What do you do when your town is about to die? In the 1980s, the people who call Deadwood, South Dakota, home were nearly faced with that possibility. The smaller gold mines had all closed, and even the mighty Homestake Mine (where the Hearst family fortune had its genesis) was in trouble.

A genuine Southern welcome was extended to thousands of motorhomers who sojourned in Perry, Georgia, for FMCA’s “America On The Move” convention Monday, March 21, through Thursday, March 24. This grand gathering — the association’s 73rd International Convention — took place at the Georgia National Fairgrounds & Agricenter, which hosted previous FMCA conventions in 1996, 1999, and 2002.

With the emergence of production-built motorhomes (circa 1962), the need for refrigerant-based cooling systems for these new vehicles became apparent. Roger Aldrich, engineering manager at Dometic Corporation, explained that RV air-conditioner technology originally was borrowed from the residential and commercial industry.

If you’ve grown tired of hearing “Shut the slide on the screen door” every time you move it to access the door handle, here’s a solution I came up with so I never have to move the slide again.
First, take a plastic coat hanger and cut off the straight section at the bottom. Discard the rest.

XPower Powerpack 400R portable power sourceThe XPower Powerpack 400R from Xantrex Technology Inc. is a seven-in-one power unit that is said to be ideal for those who need portable or backup power.
The unit, which is approximately the same size as a small boom box, provides 115-volt-AC or 12-volt-DC power that can be used to operate or recharge numerous electrical devices.

The fifth edition of the Big Rigs Best Bets campground directory is now available to assist motorhomers who travel in coaches that are 35 to 45 feet in length. The new edition covers all 48 states in the continental United States and lists more than 900 campgrounds that can accommodate large motorhomes.
The directory provides detailed information about each park listed, including recommendations for specific sites; whether the sites are pull-through or back-in; utilities available (electrical amperage and sewer); approximate length of the sites; directions; telephone numbers and Web site addresses; and more.
Besides the addition of nine more states and roughly 100 more campgrounds to this edition, readers also will find a new Wi-Fi section.

Clients of Royale Coach by Monaco include celebrities such as Dolly Parton, and owners who are not as renowned but nevertheless appreciate fine luxury coaches. A long list of successful people own these coach conversions, which have price tags that can reach above $1 million.

One burner and one pan can add up to a colorful, multi-ingredient meal with recipes such as these.

Noodlecakes And Gravy
The best bargain in the supermarket is ramen noodle packets. Here is a way to turn them into a crusty main dish with a creamy gravy.
2 3-ounce packets of chicken- or beef-flavored ramen noodle soup mix
3 eggs, lightly beaten
3 or 4 scallions, finely chopped, including the tender part of the green
2 tablespoons soy sauce, divided
Vegetable oil
2 tablespoons flour
In a large microwavable container, cook the noodles in water according to package directions.

Despite their name, jackrabbits aren’t rabbits. Cottontails are rabbits.

Balloon festivals are great events to experience the excitement of flight. What’s best is that you can get your thrills firsthand, or, for those with queasy stomachs, by watching others.

Amidst the hills of Kentucky thrives an FMCA chapter whose name calls to mind the Bluegrass State’s equine heritage. The KY.

In March 2002, the Heart of Georgia Travelers chapter held a rally at Beaver Run RV Park in Metter, Georgia. Henry and Juanita Hogan, F258257, and Hartis and Dorothy Rogers, F274094, were our hosts for the event and provided a wonderful Saturday night dinner with fried catfish, grits (several flavors), shrimp (several flavors), hush puppies, and all the trimmings.

Dear RV Doctor:
My wife and I are ordering and buying a new type A motorhome — a 33-foot, gasoline-powered coach with a 7,000-watt generator and 50-amp shore power service. The unit comes with a 300-watt inverter as standard equipment.

Q: I am trying to find a good product to deal with the problem of cleaning the black streaks that come down the exterior of the RV. Do you have a recommendation?
Adam Radzik, F335007
South Orange, New Jersey
A: There are numerous cleaning products available that will remove black streaks from the sides of motorhomes.

Dear Editor:
The Moose Chapter FMCA is a new chapter being formed at the Northwest Area Rally on June 11, 2005. You do not have to attend the area rally (held at the Linn County Fair and Expo Center in Albany, Oregon) to attend this meeting, which takes place at 2:30 p.m.

Thanks to a white duck we all have become familiar with, I am sure most of you can pronounce the title of this month’s commentary. Although Beverly Spurgeon, director of member services, and I plan to cover a couple of items in this month’s commentary, I wanted to start off by announcing a new partnership that has recently been formed between FMCA and American Family Life Assurance Company (AFLAC).

