|
|||||
|
|
Here’s a shout out to a new full-time RVer I met in Provo, UT. He’s a young fella traveling around in a shiny Airstream trailer with his dog and motorcycle. He had the rear of the trailer altered to add a door to roll his huge hog up inside like a toy hauler. The outside is covered with a graphic to advertise his travel blog GypsyLivin.com. What a great name! Sounds like he is having fun and making the most of his time on the road. He too is working on his bucket list. Take a look.
 I am often asked how I get such great deals on food and entertainment everywhere I go. It is really not that difficult. The magic word is “Internet”. You can walk into a restaurant or up to a theater or an amusement park and pay full price if you like. Personally, I like to save my money and get more for my buck by shopping for deals and coupons on the Internet.
All the fast food places and many higher class restaurants have websites. You may find a deal just by browsing to them but go ahead and subscribe to the site even if you don’t find a deal. They send out deal announcements and coupons by email. I just got 2 free “W” burgers from Wendy’s that way. I also get great discounts at KFC, Del Taco, etc. It is well worth it. If you are worried about getting spam emails because of this, then create a separate email address just for this. Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc. provide free email addresses. Your ISP may provide more than one email address to use. Restaurant.com can be an excellent place to get discounts at restaurants. They sell discount certificates. The usual price is $25 for a $35 certificate but they also have regular sales for as little as $2-$8 for $25-$50 certificates. It is a great way to try a new restaurant out or go out with several other people and pick up the tab. There are restrictions and only one person in a group may use the cert at a time. Be sure to show the certificate before ordering. They do work though. I have used them and they make it easy to send gift certificates to family and friends. I also like that they do not expire so you can buy now and use them later. If one of you is a veteran, recently Golden Corral buffet has been offering a free meal for veterans and active duty military on Veteran’s Day. Get there early because it really draws a crowd and don’t forget your VA card or military ID. Amusement parks, theaters, and dinner theaters all have websites as well and I almost always find special deals on them that are only available when booking over the internet. Never go direct to any of these without checking their website first. Usually I get a discount price but other times I will at least get a free VIP upgrade and sometimes both. VIPs get better seats, may be allowed backstage, get a special waiting area to sit down in away from the crowd, and other goodies. If you subscribe at their websites, they will notify you of upcoming deals, shows, and special days so you can better plan your next trip. I scored two tickets for the price of one to Medieval Times dinner theater on their website. I got a discount and free VIP upgrades at websites for two other shows. Disneyworld let me in free on my birthday after I registered at their site for that deal. If you are thinking about going to an RV show, they too have websites with discount tickets available. The same applies for local races and festivals. Pay attention at grocery stores in the area you are visiting too for discount coupons on rodeo, circus, and amusement park tickets. Another good place to get a discount is in your RV park or motel office. Most of them carry a brochure rack and some brochures have coupons in them. Lastly, consider your state of legal residence. Disneyworld in Florida provides a discount to local residents. If you are a full-time RVer, hang out in Florida a lot, and love Disneyworld you may want to consider using Florida as your legal residence. Florida also gives a 50% discount to local seniors and handicapped for state park camping fees so you could save quite a lot just by changing your state of residence. They also don’t have a state income tax! A big problem for RV parks is setting rules. Tenants without rules quickly get out of hand but too many rules make park living miserable for everyone. Rules must be enforced and enforced evenly for the most part or there is no point to them and an RV park can quickly find themselves involved in major disputes or even lawsuits. RV parks must also follow rules set down for them by the state and county. Not all rules you see are of the park’s doing and quite often county bureaucrats who have never camped in their lives will try to apply rules to transient RV parks that make sense only for homeowners or benefit only nearby homeowners.
I personally as a free spirit despise rules but I do understand the need for them. I don’t want to stay in a park where all the long-termers have bunches of broken old crap or couches sitting all around their RVs. I agree with keeping things picked up and out of sight. I don’t want to stay in a park where children are running wild with no parental supervision at all. I don’t want to stay in a park with unmaintained ugly RVs. I like to see well maintained lawns. But I also like to see fellow RVers asserting their individuality and creativity with decorations, lawn ornaments, flags, lights (preferably solar powered), etc. I don’t have an issue with older rigs that still look decent or the usual BBQs, patio furniture, bikes, etc. being around. Rules can be good and healthy. However, one can go too far when there is no flexibility. For instance, one park I know forbids non-automotive motorized vehicles such as golf carts except for their own staff carts. One night when an older person’s car broke down nearby on the way back to the park, he was able to get a ride with someone in the neighborhood outside the park who was on a golf cart. Unfortunately, they were stopped at the entrance and he was forced to walk through the long park to his rig and no ride was offered by the staff member who was on a golf cart. It has finally happened. I knew it would sooner or later. Someone running another site has stolen a post from my site and posted it as theirs. It looks like he may have used an automated scraper. Why should I care and shouldn’t I be flattered? No, it is not flattering to be used to create content for someone else’s site so they can make money from ads off my work. Many unscrupulous people create websites that scrape the content of other sites with no creation of their own content at all solely so they can make money from ads. They throw up hundreds of these automated sites to get rich off others. It is one thing to ask if you can host a feed from someone else’s site or post excerpts with full credit given but quite another to simply take their content which is illegal. Also, having duplicate content posted elsewhere lowers the ranking of my own post in many search engines.
Happily, I took steps quite some time ago to be able to stop it. There are services which you can use to semi-officially copyright your material or at least create evidence of when it was created and by who. My Free Copyright is a good one and it has a FREE version. If you are a more prolific writer with more than 3 posts a day, look into their paid service. They monitor your feed or you can upload individual articles securely, they copy any new content, create a digital fingerprint of it, register it with themselves, then email you a copy. They also provide a logo for your website. There is also a WordPress plugin called Copyright Proof that can do this as well. Another great plugin is Digital Fingerprint. This can mark every post in your feed with an identifier that makes it clear the content is in fact yours to anyone who sees it and can be used to track stolen content down via search engines. ©Feed is another plugin that can do this. I highly recommend using Google Alerts with your digital fingerprint to keep watch for your signature and email you when it appears somewhere it shouldn’t. What should you do when you find content has been stolen?Contact the owner of the website first by email with a Cease and Desist request (use in the subject line) to see if they will remove it without further hassle or at least give you proper credit so you get a link back. You may want to only allow part of the article to be used with a “Read the rest…” link to your blog or page. You can find the owner of the domain by checking any whois site such as Betterwhois . If the owner info is not provided, it will at least tell you who the domain registrar is so you can then go to their registrar and use their whois. If the domain is private (info hidden), there should still be an email address to contact or you can contact their domain registrar with your complaint. If the domain or site owner refuses to remove the content, contact their webhost with a DCMA request to remove it. Webhosts take such complaints very seriously as required by law. Their webhost name is often in the name of their DNS servers shown in whois or you you can do a tracert to the domain to find their webhost. See also this FAQ for some DCMA report addresses. I suggest watermarking your photos too. If you use Microsoft Live Writer to create posts, it is capable of watermarking images. Many gallery scripts such as Coppermine can also watermark images uploaded to them. WordPress has several plugins available. Try searching the term “watermark” in Add New under Plugins in your WordPress admin panel or see “WordPress Plugins to Automatically Watermark Your Images”. For more info on copyrights and plagiarism, PlagiarismToday is a great site with plenty of info. I also found this article on copyrights helpful: 10 Big Myths about copyright explained . It will give you a better idea of what is copyrighted and what may be fair use. BTW, my Cease and Desist email to the website owner worked for me. He removed my post from his site and apologized. 🙂 |
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2026 Dang RV - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa 
|
|||||
