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!

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!

And now that the ranch cabins are for sale, there’s a lot more people who are going to discover the magic of this 100-year old Lake City legacy.

Recently I talked to Larry and Paul Vickers about the family’s exciting new Vickers Horse River Ranch Property that gives the public a chance to own one of their hand-crafted, historic log cabins.

I wrote about the family’s big endeavor in my latest GoColorado.com article, “Lake City Vickers Ranch: Frontier Spirit Thrives in the San Juan Mountains” but you can listen to the interview I based my article on in our latest project:

Live. Work. Dream on Blog Talk Radio

In this 15-minute intervew we talk with Larry and Paul Vickers, whose family helped establish Lake City during the peak mining years of the late 1800s.

Jim and I worked at their ranch during 2008 when we thought we wanted to buy a small resort.

Then we realized: What, are we nuts?!

Now that we know the realities of the resort life, we can say we’re definitely not cut out for this kind of gig. The work was the hardest we have ever done but the family’s kindness and generosity made it all worthwhile.

Our adventures at the ranch were chronicled in blogs post such as:

The Nitty Gritty Details of Running a Resort: Wimps Need Not Apply

Breakfast Ride Offers Best Biscuits, and View

Ode to the Laborer

Yeah sure, haying is safe.

The Vickers Hay Chronicles

We’ll hopefully be heading back to the ranch in a few weeks to get our share of hay buckin’, cowboy coffee and manual labor, so stay tuned for more Vickers Ranch workamping adventures.

Meanwhile, if you or someone you know would like to be a guest on our Blog Talk Radio show, drop us a line!

Exactly two years later (almost) on the 17th, we were married. It was the happiest day of my life. Really.

Every day together is a reminder of just how happy. Thank you. For everything. Really.

Bob did a good job at describing how Chris Crawford was awesome in his Talking Tech blog. And the Eureka Times Standard published a rather eloquent obituary for Chris, who would have easily discerned they didn’t write it.

To the paper’s credit, they did run a rather nice cover story by Donna Tam about how the community is mourning his death. They also ran a piece from two business leaders about how friends will always remember Chris Crawford. So true, how could we ever forget?

To know Chris Crawford was to love him. Personally, I feel that after high school and college, one rarely gets the opportunity to make a new lifelong friend. Chris made it simple. He and Elaine welcomed us into their home, and their hearts.

After knowing Chris just a short time, we became very close friends. After the various parties he hosted, or times he and Elaine would treat us to dinner or cocktails, I would thank him sincerely. His reply was always the same: “We’ll have the rest of our lives to make up for it Jim.” My only regret is that I won’t be able to keep my end of that bargain.

Chris was always our biggest advocate. He believed in us when others thought we were crazy. In dealing with the City when attempting to convert an abandoned property into live/work space, he solicited letters on our behalf.

At a public debate when running for Supervisor where his opponent answered my question about what might be done to assist local small internet-based businesses with “government can’t help you…” he easily illustrated aspects of his seven point plan that could.

And, when we decided to follow our dream by selling our home and traveling the country with Jerry, he was there at our sendoff and frequently commented on our travels…

“…we fully appreciate your wanderlust. As you note, it’s always heart warming to know there are people who love you, know you for who you are, and pray for your safety while you pursue this adventure.” — Chris Crawford’s comment on this post.

So much has been said about Chris already. So we will sum this up in stereotypical Crawford fashion…

Look, it’s like this. He led a good life. He was a very fortunate man to have found such a wonderful soul mate in Elaine. He was successful in business, and passionate about what he believed was best for the community. Cancer may have broken his body, but his spirit shall live on forever.

Gregg and Jay are right. “Was” is indeed the hardest word. God speed my friend. Thank you for being you.

My reasoning at the time was that we had enjoyed a wonderful life with Jerry on the road, where he taught us – among many other enlightening lessons – that every day is a great day, no matter what life throws your way. I was recently reminded of this by a comment on some satellite radio show about coping with difficulties. It went something like this…

“You always have a choice. Even if your only choice is how you react to the situation, you still have a choice.”

So true. I choose to be happy. It sounds simple enough, but it can be harder than you might think, especially when life throws you a curveball. Or worse, beans you high and hard.

With the anniversary of Kris’ death coming up, and doctors suddenly telling another dear friend cancer is killing him, I thought it high time to share how I do it. Be happy that is. Consider it a bit of open source enlightenment.

Ever since we hit the road with our three legged dog after his cancer diagnosis and amputation, I have been privately working on this personal mantra…

“I am available to more good than I have ever experienced, imagined or known ever before in my entire life. So I open myself to all the wonderful gifts the universe has to shower upon me. And I am grateful for living a happy healthy life free of pain and discomfort, thriving in tune with the cosmic dance. I know the universe is conspiring on my behalf, so I free myself of guilt and blame and think kind thoughts, speak kind words, and act kind deeds toward myself others and the environment. Should I experience stress or pain, I choose to let it go knowing that I am completely free without it, because I am most happy and comfortable enjoying every moment to the fullest choosing to live life in the ever present now.”

It’s an ever-evolving work in progress but that’s what makes it work so well. I repeat it most often when out for my morning runs. Another friend, Dave Berman, found it enlightening enough to use a variation we agreed upon when he launched his Manifest Positivity blog. You can ask Dave how the differences he suggested I incorporate make the mantra more effective, he’s the certified NLP practitioner.

But I am a creature of habit, and I believe this is working for me. Call it mumbo jumbo if you will, but a little good juju can go along way if you ask me. So I recommend anyone seeking a little more happiness from life develop a mantra of their own. Below are a few resources that led to me developing mine.

Recommended Enlightenment

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams by Depak Chopra –  I first listened to this audio book on tape (yes, audiocassette) in my previous life as a marketing manager who spent hours a day in traffic.

Ethics for the New Millennium by his holiness the Dalai Lama – Could there be any greater path to enlightenment than getting it directly from the source?

The Secret – The law of attraction is no secret after all, and anyone who has read or seen this will recognize the first few words of my mantra.

Pronoia by Rob Brezsny – Never read it, but a few of the things I tell myself I learned from Dave, who swears by its teachings about how how the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.

Am I Being Kind by Michael J. Chase – I still owe Dave a public thank you, and book review for this quick read about how asking one simple question can change your life, and your world.

Excuses Begone! by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer – Didn’t read this one either but did take plenty of notes during Dr. Dyer’s seminar of the same name on PBS about how to change lifelong, self-defeating thinking habits.

Guardians of Being by Patrick McDonnell with words by Eckhart Tolle – Read our book review of this enlightening little treasure if you love Mutts, or wonder why it’s such a big deal to us.