. Plus none of this local care was ever really funded. Well they are paying for it now. I understand that some of the blue states provided considerably less attractive accommodations. Known as snake pits, Odd isn't it that the progressives mistreated folks while the regressive 'south' provided much better homes.

We started out tent camping, I actually did it in a 2 man mountain tent and probably racked up 60 days or so in the tent. Including weeks in Yosemite during a snowy winter and weeks in DVNP. My first tent was a tube tent if any of you recall those monstrosities. Just about cooked me in northern Wisconsin while the mosquitoes landing lights kept me awake all night. But I got married and we moved to a wall tent that lasted several years including our first trip out west from Florida to Idaho via YNP and the Wind Rivers. Then we got our first tiny popup and have been getting bigger and bigger RV's over the years until we peaked with a 34 ft fiver and moved back down to our current 30 ft TT. Which suits us fine an works very well for boondocking/no hookup camping.

It's probably both. Right now you have to have a fair amount of spare money to afford one of those systems. Prices will probably come down but I suspect not as much as you expect. There is a huge demand on the materials, Lithium, cobalt and other in demand materials in the world now and for the foreseeable future. How many cell phone batteries can you make from the materials in one of those big batteries? EV's will get more common and put more demand on the supplies and so on. These RV battery companies are small in comparison with the industrial giants it is competing with for supplies. So until the prices drop down to reasonable levels, $250 for a battery maybe, I'm not buying. We do not know the longevity of any of these big lithium batteries right now either.

DIY with Tito is another vblog like that and he shifted to 4 Li batteries. You have to wonder if these tech blogs are buying all this stuff or the manufacturer is giving them the items in exchange for a 30 minute vblog. What are those $1400/battery? Almost $6000 for a 4 battery bank!

Yes. I don't think Judy, the group leader wants meetings publicized on the net. At least she asked me to not give the newsletter to anyone else not in the BOF. I'm not sure if she reads this.

OK I can't find my copy of the last BOF newsletter, are they stored online anywhere? We want to go to at least one of the Florida winter meetings, the Ocean pond one and/or the Salt Springs one but need the dates and locations. I looked on the boondocker group.io but there is nothing on it, the calendar is blank along with everything else.. It would be nice to know if anyone else was going to these things, I'd rather not be the only one to show up, assuming I find out where they are.

It's uncertain right now But does not sound good. Permafrost slumping has closed the road at mile 43, that's on the 90+ mile park road. The visitor center is on the far side.

If you have 6V golf cart types, get a battery strap they make the lift easier, not easy but still an big improvement. This is a good one. The hook goes from inside out. These only work on batteries with the two loops on top of the cells for the hooks.

Exactly I own a mid sized TT that fits none of his giant rv parameters. Let's get back to the original thread which was interesting

Another user says he got an email saying that they are canceling the unlimited 360/yr program on 1/15/2020 so you need to sign up before then. I have the device but have not activated yet, so I'll wait until January to sign up to maximize the time. Hopefully we will see some other plans come out.

Got it today. Thanks for the suggestions folks.

We have a 2016 Arctic Fox 25Y which is about 30 feet long. We have owned about 5 or 6 other RVs over the years including popups, hybrids (Trailmanor) and last a fiver (Titanium 34 ft) but with the kids mostly gone we decided to drop down to the AF. Plus I always wanted an AF but they are very rare down here in FL. It has features that match our camping style, we plan to go mostly fulltime this coming summer when my wife can retire. We like boondocking out in the back country. Which means driving down gravel roads. And the AF can do that. People say that AF quality has degraded recently but in my opinion this unit beats all the others we have owned. That's not to say that hasn't had problems. Mainly water leaks due to stupid construction decisions--using band clamps instead of PEX in some places. And nagging electrical issues that I'm tracking down right now. May be a bad converter. And a bad power tongue jack that I replaced with an excellent one. After that gets down I need to complete the solar installation that is about 75% done.

People need to understand something about any list like this. First if a manufacturer sells 1000 units and 100 have problems, those 100 people will raise caine, loudly. There is a business principal, "one angry buyer will lose you 20 sales.". So just because your unit is OK doesn't mean that some people have not ended up with lemons or got a bad dealer. Also I saw some comments about Thor not being on the list. Well many people buying an RV have no idea that Thor built their unit. They are not members of this or any other online groups. I doubt if 10% of RV users are on any sort of RV list, FB included. Tho many more are on non-RV centric groups. They never heard of Thor or Lipert of any other specialized terms. Not to defend lists like this, at very best they are narrow snapshots of something. But still are conversation pieces.

Yeah I heard about that but the company's routers have been unavailable on Amazon for months now.

I don't see it on Amazon and the Pepwaves I do see are $130 and way up....

And if you are which one and how do you like it? A router is needed to allow more than one connection to the hotspot.

I guess you need to consider freeze proofing. Getting all wet lines up inside the belly Coreplast. At least on the 5ver I worked on they were under the Coreplast but within a foot or so of the side. Burying them deep inside the belly is a real problem. But how would you know when buying a unit? I doubt a dealer will willingly pull the belly off for you to look. And I have never even heard of a piping diagram of one of these units.

And they are serious about it, I've heard that they are handing out citations and seizing drones.

Not always true, as I mentioned about the $130 boots. But then Amazon wants a $4 item back. Price is not always what determines returns. We live 30 miles or more round trip from shopping areas so it's often a lot easier for me so I order a lot from Amazon and occasionally from other vendors. So I do return stuff maybe once a month or so. I have noticed that their Prime service is no longer 2 or 3rd day it often stretches out more than that lately. Walmart is supposedly making an effort to compete with Amazon on mail order. They started with some silly idea of giving instore customers a couple bucks to drop a package off near where they live. No surprise that didn't last long. But the still do not come close to Prime delivery. I ordered a few items from them or Samsclub and opted for store pickup. If anyone is going to break Amazon's stranglehold on this market they will have to match the Prime delivery system. I think some Chinese company made a try but had poor selection. I don't know about their delivery efforts. I know that personally when I think about ordering something from some other company and get to the checkout to find a $10 or $20 delivery charge, that I better really want the item before I can overcome my irritation.

Amazon has been doing the keep it don't return it, for years. The others are just playing catch-up. And not just for cheap stuff, a pair of $130 hiking boots went missing during UPS delivery. Waited for 3 days past the scheduled delivery time and reported it to Amazon. They refunded the purchase price and told me to keep them if they showed up. Ordered another pair and the original ones finally showed up after the second ones arrived. I gave them to my oldest son, I don't need that many boots...heh. The original pair must have got lost somewhere in the UPS delivery chain.

RV Travel eMagazine re-posted this Read that note at the beginning of the story, they express some doubt about how that list was created.

I just don't try the pull thrus, I park in the back taking up 4 or 5 spaces. We are generally ready for a break anyway when we stop at one of these.

So are you talking about the area above the lower shadow mountain sites? The road we saw going up looked rather steep but I didn't drive it.

Unless they are different from all the ones I've seen they do not have seals. Not like you imagine anyway. They may get crud built up on the valve disk which keeps them from closing all the way. There are two solutions, very thoroughly flush the tanks. Wear rubber gloves, remove the valves, clean them up, I lubricated the disks with silicone grease, and put them back in. They worked fine after that. Or buy new valves and remove the old ones and install the new. There are temp fixes where you can buy a valve that hooks onto the outlet of the piping. Then you use that to shut the line off. You can see what the valve looks like. I'd call this a knife valve.