Hey Dad,
Other than it snowed today and is a tad chilly for RVingeverything looks good for lift-off in about 9 days. Of course I thought that last year and found out on the day I was to leave that my tail lights didn’t work.
Not this year…I hope.
Anyway, I worked hard at the end of last year on my list of things to fix and this is what I got done:
Q – What is the best Black water treatment product?
A – For those of you who don’t know about the finer points of RVwaste disposal let me just summarize: It’s way different than what happens in your house. There, you use the restroom, flush the handle, and never see it again. Not so in the RV world.
What goes down into the toilet, you haul around with you until you find a place to dump it and then…you dump it.
One of the by-products of hauling all that raw sewage around (if you’re getting squeemish then you have no business RVing) is the sometime noxious, foul odor.
I can’t begin to tell you how many emails I receive asking about traveling with family in an RV. The questions go something like this: What kind of RV should I buy? What should I know about RVing? Where should I go? 
My RV knowledge is not unlimited, but I have traveled with my family through a decent chunk of the good old USA by RV. We’ve traveled with as few as seven people and have now reached the insane number of TEN. We usually stay out on the road for several months a year, sometimes up to 100 nights in a row in our big old Familyman Mobile. My children have been to Gettysburg, Antietem’s “Bloody Lane”, the spot where Washington crossed the Delaware and where he rested his troops at Valley Forge. They saw the place where Lincoln was born, the only house he ever owned, sat in Ford’s Theater, the little room where he died, and the hallowed place they laid his body. They’ve walked the banks of Plum Creek where Laura Ingalls lived as a little girl and and visited the house she lived most of her adult life. They’ve been to Mark Twain’s boyhood home, his mansion, as well as the boyhood homes of Walt Disney, Martin Luther King Jr. George Washington Carver, and Bill Clinton. They’ve been to presidential museums, seen road side oddities, and even had their picture taken in front of the REAL Brady Bunch House in LA. And they saw it all and so much more because we RV. The RV gives us flexibility and spontaneity. The truth is, you might not drive all the way to Gettysburg just to see a battlefield, but if you happen to be in the neighborhood…you do it.
Trying to bring order and harmony to the Wilson home, I decided it was time to consult Ann Landers about the problem. Here is her answer:
If you open it, close it.
If you turn it on, turn it off.
If you unlock it, lock it up.
If you break it, admit it.
Let me say up front that I’m not writing this booklet as some parenting expert who has arrived. In fact, this whole discussion came about because of a tingle that creeps up my back every time this topic comes up.
The world we live in is saturated by all kinds of technological gizmos. There are X-boxes, game cubes, Wii, cell phones, iPhones, iPods, INTERNET Blogs, chat rooms, Facebook, My Space, and You Tube, just to name a few. They surround us. They are as present as the air we breathe.
*Hey Dad,*
Thought I’d give you just a quick synopsis of our family trip to Hawaii (and point out a few tricks that worked or didn’t work for us). If you think about it, it really is a terrifying thing to take eight children on a 6000-mile journey to paradise. Not that I was afraid of the paradise part, but I was sure the plane trip would be hellish. But it wasn’t.
In fact, outside of being a long, tiring flight, everyone did great. I’m sure it was in part because so many dads and moms prayed for us and because we scheduled the flight so that we arrived in Hawaii at bedtime and left Hawaii at bedtime, giving us some big chunks of sleeping in flight.
