Once again our $44 yearly Passport America membership has paid for itself. Last Tuesday after a sad goodbye to my family in Los Angeles, we headed south to San Diego to see Tripawds friends.

Our destination was Mission Bay RV Resort, which offers 50 percent savings to Passport members during winter. This coastal campground is normally $50 a night for a bare bones back-in RV site, but with our Passport America membership we got our sweet spot for half off!

Many of Passport’s affiliated RV parks are located in smaller towns that want to attract more tourists, but oftentimes you’ll find gems like these in major destinations.

We’re always super frugal about paying for campgrounds, but since joining Passport in 2008, we’ve never once regretted spending the money on this membership. It always seems to come in handy whenever we need full hookups.

If you’re on the road and haven’t joined this club, do it today. I guarantee you a Passport America membership will pay for itself the very first time you use it!

Don’t care to install yet another bloated plugin package? Use Jetpack Lite like we’re doing on our new and improved Team Agreda blog.

But this isn’t about plugins, or jets, it’s about what we’ve been up to here at LiveWorkDream.com over the past year – at least according to WordPress.

Here’s what their algorithms had to say about our blog in 2011…

Some Crunchy Numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 160,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 59 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 633 posts.

The busiest day of the year was September 28th with 1,418 views. The most popular post that day was Stephen King’s Number One Faaayuuuun… Interesting, considering the post is four years old. And that date was a week after Mr. King’s birthday, but while we originally published that post a couple days after our visit on his birthday, we didn’t mention Stephen King’s birthday at all. Must just be some good SEO juice regarding Stephen King’s birthday there – either that, or something creepy is going on behind the scenes… bwaaaaahaaaaahaaaa!

Sorry, there I go digressing once again.

How did they find us?

The top referring sites in 2011 were:

hitchitch.com
Many thanks to the crew over at Hitch Itch! It is a great site for finding RV Travel Adventures and Journals, and it continues to drive traffic here daily.

dishpointer.com
Dishpointer has come a long way since we originally wrote about this cool satellite finder iPhone app.

thebayfieldbunch.com
Kudos to our friends Kelly and Al for clearly sending some readers our way

livingthecheaplife.net
We bet most visitors from this site find our blog after reading Living the Cheap Life in an RV, or because they found the popular video and resources we posted about How To Build Your Own RV Video.

ehow.com
eHow has referenced many Live Work Dream RVing articles, the most popular of which are likely our tips for Troubleshooting the Norcold N821 RV Refrigerator, and Our Fussy Magic Chef RV Oven.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for stephen king house gate, slab city, wawa, build your own travel trailer, and dishpointer.

How did you find us?

What did everyone read?

It only makes sense that those referring links all relate to our most popular posts of the year. While many of our most popular posts were written before 2011, these are the posts that got the most views last year, followed by their activity and original post date.

• 1 Stephen King’s Number One Faaayuuuun… 4 comments, September 2007
• 2 On a Budget? Build Your Own RV! 12 comments, October 2007
• 3 Our Fussy Magic Chef RV Oven 35 comments, February 2008
• 4 Build Your Own Travel Trailer, Cheap! 3 comments, January 2008
• 5 Calculate Satellite Settings with Dishpointer 20 comments, January 2008

Where did y’all come from?

We assume many of our readers are on the road, or hope to be someday soon. Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & Portugal were not far behind.

If you are reading this from afar, please leave a comment and let us know what brought you here.

Looking back, and going forward.

Does any one thing we wrote about here last year strike you as particularly memorable? Rene recalls the lively discussion inspired by her post titled Free Camping and Assassinations, Your Tax Dollars at Work. And for whatever it’s worth, my post about Paying Your Emotional Allowance will always ring true with me.

We shall continue working the dream life from our mobile headquarters of Team Agreda this year, and look forward to another summer at Vickers Ranch, and a return to the Right Coast next winter. We hope you will follow along and are enjoying your own life’s adventures. For more about the nuts and bolts of how we make a living on the road, be sure check out our new and improved home-based business blog and stay tuned for the launch of our new e-book about how to earn an income anywhere!

Our workamping gig at Hill Shade RV Park in Gonzales, Texas has come to an end. Yesterday we said goodbye to owners Michael and Christine Moers and their awesome family. If you’re ever between Houston and San Antonio, stop by and say hello. You’ll love their park.

We can’t thank the Moers enough for being so good to us. They are two of the most genuine, funny and down-to-earth people we know, and we hope to be back at their quiet little retreat again in spring.

