Willing to get off the beaten path? Consider central Nebraska

July 7, 2014 by Marlan at Rv52 1 Comment

When visiting my 81 year old mother in a small town in central Nebraska (Miller if you must know), I found myself fading in and out of sleep on her incredibly uncomfortable couch.

I was alone in the house.

I had plenty of rest.

So I wondered… why was I fading in and out of sleep.

Then I listened.

And I heard.

I heard absolutely nothing… Nothing man-made. No cars. No lawn mowers (it was after lunch). No engines. No “road noise”. No yelling kids. Absolutely nothing.

What I did hear was the ebb and flow of the wind that is so ever-present on the Nebraska prairie. I heard the birds – tons of song birds.

It had been a long time since I had no man made stimulus. Just me and nature – ok – I cheated – me and nature from my mom’s couch with tons and tons of open windows. But there was nothing else. Honest.

It was amazingly restorative.

Which got me to thinking. Maybe all the cool places aren’t the ONLY places that are cool?

Consider Comstock Nebraska.

In a short afternoon, or maybe even an hour you could see the whole town. But that isn’t the point. The point is to literally stop and smell the roses.

Visiting Comstock this summer I noticed a little RV park. It wasn’t much, but the point isn’t that the park has to be the fanciest place on the planet – just a place for a little peace and quiet.

There are some really neat water features like the Calamus Reservoir State Recreation Area where you can get some fantastic fresh water fishing without having to deal with any other people. Many fishermen know that it is hard getting to fish by yourself anymore. Well, it is still possible in Nebraska. Another closeby dam is Sherman County Reservoir.

Not only are there local lakes, there are two really nice rivers called the Middle Loup and the North Loup Rivers.

You would also have access to the sandhills which are pretty darned fascinating all by themselves.

Comstock itself has a yearly music festival (see the picture below) as well as the video gallery below.

The ladies (and probably some men) of the community have created an amazing community garden called the Centennial Garden.

Comstock also has a wonderful park with beautiful big fluffy trees that have wonderful shade.

Go see the Dowse Sod House. I mean really, a sod house. With a history and kept up by people who really care.

There are other things too – like a few businesses, but I really wanted to focus on the cool things.

The coolest thing

But the coolest thing is this… If you would be willing to forgo some of the fancy big-attraction things and spend a couple months in central Nebraska, perhaps just thinking, being quiet, being still, and enjoying the peace, then you might find yourself looking back at you.

Imagine mornings with moderate temperatures, crisp blue skys free from ozone haze, smells of summer, birds, and sometimes, just the ebb and flow of the wind. Imagine coffee from your Keurig (I still love mine), getting up with the sun and going to bed with the sun, stars so bright they hurt your eyes, and just imagine the power and energy of the natural energy of the universe seeping into your soul.

That was kind of what I was thinking when sleep and wake washed over me like waves when I was laying on my 81 year old mother’s couch.

What do you think?

P.S. pictures below.

Pictures (if you can’t see them, then click on the article title and then you will be able to see them).

[tubepress mode=”tag” tagValue=”comstock rock”]

RV Park Operator asks RV52.com Readers a Question

June 19, 2014 by Marlan at Rv52 1 Comment

RV52 has been in operation for several years. This site gets 10’s of 1000’s of visitors every month. Honestly, I get more traffic than most people think.

Part of RV52 is a directory of RV parks.

In all this time NOT ONE, not a single park, has ever engaged me and had a frank discussion on how to improve their marketing or success on the world wide web.

…until this week.

I received a comment from Debbie, the manager of Crossroads RV Park in Mohave Valley, Arizona. I print her comment without any editing whatsoever. Why don’t you leave a comment and give Debbie some ideas?

