Get away, stay connected – our life on tour

See list of rallies / tour dates at the bottom of this article

Over the years of traveling by RV, we’ve evolved. From wandering, to sightseeing, to working on the road. This summer, my husband and I – as GeeksOnTour – are on the road for 5 months and are booked to give seminars at 7 different RV rallies. As we travel, we are making our living from our website. We’ve grown into our name – this summer we are Geeks On Tour more than ever before. Check out our map at right.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida is home. “A” on the map is where we start and stop. Our transportation, home, and office is a camper van made by Roadtrek.
 
It has all the comforts of home, just in miniature!
 

No hookups? No problem.

We can have our wilderness and do our work too. We spend months at a time in our Roadtrek camper van. Most of the time we park at places with hookups. That means we plug the RV in to a power source, and now we have air conditioning, TV, and power plugs for all our computers, coffee makers and anything else we need.
The other day we parked at a campground in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. It is a rustic, National Park campground with no hookups.  We parked, got the bikes (electric folding bikes by ProdecoTech) down and went for a ride to the lakeshore.
 
Lots of beauty, a little exercise, gorgeous weather … we really enjoyed it. While we were out we found a “Gourmet Grill” for dinner. When we got home (to the RV), we had work to do. We need power. Here’s how we get it:
  • Propane: powers the refrigerator, hot water heater, stove, and furnace
  • 12 volt: powers the lights, powers receptacles in the dash where we charge our mobile devices at any time
  • Inverter: converts battery power to 110 for two of our electric wall outlets. All we do is turn the Inverter switch on, then we know which outlets are live and plug our computers in there. Our inverter is not powerful enough to run the coffee maker or the air conditioner.
  • Generator: as long as we have over 1/4 tank of gas, we can turn on the generator and have as much power as we need. Just as if we were plugged in to shore power. Coffee maker, A/C, hair dryer – everything.

Self-Contained

What about water and sewer? We have holding tanks for that. When our fresh water tanks are full and our black and gray water tanks are empty, we can live comfortably for about 5 days. We’ve gone 7-8 when we have use of a bath house.

What about Internet?

Ahh – there are entire books written about that! I’ll just give you our short answer. We have a Verizon unlimited plan on our old Samsung phones. We turn those phones into hotspots so our computers can connect. Here’s our video on how to do that.

If you look closely at the first photo above, you’ll see a cell tower in the distance behind our Roadtrek. That’s what we like to see! We had screaming fast Verizon Internet there – 60Mbps down/37Mbps up! We even had enough connectivity to do our live YouTube show from that location – see Episode 144. Even at the Dunes we had good speeds, 10-20 Mbps. Here’s an article to learn more about Internet speeds. Rarely do we find a location in the US where Verizon doesn’t give us at least enough check email or post to the website. If we do find ourselves in such a place, we also have T-Mobile service we can try or Project Fi from Google. If nothing works, we can’t stay!

There you have it, whether we’re in our house in Fort Lauderdale, or in our Roadtrek working on the road, it makes no never-mind to us. We have everything we need. Let the tour continue!

List of Rallies, Tour dates. Numbers from map above:

  1. Escapade: May 27-Jun 1
  2. FMCA Glamarama: Jun 6-9
  3. FMCA International Convention: Jul 18-21
  4. Safari 30th Anniversary: Aug 27 – Sep 1
  5. Discovery Owners 20th Anniversary: Sep 10-15
  6. RV Travel Club Grand National Rally: Sep 26 – Oct 3
  7. Workamper Rendezvous: Oct 15-19

2 replies on “Get away, stay connected – our life on tour”

  1. I have a ?, where is clipboard on a Samsung J3 Galaxy Eclipse? I know I am in wrong spot for questions. First timer please excuse.

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