Today we’re at lovely Landa RV Park in New Braunfels to hang out with NuRVers.  Oh how we missed the serenade of the train that runs through the back of the park. Despite how dissed it pretty hard in this blog post during our last visit, it’s not a bad place to be. Compared to some of the dumps we’ve been in, this one is first-class!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tomorrow we’ll be boot scootin’ in Luckenbach for their annual Christmas Ball. Then Sunday, we’ll be blazing across I-10 out to the coast, for some sunshine, warm temperatures and family.

If you’re also traveling somewhere to see your families for the holidays, hoppy travels!  Where ya headed?

Work for RVers and Campers is for RVers who want to earn money to support a traveling lifestyle. You’ll find free paid employment and volunteer workamper positions along with work-at-home business tips for travelers. Coleen’s newsletter also has inspirational tips and workamping ideas.

We found this resource during our early days of researching the road tripping lifestyle and we continue to pop in whenever we’re looking for new ways to generate income. Now, we’re thrilled to be featured on the Worker’s Profiles page!

Coleen and Bob are a real source of inspiration to us and if you’re thinking about this lifestyle, their story will inspire you too. They’re one of the web’s most well-known experts on making a living from the road. After all, they know a lot; they’ve been fulltiming since 1992! Here’s a little bit about this inspirational couple:

Bob and I spent over a decade living in a recreational vehicle of some kind or another. They included several travel trailers, a pickup camper, a park model trailer, and a motorhome. Along the way, we worked and supported ourselves. We are proof that it is not only possible, but practical, to earn a living while full-time RVing.

Much of what I write is based on our experience. Some of it comes from corresponding with thousands of campers and RVers. I also share what I’ve gleaned from employers and managers who hire and work with work campers and other RV workers.

If you’re dreaming of the fulltime RVing lifestyle or actively looking for work, we can’t recommend Work for RVers and Campers’s Resources enough. Visit today!

In less than two weeks we went through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas and didn’t see much other than a few small farm towns and more conservative Christian billboards than people.

Our rig is now parked at Hill Shade RV Park in Gonzales, Texas where we’ll be here workamping until mid-December. More about that later . . . but now:

The Road to Amazon is Now Paved with Gold?

This time of year always brings me back to my not-so-glorious days of working as a seasonal workamper at Amazon.com’s Fernley, Nevada warehhouse.

In fact, I keep receiving automated calls from the mis-named “Integrity” Personnel staffing agency that finds Amazon’s temporary workers in Nevada. The messages hype the lucrative pay and rewards that never materialized when I was there.

Funny thing is . . . maybe they’re telling the truth this time!

New Times at Amazon

Recently I bumped into Amazon’s main workamper hiring representative, the “Camper Force Coordinator” who attends RV shows and gatherings like the Workamper Rendezvous, touting the benefits of working at Amazon and hiring people on the spot.

This man isn’t a stranger to working the lowest rungs on the ladder at Amazon. He’s a retired firefighter who toiled at Amazon’s Kansas location before being hired as a seasonal recruiter when Amazon started managing the workamping program directly instead of relying on staffing agencies to do so. This recruiter is so nice that I hesitated to tell him about my crappy Fernley experience.

However I didn’t need to be shy: he knew all about the lousy way that the Nevada staffing agency managed seasonal workers like me, and he’s been working with Amazon to make every location a better place for workampers.

So it wasn’t just me! I wasn’t crazy for thinking that the agency treated everyone like dog-doo. I LOVE being vindicated!

The Camper Force Recruiter told me “I want to make sure that seasonal campers have a good experience and want to come back and tell their friends about it.”

Now that Amazon oversees temporary workampers, the benefits are greater than ever. Everyone gets a completion bonus, all campground fees are covered (they weren’t in Nevada), the pay is higher and every worker gets a 10 percent discount on Amazon purchases!

Amazon is also better managing the amount of workers they hire so that the promised overtime that never materialized for me is now occurring for workers at each warehouse. We talked to one Amazon elf this week who is already getting overtime in Nevada.

The Camper Force Coordinator made being a minion sound so appealing, he almost swayed me into applying. If I didn’t have other business ventures happening right now, I might’ve done it.

But then again, who am I kidding?

All Aboard the S.S. Independence!

The most valuable aspect of working as a minion was reacquainting myself with punching a clock.

I had forgotten what it was like to be told how to do my work and even when I could have lunch. Call it a bad attitude or whatever, but that’s just not my style.