“Hello, I am the Manager of an RV Park in Arizona. When looking at ways to make and keep your tenants happy and as comfortable as possible, I thought why not ask those who know best…. Other RV’ers. (asked Tenants first of coarse) So I would love to hear any and all suggestions and opinions. Be it activities, way things are set up, communication lines and/or anything else you can think of that you either look for at/in RV Park or have experienced at an RV Park that was unique or different way that created a positive result. I want to thank each and everyone of you in advance for sharing this information with me and all those who choose to read it. Have a very Blessed Day! Belated Happy Fathers Day to all of you Fathers, Grandfathers or Fathers to be out there.”

Fitty Confesses

June 6, 2014 by Marlan at Rv52 Leave a Comment

I’m going to keep this short because this is embarrassing.

I thought if I wrote about my attempt at weight watchers it would help me keep honest and be successful.

Right.

I did pretty well up until the “Truffled French Fries” at a place called Chiso’s Grill in Bee Caves, TX.

But I didn’t stay on it and telling the world about it didn’t help either.

I’m hoping that all of you can forgive me.

On the positive side, I am somewhat behaving myself. But I’m not going to say more until I see how my results come back from my blood work this summer.

It is GOOD to remember, forgive, and be forgiven – Memorial Day 2014

May 26, 2014 by Marlan at Rv52 2 Comments

[Not an RVing article, but hopefully interesting and useful to RV52.com readers. Love you all. Cheers – Marlan]

My dad died in 1987.

Age 59.

I’m not even sure why. I had heard he was on dialysis, was bit by a spider in South Texas. Very sad that I’m not even sure.

My parents divorced in approximately 1980. It was so long ago – the memories are fuzzy. The best I can do on dates is large generalities.

Our family took sides. I was a minor child so, by definition, I was PUT in a side by law and you’d better be true to your side or there would be hell to pay. I had siblings and they took sides too. Right or wrong that was what happened.

I made a judgement against my dad. I was punk kid and thought I knew something about life.

I saw my dad one more time before he died.

He came and visited me in Lincoln in 1986. I wasn’t very friendly. (even as I write this 2014, I struggle to hold back tears).

You see I had some high and might morality. It is such BullShiRt really. But tell a kid that. Even worse, when the side-taking occurred, I had no real coach telling me to separate the event from the person.

I know this isn’t true for some people, but for most (many?) it probably is true… Your dad is probably a pretty darned neat guy and knowing him is worthwhile.

Mine died before I figured this out and the opportunity to know each other as peers is gone. I’m horribly pained by that. And there is nothing I can do to take it back.

I know a few things about my dad.

He loved to have fun. He was renowned for that. He never ever worried about money. He was terrible at saving money. But somehow he had enough money and when we sold our farm in 1978, we were flush with cash. So the evidence says he was pretty smart in a sneaky way.

He never really got stressed out. I think I inherited that trait from him Love it – Thanks Dad.

He quit smoking cold turkey in a single day. His smoking was really cool compared to most people. He used Prince Albert in a can. That stuff smelled so good that I can still smell it today. He would roll his own into cigarette papers and then seal the cig shut with spit from a lick of his tongue. My dad NEVER used a lighter. He was a match man. He would take a match from a match book and with an amazing flash of his hands light his cigarette in gail force winds. His shirts always had little holes in them because of the way roll-your-own cigarettes would allow the burning tobacco to fall out.

But he was decisive and he decided. He quit smoking on a single day.

He then ate hard candy like a madman. But hey, it is still pretty impressive that he quit using sheer willpower.

I do wished that he and I could talk. He would be 87 years now.

It is with this background I visited his grave

He was buried in a military cemetery just north of North Platte Nebraska. Fort McPherson National Cemetery is the exact place.

By USA standards, Fort McPherson is really small. It was immaculately kept. The name comes from the name of the Fort which was established long ago when the westward expansion occurred and the settlers got military protection from the US government.

Today, it keeps soldiers on their last bivouac.

I found my dad’s marker and I wept. I asked him for forgiveness. I asked the good Lord for forgiveness. I spoke out loud that my dad deserved better than what he got. I forgave my dad.

