johnny November 9th, 2008
I know a lot of fulltimers swear by various camping club memberships to keep their camping costs down throughout the year, but at Hitek Homeless, our focus is on avoiding camping fees altogether. That being said, sometimes it is just more practical to stay in an established campground overnight and some sort of discount card sure would be nice.
Recently, we stopped over in a national forest and it was getting too late to be out looking for a campsite in the dark. The fees posted for this campsite were $5/day. You can’t beat that with a stick, right? Wrong! For the first time, I noticed that our America the Beautiful pass would allow us to camp for HALF PRICE somewhere.
Now, I happen to think this interagency pass is an excellent deal for folks that want to check out the national parks as they travel, so we picked one up while visiting the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk, NC. At the time, we joked about buying an $80 pass to avoid paying an $8 entrance fee. But, you’ve got to remember that the interagency pass takes an all you can eat approach to entrance fees. It will get you and up to three other people into just about every federal area where they charge an entrance fee for free. This includes national parks, monuments and historic sites, forestry service, bureau of land management, bureau of reclamation and fish and wildlife sites as well as federal recreation lands.
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Tags:
bureau of land management,
campground,
campsite,
forestry service,
fulltiming,
money,
national forest,
national monument,
national park
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johnny April 26th, 2008
Ok, so it’s fun to make your own booze and all, but Jenn’s parents are reading, so let’s change the subject for a day or two.
Today, in the midst of working on a half dozen things and finishing none of them, I managed to temporarily frag our Cradlepoint (the EVDO/wifi access point). Now, there was nothing wrong with the device that clearing my browser cache wouldn’t fix, but it took a call to tech support to have the obvious pointed out to me. Cradlepoint has an excellent support team by the way.
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Tags:
evdo,
navigation,
wds,
wifi
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johnny July 21st, 2007
Well, we had a nice little Tioga lined up to look at today. It was about an hour drive, so we made sure to have the owner answer a bunch of questions before we left. Everything sounded great.
We spent a good hour and a half going through it. Some minor issues that we didn’t care about and the owner was upfront about them. Then, Jenn found the nasty secret. A fair bit of recent water damage, buried under a pile of junk. This was something we had specifically inquired about and had been assured was not a problem. It’s a small enough area that we can probably repair it without too many issues, but there were enough small things that we decided to keep looking a bit longer.
On the bright side, we got to use the new navigation software. Jenn hates the copilot already. Overall, it does a pretty good job, although I think the fastest way to confuse it is to do a u-turn. It takes a bit of getting used to some of the ways it gives directions. On occasion it will say something like ‘turn left and make an immediate right’. Then, it will give you the next direction in between those two steps. Also, it wouldn’t hurt if it announced the street names instead of just the distance and direction to turn.
Next, I’m going to pair the laptop up with my bluetooth headset and see if I can get voice recognition to work. If nothing else, I can tell Jenn when to turn and she’ll think I’m the smart one!
Tags:
navigation,
rvs
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johnny July 20th, 2007
Today, I’ve been looking into some of the tech I expect to use on the road. Now, I’m a bit of a UNIX geek - earned a living on the command line for the past decade. However, in my old age, I’ve adapted somewhat and I can actually use windows machines for simple things like video games and web browsing. In fact, I picked up a Fujitsu Lifebook 1510 a year or so back and actually left Windows XP tablet edition installed. At home, I run a windows machine side by side with a FreeBSD machine, using synergy to share the mouse and keyboard between them.
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Tags:
damage,
geek toys,
navigation,
rvs,
unix geek
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