As bad as it was working at Amazon’s Fernley location in 2009, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

Why? Because it reminded me that . . .

I’d rather be the captain of my own dingy than a junior officer on the Titanic!  (Dr. James Chan)

If you’re working at Amazon this season, what’s your experience like so far?

Originally we were supposed to head to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, an artsy little town that I’ve always wanted to check out, but instead we drove a little further southeast to the Workamper Rendezvous in the Ozark town of Heber Springs, Arkansas. What a great decision that was!

Networking and Road Tripping with Like-Minded People

Workamper Rendezvous is a new, twice-yearly event put on by the good Workamper folks. This crash course is a 3-day seminar series geared toward anyone who wants to explore fulltiming and workamping arrangements that allow RVers to work a few hours in exchange for a free RV site and sometimes even pay.

The sessions were a little too beginner-level for us, so we didn’t attend the conference but instead went to network with others who work from the road.

Honestly I had forgotten about what fun this crowd can be. We were made to feel at home from the minute we showed up. From the nightly campfires to the folks I interviewed for an article I’m writing about workamping, everyone was so enthusiastic and welcoming!

If you’re unfamiliar with workamping and dreaming about ways you can live and work on the road, do yourself a favor and check out this seminar, held in April and October. The price is well worth it, and will pay for itself when you get that first workamping job.

After hitting the road, we started blogging about our adventures, reviewing campgrounds, and searching for the best biscuits and gravy.

For nearly three years, LiveWorkDream was our full-time RVing sabbatical blog as we searched for the perfect mountain property to call our summer home.

As seasonal snowbirds, the blog became a place to write about both our life in the mountains and the trials and tribulations of RVing.

After listening to Tim Ferriss, I realized he had coined the term I was looking for to label the new focus of our ramblings here at LiveWorkDream.com: Lifestyle Design.

After all, this is what we’ve been doing all along – creating our own reality, taking charge of our destiny, designing our own lifestyle.

In line with our new business venture, going forward we will share our lifestyle choices and the strategies we implement to stay on our path to total wellness and financial freedom. Please stick around and enjoy the ride.

This isn’t to say we won’t keep looking for tasty biscuits, or sharing any RV mishaps that we may encounter. But we’ll also review health and wellness products, and share our methods of making money on the road so others can do the same. What exactly would you like to hear about from us?

Roadtripping with debt didn’t seem like a problem to us in 2007. After all, this lifestyle was only supposed to last a year. After that, we were supposed to settle down and get back into the “normal” routine of a mortgage and living beyond our means with the miracle of plastic.

We didn’t know that being normal was dumb.

But when we discovered that we we loved the nomadic lifestyle too much to stop, we knew we had to scale back our spending to keep going.

We still had no idea where our income would be coming from, but our original road trip budget could last another year if we got out of debt. Meeting real life examples of debt free road trippers also helped.

Old Habits are Hard to Break

In 2008, we painstakingly cracked open our nest egg and paid off our last debt, the rig. But old habits are hard to break, and we kept using credit cards.

There’s something about the security of using a plastic when you don’t know how much money you’ll make each month.

Physically we were debt-free, but mentally we were still enslaved by the credit card security blanket. We paid off the balance each month but I would sweat as I scrambled to find the funds.

But I Pay My Balance Every Month!

Studies show that when you use plastic to shop, you’re automatically spending more than you would if you paid in cash. But somehow I thought I was different, and poo-pooed those studies thinking “Oh  not me! I’m always careful.”

But after some agonizing credit card billing hassles with Bank of World Domination earlier this year, we burned the security blanket and committed to paying cash for everything.

Because we have the most sporadic, unpredictable income, suddenly every purchase we made was under scrutiny. Knowing that we could suffer the embarrassing fate of being declined at the checkout counter gives us a self-discipline like we never had before. It was scary as hell the first two months, but now it feels “normal” to us.

The Results

Since we stopped using credit cards, I can’t say that our expenses have gone down a whole lot (after all, we were pretty frugal to begin with), but the peace of mind I find in knowing that everything in our possession, everything we eat or consume, is paid for on the spot.

Next week we’ll hit the road, completely, truly debt-free for the first time ever. I can’t wait!

Disclaimer: I’ll confess that we still use one piece of plastic to handle some aspects of our business. The efficiency and protection our card company offers when dealing with vendors, product returns and exchanges and other things that make our businesses run can’t compare with the lame customer service we get from our bank. I know Dave Ramsey would disagree, but since we don’t use the business card for normal everyday spending, I’m OK with it.