Of all the things in my entire life that have passed – I hope the hope of all hopes that somehow I can see him again and make it right.

But on this day – the day I visited his grave. I did my best to let it all go.

I wonder… is it just a pile of old bones six feet away? My hope and belief is that it is not.

I took some time to walk around

I learned that many people here were not heroes. They were just people. Many times people want to be buried here because it simply costs less than other places.

What makes me really, really sad is that my dad never really talked much about his service. He was in the navy and put out to sea in the summer of 1945 which means he really went on an ocean voyage and returned and went home. Nothing to be ashamed of and nothing very glorious. He did his job which is what you are supposed to do. But he never spoke about his service much.

Which is why I’m sad. I’m horribly afraid that he had himself buried here because he had no place else he could call “home”.

And then I see these markers (mostly from military service prior to World War I)

There were 100’s of marker with the words “Unknown” on them.

Let this sink in.

My dad is likely buried here because he had no home (I understand that there are heroes here too who wanted to buried here BECAUSE the service was their home, but I’m talking about MY dad, ok?).

“Here” is a little out of the way place that really no one in the entire world has ever heard of.

“Here” lies 100’s of people who have no home, no identity, no closure, and maybe no one ever looked for or missed them.

The thought it entirely overwhelming.

This day, you can do this much

Today, on Memorial Day, be thankful for the millions and millions of people who have served our country. But open your mind to some other things you can do as well to maybe make this Memorial Day a new beginning for all of us.

Here is my parting list:

Keep our allegiance to the OFFICE of the President and NOT the man in the chair.
Lets ALL OF US serve the ideals of our forefathers.
Do one selfless thing in the next few days.
Forgive someone you need to forgive.
Ask forgiveness – if not in person – at least out loud in private – from someone you wronged.
Love. I really mean it, and I’m a dude, ok? Love.

And if you can, bury the hatchet with you parent(s) if you need to do it.

Happy RVing.

RV Entertainment System Overview with Sonos Play and Bridge

Last updated on September 25th, 2016 at 09:02 pm

May 20, 2014 by Marlan at Rv52 Leave a Comment

(Note – this article is a pseudo-excerpt from the book The Spartan RV. Learn more about living life more fully, without STUFF in that book)

A reader asked about a simplified RV Entertainment system…

I thought I would elaborate while spending some time talking more in depth about how to get the internet in and out of the RV. I did not dive in deep enough on that subject on my earlier video.

If you don’t see the video below this text, then you need to click on the title of the article until you see the video.

Transcript here:

Hello, friends of rv52.com and Fitty. I had a reader write in and ask me if I had a simplified RV entertainment system. Also, she wanted to know if my system has been updated. She felt that maybe my components were old and some of that. So, I thought I would address the question.

Here’s the entertainment system that I’ve had for a long time. What has changed? Really, not too much. We’ve switched out of the Clear wireless for the modem, and I’ll explain a little bit of that later. But, the biggest change in our system is we upgraded the Mac Mini in the center right, and we got rid of the Western Digital USB because the Mac has a plenty large disk drive to save movies.

That’s it. That’s really almost the only change. We even added more devices on the left hand side. This network still stands pretty much as it was.

Let’s start with a blank slate here. I’m going to draw a line that’s going to divide us between outside the RV, which is the Internet, and inside the RV. This addresses a lot of the questions I get. Most of the inside the RV questions… There aren’t that many. Quite frankly, people I think are fairly confused about all the choices about how to get Internet and what they mean. So, let’s go over some of that.

First off, outside the Internet there are really only two kinds of Internet
– wired and wireless. There are really only two ways. It’s, you could argue, a big oversimplification, but let’s go into this a little bit.

