We are a Big Rig looking for a Tent Experience.
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We are a Big Rig looking for a Tent Experience. |
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thoughts on the RV lifestyle they call Van Dwellers and the You Tube channels they produce on this lifestyle. Now the rest of the story, as you may know I also do www.hitchitch.com a national web site with travels and journals of mostly fulltimers who are living fulltime in their RVs. And a great Resource Section on how to find that perfect camp site. While those sites are great and people love sharing their travels, some have now turned to doing what they call a channel on you tube to share their lives on the road. Some have both a regular blog and You Tube channel. You may say, so what, well as with everything, advances in tech, people progress to new means of communicating. Remember when travelers used to send home postcards? It takes a huge amount of time to produce a video and upload it to You Tube but for many the time spent is worth it as some have large followings and thousands of viewers and you would not believe what kind of money they are making with viewer clicks. I know how much work it is as I have done it by using some of my drone footage to make a video. And this summer while camp hosting and plan to use my drone more, and put the video on my blog. But I degress. As I have observed many of these people are are traveling on low budgets, calling themselves Nomads, many of a younger set and not in the old so called normal retirement age. But doing what they call the Van Life living in vans. Not exactly full blown conventional RVs. Ya want to shit in a bucket, as many do but they love being free, so be it. This year as had been for the last several years they held a Van Build event in the BLM desert near Parker, AZ where they get together and help each other by remodeling their vans, etc. We watched it all on You tube. Later the BIG event is the RTR (Rubber Tramp Rendezvous) gathering down in the BLM in Quartszite. This year they had like 8-10 thousand as they like to be called VanDwellers. The BLM even arranged a special location separate from the 14 day areas just for them as they have grown too large for the free 14 day use area. Gives testimony to the shear size of the movement.    Bob
Wells runs this and has for years and has produced You tube
Vedios (253 thousand subscribers, 431 videos) promoting how
to live this lifestyle at Cheap
RV Living.com Now my take on all this. We have traveled full time since about 2003 when I retired at 54 years old, with adefined pension and now with SS. So we have had the funds to do it from the start. Even then it took much soul searching if it was the right move. But what Bob is selling is it's just great to live in a van and live cheap. But what happens when you need health care and so much more later on when esp. you get older. Now I will be the first one to declare getting out of the office cubicle was a best ever thing, but to do it, and live in a car or van and take showers at the next Planet Fitness is a bit much, me thinks. So why are people doing it? Money of course. Low paying jobs that don't pay a living wage, living life free, knowing there is more to life than the 9-5 rat race, and the cost of housing make it about the only way some can afford to live. And with Cheap RV Living.com telling them how to do it, they are going for it in a big way. They band together and travel like in tribes from place to place. Many out west with free BLM land offering a great and cheap way to camp for free for up to 14 days at a time, and then move about 25 miles to the next free site. Bob has even organized caravans of people who travel together from site to site as a tribe. Nothing wrong with that me thinks as, to each their own. You just have to be cool with that and know what you are getting in to. As camp hosts for the BLM for the last two years in Idaho in an out of the way campground we have learned to treat all peaple with respect. We each do our thing in our own way. That's what maks it all work. Diversity. Many as I said document their lifestyle on You Tube channels and with viewership payments from You Tube to pay their way. Now to do that they need internet connectivity to upload the content of course. But it's a small price to pay for the return in investment they receive to be able to make a living. You should see the camers and mobile internet gear some of these people have invested in, to do this. I so far I have not listed,but starting to do ones that have both a v-log channel and a regular blog site. Because as soon as you go to their site on You Tube you do not need to come back to my site. If you don't utilize my listings and possibly click on my ads I don't make money to keep my site up and running. I don't make anything near what a You Tube channel makes. Just enough to cover my server and domain name expenses. If you know how You Tube works you subscribe to their channel and you get a notice when each subscribed channel is updated with a new v-log. Some of these channels also now want you to goin a program called Patreon. Patreon (/ˈpeɪtriɒn/) is a membership platform that provides business tools for creators to run a subscription content service, with ways for artists to build relationships and provide exclusive experiences to their subscribers, or "patrons". They will give you extra content for fees. Getting paid by You Tube is just not enough I guess. But if people want to pay for premiim stuff then go for it. It is all what the market will bear and if you feel you are getting good value OK. Like an online tip jar that you used to see. So for now, most sites on my Hitchitch.com site are listings of people who are sticking to regular blog posts. And there are still many people who for many reasons do not want to make videos. It takes lots of time and money to do it, and for many a blog is still very creative. If you are traveling and not sitting at home with a unlimited bandwidth account watching a You Tube v-log (video) it uses a lot of bandwidth. Sort of like constantly watching Netflix. Anyway enough for now. I plan on getting more into expressing my thoughts on this full-time RVing thing and how it is evolving. Stay tuned. Spending lots of time exploring about the ins and outs of owning and maintaining an older Class A diesel pusher. After owning two big NuWa HitchHiker 5th wheels this is a whole new deal. Following facebook Monaco RV Owners group and Class A Diesel RV Owners and of course iRV2.com forums. |
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