My wife, Jeri, and I are avid sports fans, especially when it comes to Oklahoma University Sooners football. We discovered back in the early 1970s that a fun way to use our motorhome was to take it to the home games.

I’m a history buff. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a history scholar.

Trip planning has become much easier in recent years with so many more resources available to assist in the process. By using this wealth of information, travelers can turn a humdrum trip into an exciting adventure.

Like an island in a sea of new, state-of-the-art motorhomes, trailers, and fifth-wheels, David Woodworth’s RV was quite conspicuous at a recent RV show in St. Louis, Missouri.

Many RVers toy with the idea of visiting the Canadian Maritime Provinces, but they never seem to get around to it. I speak from experience.

It might seem a little unusual that thousands of visitors a year want to spend time on an island that has approximately 500 year-round residents (not to mention 500 or so horses), and see a famous hotel that originally was slapped together and ready for occupancy in just 90 days. But that is exactly what happens at Mackinac Island, situated in the Straits of Mackinac between the shores of Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.
From May through October, crowds of visitors step off ferryboats onto this Victorian island for a day of fun or an even longer stay in a refreshing, old-fashioned world of yesteryear.

The Federal Department of Transportation requires that certain standardized information be molded into the sidewall of all passenger car and truck tires. Reading this information is a bit of a challenge, as some of the numbers and letters are self-explanatory but others are in code for conservation of space.

Most motorhome travel involves spending time on the highway, driving from city to city in between your campground stops. But the Inside Passage in Alaska is made up of islands and towns that can be reached only by airplane or boat.

Have you ever wished you’d lived in the gold rush era of the 1800s? Have you wanted to feel the thrill of picking nuggets of gold out of a rushing stream? Have you envied men and women who grabbed their own destiny and controlled it, instead of waiting for the years of Social Security and Medicare to “enjoy” life? Is there something hypnotic about the words, “Gold, gold, gold?”
Of course, the naysayers and the dream crushers are quick to remind us that not everyone got rich during the gold rush days of the American West. In fact, very few people did.

With the word “domestic” as its genesis, Dometic’s name was born in a brainstorming session at Electrolux (at the time, a Swedish corporation) in the 1960s. Originally set up as a U.S.

On the whole, I’d have to say that we RVers are by nature a finicky lot. We keep our rolling homes neat, clean, and running right.

Shoe bag used as storage bag to conserve space in motorhomeIn an effort to conserve space in the motorhome, we found it useful to hang a shoe bag on the outside of our bathroom door. In the pockets we place items that we need during our travels, such as pens, pencils, scissors, staplers, baggies, and other goodies.
John & Alice Ann Sundquist, F195423
Houston, Texas

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Indoor Clothes Hanger
After doing laundry, my wife likes to hang some of our clothing on hangers to finish drying.

According to product literature from Dieselcraft Fluid Engineering, diesel fuel contamination often can lead to engine smoke, loss of power, carbon buildup, and premature engine failure. To help improve the quality of the diesel fuel in your fuel system before it reaches the fuel pump, the company has developed the Dieselcraft Fuel Stabilizer.
This nonadditive, prefilter stabilizer is installed between the fuel tank and the primary fuel filter and uses a magnetic field inside the chamber to induce a small electric charge into the fuel, which is said to alter the molecular bond of the fuel.

Tiffin Motorhomes, C1717, reached a major production milestone on February 24, 2005, when the 50,000th Tiffin motorhome rolled off the line. More than 300 suppliers, customers, and employees cheered as the 2005 Allegro Bus was presented.

Although its name may evoke visions of a warm Baja beach with soft zephyrs stirring the palms, my wife, Saraine, and I took a Tropi-Cal motorhome in the opposite direction, north to Yellowstone National Park, with three passengers. A 2,700-mile trek from Mesa, Arizona, to Wyoming and the nation’s first national park, and then on to Las Vegas, Nevada, gave me an all-around experience in this coach.

Commercial mixes offer masterful shortcuts in the galley. But if you have allergies or other dietary concerns, you can make your own.

Have you ever seen a snowy owl in the wild? We haven’t; we try to stay out of the snow. We wouldn’t count it among our “life” birds, but we have seen one on the silver screen in the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Depending on your source of information, New Mexico has more than 150 ghost towns, or 60, or maybe 50. The state’s most famous “ghosts” are, of course, the few that are well publicized and cater to tourists.