On the wired side you have what’s called cable, which is Cox Time Warner, and it refers to a special type of wire which the cable companies have run. They’re able to send Internet signals over the same wire that the send the TV signals. There’s also twisted pair which is AT&T and the phone companies. They’ve been doing DSL. Now they’ve got U-verse. And, I’m sure there are all sorts of similar things. They go over a type of wire called twisted pair. There are probably others, but the first two I mentioned are really the big dogs.

On the wireless side you have WiMAX which is in some ways sort of rare. We purchased it. We had it through Clear, and then Clear was purchased by Sprint. The neat thing about WiMAX is I had no usage limits, which I’ll talk about later, and we were able to do movies and things like that over the WiMAX connection. But, I don’t think they actually went out to a lot of cities.

I find WiMAX very confusing because Sprint called it 4G, but there’s also 4G cellular and they’re not the same. It’s very, very confusing. The 4G you see on your phone, if your phone says 4G, is simply not the same as what Sprint was claiming. Very confusing. The technology is called WiMAX.

Then, there’s cellular where you have Verizon, AT&T, Sprint’s cellular. Those typically are the same technology as your phone. There’s a 4G LTE, those are the type of technologies you’ll see. That’s another wireless technology.

You can get these little boxes. They’re about the size of a wallet maybe. They bring in a cellular signal. They put Wi-Fi out which could be very good for an RV, but that’s not what I’m going to recommend for a number of reasons.

There’s satellite like HughesNet, for example. It’s a really, really, really good choice for RVers as long as you don’t do movies. Movies change everything. There are probably other radio systems that I left out. But, those are the three big systems that come to mind.

On the inside of the RV, regardless of what you pick on the outside, wired or wireless, you have to have a box that takes the outside Internet and converts it to something that you can use inside the RV That’s usually called a modem. The modem usually attaches to a router. Sometimes they’re all one thing. Sometimes they’re two boxes.

In my case they’re two boxes. But, you almost always have this combination. I want to stay with those green boxes in this whole presentation. So, just watch the green boxes.

On the output of the router you have wired or wireless. The primary wired is Ethernet, and the primary wireless is Wi-Fi. Let’s move on. Remember this, though, this is a very important diagram.

Let’s talk about the people who might want to use these technologies to watch movies. Let’s say they are convinced they’re going to use Netflix or they’re going to use Amazon and they’re going to watch streaming movies. I’m going to outline what I think is the most sensible path based on a couple of things.

The first thing and most important thing is fair use. All the wireless people… Because a signal that contains your Internet going out on wireless goes everywhere. Everybody can see it. It’s like one big wire and everybody has to share it. So, there are limits on what you can do.

Because of that cellular, satellite, they all have this thing called fair use. If you go over it it’s either going to cost you a boatload of money or they’re just going to shut you down. We’re on T-Mobile. If you go over the fair use limits on T-Mobile they slow you down. But, when I say slow you down it’s almost stopped.

Let’s look at the most sensible path that you’ll have for getting your movies in and around your RV Inside the RV I haven’t seen too many RVs wired for Ethernet. That’s really not what people do and it’s not what’s convenient. So, I’m just going to take that off the list.

Inside your RV you’re probably going to use a wireless technology called Wi-
Fi, sometimes called 802.11. Outside the RV I’m going to cross WiMAX off in a blue line. We used it very successfully. If you’re able to talk to Sprint and buy the WiMAX service that used to be called Clear, more power to you if you can do that. That’s pretty good, and you can watch movies through that.

I’m only going to cross it off with a blue line. It’s what I used for a long time, but I am going to cross it off as my recommended path for this presentation.

Cellular, honestly, is full of fair use limits. I’m going to take it off the list. But, I do see with T-Mobile and AT&T you can buy extra gigabits for pretty high rates. They really don’t want abusers on the system.

Then, I’m going to cross off satellite. Because if you thought it was bad for cellular, satellite’s even tougher on fair use.

I’m going to put a blue line through other radio. Because there might be other systems that are worth considering. I’m just not going to do it here.

