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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Hitches, Load Management and Fire Safety @ Escapees RV Boot Camp

We started out the day with a big breakfast in the Escapees Activities Center where RV Bootcamp is held. We sat one table over from the Program Director Mark Nemeth. In a addition to being very knowledgeable on a lot of subjects he is a very personable guy.
Mark started the Day off talking about different aspects of hitches and for travel trailers, 5th wheels and motor homes.

After Mark's seminar, he introduced Neil Kelander who spoke on RV Load and Weight Management. Neil has been RVing for over 35 years and worked in the tire industry for over 30.
He offered the following statistics:
  • RVs are the only vehicles on the road operating at 100% capacity 100% of the time
  • There are 30+ million RVers worldwide
  • There are 8.2+ million RVs registered in the USA
  • There are 1.3 million RVers who are full-timers
He also said the #1 problem with RVs today is overloading. He strongly recommended we get our RVs weighed by a place that can weigh each wheel separately.

In the afternoon we had a Fire Safety seminar by Mac McCoy.
He had a mix of information, stories, a few RV fire videos and an outside demonstration using some extinguishers. My takeaways from his presentation were:
-We need to do our own fire escape exercise (as in climb through the window). When we have an emergency is no time to figure things out. We may have 20 seconds to get out so we need to be start and train for that possibility.
- The other one was that we need to look at our fire extinguisher and see how to operate it.

After a dinner of hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, beans and cookies,
we had the Bootcamp staff tell a little bit about their story. Each husband and wife team told: how long they have been full-timing, what they like the most, like the least an what they plan to do after full-timing.It was another good day and we learned a lot. We are looking forward to seeing some of the local area around Livingston Texas after the Bootcamp ends at noon.

That's it for today's Roadrunner Chronicles. Thanks for viewing!

4 comments:

  1. The Boot Camp sure sounds like a great way to learn a bit more about RV'ing and our rigs. That's great advice too on practicing an escape route in case of fire. Thanks for all the info!

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  2. Seminars like that are an excellent way of short tracking the do' & don'ts of RVing. Many woes can be avoided by learning how to do things right in the first place. We've never been to a seminar so have made most of the usual RV mistakes:(

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  3. We've been to two great rallys/seminars and look forward to the RV Driving school in Texas in February. Thanks for the info on fire escape. Great post!

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  4. Wonderful idea to have a "fire drill" in the RV. I've never thought of doing that, although we did similar things in our s-n-b home. Thanks for the good suggestion and a great post.

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