Bill Joyce

Is someone else in your family willing to buy the house or reliably pay you rent to live there?  If not, you are the only one who truly cares that it stays in the family.  If no one else will actually put the money down, you know that the estate will sell the place when you die.  My wife's family went through this with the old family house that her great grandparents built. They finally ended up selling it to stop the financial drain and the family bickering over upkeep.  

Check what price https://www.campgroundmembershipoutlet.com/ is selling such a membership.  

Remember that Visible has a one device hotspot limit.  You can use a mobile or travel router to be the one device and get around the one device limit, but that requires more equipment and setup.  Also Visible is on Verizon, which has the most coverage, but we have found places where AT&T or T-Mobile works and Verizon does not, so it is best to have two plans if you want to be sure you will be online.    Of course all of this is covered by the Mobile Internet Resource Center, the authority on mobile internet.

9 hours ago, Ray,IN said:

Dennis the statement " your computer is missing important security and quality updates"  Yes it is in red, puzzles me. I had not turned that HP laptop on for perhaps 3-4 months. Like I said, I'll just wait for something to happen. There is an alternative, run a Refresh for W10, but I'd rather not entail the work involved to get back my old software and the entire slate of updates.

I just updated a laptop that had not been turned on since October and that statement came up after "check for updates" in settings for me.   The updates installed and sometime in the next couple weeks I will install the feature update to 1909.  

We are driving US 95 through that area on June 2nd by car, so I am glad we are missing the June 3rd closure.

What do you mean by "landed"?  We fulltimed for 15 years and bought an 800 sqft winter place in Arizona because we decided to stay more than 3 months and wanted a bit more room if we did that.  We could also afford to make that change.  We still have the RV and use it the rest of the year.   Winter campground reservations were also getting harder and harder to get in south Florida, which we liked to visit about every other winter.  Most places wanted you do stay through March and come back every year to even have a reservation.  We already figured out where we wanted to be in Arizona since it has a very active quilting setup my wife likes, so we bought a park model with an addition (Arizona room) in the same campground.  

I am surprised no one has added Technomadia's guide, https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/guides/tv-movie-entertainment-on-the-road/ , to this discussion.  They also have a guide to the best data plans, which does mention Visible, https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/guides/top-cellular-data-plans-for-rvers-cruisers-verizon-att-t-mobile-and-sprint/ .  Note that you can use a cheap travel router with Visible to get around the one device limit, someone said this $26.50 one off Amazon works for that - https://smile.amazon.com/GL-iNet-Pre-installed-Performance-Compatible-Programmable/dp/B01FJ4S9JK/ .

I recently found another review of mobile hotspot plans, including phone hotspot plans like Visible, 

https://www.waveform.com/blogs/main/illegal-boosters-on-amazon-put-customers-and-networks-at-risk says it is an illegal product.

10 hours ago, sandsys said:

If you go through Bakersfield consider spending a night at the Orange Grove RV Park. You literally park between the trees and are invited to pick any oranges you can reach. I have no vested interest in the park, I just think it's a fun thing to do.

Linda

Orange Grove RV Park was sold and the oranges are now sold by the owner instead of left on the trees for guests.

Lots of people run the motorhome  generator running down the road since the roof air cools better than the dash air and you should run your generator under load monthly for 2 hours if you can.  Your inverter needs to be a pure sinewave one for many fridges to run properly, otherwise they could burn out.  If you have a standard built-in inverter (or inverter/charger) it is probably modified sinewave, so you would need to replace it with a pure sinewave one or add a pure sinewave one just for the fridge for $200 or more. 

Each hotspot will only give you 30GB, of high speed before slowing down to unusable speeds.  Depending on resolution you could use that data up in 5 to 20 hours of viewing.  Check out https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/guides/top-cellular-data-plans-for-rvers-cruisers-verizon-att-t-mobile-and-sprint/ for other plans that might work better for you.

https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/gear/c4r400/ for more information.  It does not sound like you need the boosting, so you might find a plan that works for you from this guide - https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/guides/top-cellular-data-plans-for-rvers-cruisers-verizon-att-t-mobile-and-sprint/ .

It is one of many  AT&T resellers, their price is $84.95/month - https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/gear/att-unlimited-rental-plans/ .  I think you can get better deals for unlimited. Compare plans from all carriers here - https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/guides/top-cellular-data-plans-for-rvers-cruisers-verizon-att-t-mobile-and-sprint/ .

All I can say is that in 2012 Sprint had very good 3G service at Rainbow's End, so I suspect they upgraded to 4G since then. 

(I can't believe it has been so long since we camped at Rainbow's End.)

15 hours ago, filthy-beast said:

Some states have time limit that you can be in the state before they consider you a resident. Check on AZ.

7 months in Arizona is what I have been told.  

I would probably try to help USA based businesses and most computers are built in China.  But is is difficult since most products are now built in other countries.  We can do a bit by getting takeout restaurant food and maybe buying some rib eye steaks instead of hamburger.   My wife is getting quilting supplies mail order from the local fabric store, but I don't think she is spending $1200.

RVillages open parks list - RVillage has lots of members posting.

sushidog: The 8800 software update did come out long ago and solved the problem.  

It will be interesting to compare apparent coverage between the FMCA Sprint plan, which uses a Franklin hotspot, and the Calyx plans, which use hotspots that get more T-Mobile bands.  But for new FMCA users this might not be an issue. A friend had the FMCA Sprint plan but the hotspot had issues, the replacement FMCA sent was an 8800 hotspot instead of the Franklin and is working great.  The higher end Calyx plan uses the 8800. 

Sprint can now use T-Mobile towers, so the coverage is better than old Sprint.  

I can't help myself reading this topic and thinking "First World Problem". 

I would recommend adding a water softener to your RV if you have a dishwasher, since the water is hard in many places and that is hard on the dishwasher jets.  We have a water softener in the house, since  we have hard water and a dishwasher.   But we hand wash in the RV.

We also moved around during our first winters, 2003 to 2006, one to two week stays with an occasional one month stay.  We went all over Florida, Southern Texas, low elevation Arizona and Southern California.  There were short stays during travel in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico and Nevada, but none of these felt like winter spots to us.  It sometimes took a bit of work to find a place to camp and February with south Florida the hardest.  We felt the moving around was the best way to find what we liked and it worked.

The first time we stayed more than 1 month was in 2007 in Fort Myers F L. We ended up finding two areas we liked to winter, Fort Myers FL and Mesa AZ.  Now we have slowed down and bought a park model in Mesa and travel by RV only in summer.   We do not expect to be back in Florida by RV but did spend the winter of 2017/2018 there, mostly in Fort Myers.  What is interesting is the two fulltime RV friends that recommended the Mesa campground we landed at, have both settled down in the East, one in Florida and one in Alabama.  

https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/att-releases-new-prepaid-34-99-mo-tablet-plan-but-its-not-unlimited/ mentions Netbuddy cancellations.

When my mother had Xfinity i watched out for it and found very few campgrounds, at least in the Pacific Northwest, where the wifi was available and needed to be boosted to be usable.    Being fulltimers, we did not have a house and could not have our own service.  I know Cox cable, at least in the Phoenix area, does not broadcast a public wifi signal from home units.