Basically, because I’ve got two blue lines, I’m still going to cross off wireless. So, what I’m going to say to watch… If you’re going to watch movies… Everything else is viable unless you watch movies.

If you’re going to watch movies you really need to stay with cable or twisted pair on a wired connection side, which means it’s going to be hard if you’re mobile to be doing this – if you’re very, very mobile. If you’re going to sit and stay a month you can probably get stuff hooked up in a day or two if you carry an AT&T modem or a cable modem with you. Those are standardized. That’s pretty possible.

My reader said, “Hey, I got a smart TV, what can I do?”

Okay. If you do nothing but use the RV antenna inside your RV you’re really only going to get over the air TV in HD You might have a cable connection if you’re at an RV park and may be able to bring the cable into the smart TV through the RV’s existing cable connections. I’m not showing that here because it’s really not much different than RV antenna.

Secondly, I notice that most RV parks still are running not HD. So, don’t expect a lot there.

Let’s go to the next thing you can do. Well, first off, you’re going to have to have a modem. This is the same green box, and I’m showing my Clear modem here.

You’re going to have to have a router. I use the Apple AirPort Extreme. I tested a lot of them and this, for me, has been the best. The little red radio signal thing, this is Wi-Fi. This is exactly what I have drawn on the prior slides.

Now, if I do that with just my smart TV, just by adding these two components my smart TV.. And, I looked up your smart TV and it has built in Wi-Fi. You can get Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, [inaudible 00:09:39],
VUDU, all sorts of neat stuff. You can even play with Facebook.

So, basically you can watch the Internet TV now in HD You can get the majorleaguebaseball.com, Amazon, and just all sorts of neat things.

And, if you don’t mind typing letters using a remote control like on a TV you can surf the Internet, although I will say that typing thing is pretty painful. I was able to get an app for my smart TV which controls my smart TV via my iPhone. That works reasonably well.

What’s the next thing you could do? Well, if I add my MacBook Pro to this, this system like you see here, I can’t really do too much more. I can still surf the Internet and watch Internet TV from my Mac.

It’s not the same thing as the smart TV. They’re not linked. There’s no real way to link them at this point. There may be through apps that are on the TV But, in general the answer is really no.

If I add an Apple TV to the mix I can now put pics, music, and video from my Mac onto the TV. And, if I control it from my Apple TV this is kind of intermittent or spotty. Because a MacBook Air is not on all the time. You close it. You take it with you. Whenever the Macbook Air is not turned on you’re not going to be able to do things with your Apple TV like the pictures, music, and video from your Mac.

The flip side is whenever your Mac is open you can actually project your screen on the Mac onto the big screen TV using Apple AirPlay, and that is super slick. Those are two things you can do. It’s a little bit different perspective on the same thing. But, anything you see on your Mac screen you could put on your big screen TV pretty much at full speed, and that’s pretty cool.

You told me you had a SONOS Bridge. So, you’ll hook the SONOS Bridge up onto your Apple AirPort Extreme router. Then, once you do that with your SONOS Play:1 you can put your SONOS Play:1 speaker anywhere within range of the SONOS Bridge and you’ll be able to play music.

But, with your SONOS Play:1 and your SONOS Bridge, I looked around, and I don’t think you can play any of the sound from your TV onto your SONOS Play:1 speaker. But, you can stream Internet music to your SONOS and you can play iTunes music on your SONOS. Of course, the limitation there is if the iTunes is on your MacBook Pro that’s not something that’s on all the time because it’s a laptop.

So, one big sound improvement would be if you added a Play:5 to your system, the Play:5 got its audio from the big screen TV, and now you could have nice big screen TV sound coming on your SONOS. And, it would also go to your SONOS Play:1 speaker. Then, simultaneously you’d be able to get music off the Internet on both your Play:5 and your Play:1.

There’s your system. Thanks for watching. Hopefully, this’ll help you get a more fun and more useful RV entertainment system. Thanks.

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