We still pay our balance every month, but until our business ventures stabilize our income to a level where I feel comfortable dealing with vendors in cash, we’ll continue wearing the credit card security blanket for the business.

And now with our new business venture, that shouldn’t last too much longer!

Recommended Reading:

Debt Free For Life: The Finish Rich Plan for Financial Freedom, by David Bach



Don’t Own, Don’t Rent, Live Well: How to be Debt Free, Build Your Nest Egg & Live Life on Your Own Terms, by Matthew & Fiona Peters

Watch Out for that Tree!

What began as a volunteer effort to clear slash piles from our community greenbelt turned into a scary reminder that life can change on a dime.

As we were preparing to wrap up the day, I was about to bend over to pick up my work gloves to leave.  Then, WHAMO! A sickening CRACK! knocked me to the ground.

(this is not the tree that fell on me!)

I  fell, and when I opened my eyes, I swear I heard birds chirping around my head. I wondered “What the hell?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

A nearby volunteer had been goofing around and decided to push over the one, dead  limb-less tree left in the work area, not realizing that this 25-foot tall log would fall directly on top of me. Everyone saw what was about to happen, but apparently were too dumbfounded to yell out “HEY!”

I never saw it coming as it struck me dead center on my noggin’.

EMTs showed up, a cervical collar was slapped around my neck, and in my woozy haze, my fuzzy mind heard someone say “Life flight helicopter” over a radio.

“Noooo! I will NOT go to the hospital!” I yelled out.

I could sit up, turn my head, see straight and although I felt like hell, I knew whatever had happened wasn’t going to instantly kill me. At that moment I felt strong enough to walk out on my own.

Recollections of my 2001 motorcycle crash came flooding back as I recalled the $8,000 life flight ambulance ride and the $25,000 in medical bills from one emergency room visit. No way in hell would I get in an ambulance. After all, I wasn’t bleeding or unconscious, so I didn’t need it.

After convincing Jim I didn’t need to go, and a long verbal wrestling match with the EMTs, I signed a waiver of responsiblity, and we left the scene.

Brain Hemorrhage or Just a Bad Headache?

Being one hour away from a hospital is a scary thing when you think you might need one. That evening, I felt like I might need a doctor, but I knew if I woke up in the morning, it would’ve been a waste of time and money.

What doesn’t kill ya makes you stronger, right?

The next day I felt like a truck ran over me. So away we went to see a doctor, who gave me mental competency tests to ascertain the severity of the blow.

I never realized how frightening it would be to have a doctor look you in the eye to examine your mental capacities.

After passing the test with a “D,” the doc said to me: “Hitting your head the way you did is just like when a diver hits the bottom of a swimming pool.”

Oh crap.

“You’ve very lucky that you seem OK. But you need a CT scan and x-ray. You could have bleeding going on around your brain and not know it.”

Damn. Medical bills!

Diagnosis: Lucky Girl

I shook all over and wanted to puke, not knowing if brain surgery was in my future. But less than an hour later, I found out I was OK, relatively speaking.

My moderate concussion me out of commission for all of last week and somewhat this week. But after several days of medicinal naps, restricted computer time and general malaise, I’m feeling better. My brain is still playing tricks on me when I try to do things like focus and type, and my neck is still tweaked, but it’s better than having a hole drilled in my skull.

Just another reminder that life is darn short.

Sometimes a lot shorter than we ever think it could be.

Now get off your computer and go live, darnit!

Over a year ago I committed to finally making good use of my overpriced journalism degree by building my writing career and expanding my editorial capabilities beyond the world of three legged dogs and bone cancer.

Although I was a regular contributor to the Eureka Times Standard Newspaper for about a decade (the main newspaper of our old stomping grounds) and wrote daily articles for our Tripawds.com community, I never seemed to have time to pursue actual paid writing gigs from new clients.

Faced with the reality that my current writing efforts weren’t going anywhere or generating income unless I made an honest attempt to pitch my services, I started looking for outlets that could improve my talents while actually paying something.

My efforts are slowly paying off. Here’s my latest piece about the beautiful area we fell in love with back in 2009:

“Red Feather Lakes: Northern Colorado’s Best Kept Secret.”

I wrote this for Go Colorado, a fantastic website about the gems that make the Centennial State our ideal place to homestead during summer.

Enjoy!