Occasionally we learn that an FMCA member has successfully dealt with and resolved a motorhome parking rights problem. These situations make good object lessons for the rest of us.

If you visit an Olympic Snowbirds rally, expect to have such a great time that you find yourself joining the chapter before the weekend is over. At least that’s what most guests end up doing, according to chapter president Denny Nelson, F205137.

First of all, you don’t have to be an FMCA executive or a full-timer to become a rally host. All you really need to do is to step forward and say, “I will,” which really means, “We will.” And if your wife is a school secretary, and the “I will” rally is scheduled near the end of the school year, well, you are really brave.

If you check the Contents page for the location of the “Technical Inquiries” column in the April 2005 issue of FMC magazine, you won’t find it listed. No, we’re not playing an April Fools’ joke on readers.

The e-mail address provided for Spatial Data Sciences Inc. (SDSI), the company that provides free trip routing for FMCA members, was incorrect as listed in the February 2005 “FMCA.com” column (page 120).

Every four years FMCA sends out a Membership Profile Questionnaire, or survey, to a random sample of members in order to collect statistical information to place in the FMCA Media Planner. FMCA uses the Media Planner to attract advertisers and commercial business based upon the demographics of FMCA members and other information about the membership.
Each time the survey is performed, we try to share the highlights of the responses with our members through this column.

As I write my article this month, I am at home in Oklahoma for a few days. My wife, Jeri, and I just returned from the Western Area Rally in Indio, California, which took place January 12 through 16.

Need a new theme for your next trip to or through Georgia? The siren song of the mighty Chattahoochee River has bidden travelers since ancient times. It’s no less beguiling today, a shining stream that divides most of Georgia from Alabama and widens into Lake Seminole, one of the best fishing lakes in the South.
Let’s look at a map.

Virginians call it “the Peninsula.” Outsiders may know the large coastal expanse of land that is bordered by the York River to the north, the Chesapeake Bay to the east, and the James River to the west, as the home of Newport News.
Either way, it’s an area with a fascinating history. A few examples: the Jamestown settlement and the surrounding woodlands were home to Captain John Smith and the legendary princess Pocahontas.

FMCA members have an opportunity to belong to one or more of the association’s 480-plus chapters. In fact, some folks have told me that they believe the real fellowship in FMCA lies within these groups.

We all have heard stories about the coach owner who did all the maintenance per the recommended schedule, watched the temperature gauges, and yet the engine blew with disastrous results. How can this be? Could it possibly be a defective part, improperly torqued bolts, or manufacturing contamination? Who knows, but it happens.

One normally wouldn’t expect to explore a swamp without a canoe or a boat, but the fascinating facets of the mysterious Okefenokee can be sampled during a daylong circle tour of Georgia’s gigantic, nationally famous swampland.
Good roads, major entry points, and nearby campgrounds promise a pleasant journey for motorhomers. It’s a moving armchair exploration, certainly not difficult, and yields an interesting view of what the area’s first inhabitants called the “land of the trembling earth.”
The entire Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge sprawls across approximately 396,000 acres of southeastern Georgia and is administered by the U.S.

In 2002 Mark and Jocelyn Fechner, founders and owners of American Carriage Originals, C7791, of Tehachapi, California, relocated their coach conversion business from a 7,800-square-foot production facility to a new multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art complex. The new facility sits on five acres; houses 28,000 square feet of indoor bays, shops, and office space; and includes five full-hookup sites for visiting coach owners.

Olympia, Washington, is not as well known as Seattle, but it has come a long way since the first settlers arrived there. The town, which wraps around Budd Inlet at the south end of Puget Sound, was called Smithfield back in the 1840s.

We could never figure out a good place to keep our toothbrushes when traveling in our motorhome. We were in a home-improvement store one day and found some wire guides with adhesive tape on the back.

Spec Tools’ Twin-Action Box WrenchSpec Tools’ Twin-Action Box Wrench is designed to work where other wrenches can’t, thanks to its squeeze-handle turning action, which eliminates the need for swing room when working in tight places. Using a patented, reversible mechanism, the wrench turns 45 degrees with each squeeze of the nonslip, rubber-gripped handle.
The tool also works as a conventional box wrench and as a box ratchet, making it possible to access nuts on long bolts that even the deepest sockets can’t reach.
The Twin-Action Box Wrench comes with 10 metric/SAE inserts; three low-profile metric/SAE sockets; four screwdriver bits (two slotted and two Phillips); and a 3/8-inch adapter that fits any 3/8-inch socket, extension, or adapter.