Passport America

Each time we take Destiny out on another adventure our knowledge of the “road life” increases tenfold. Through conversations with other “full-timers”, research on the internet and just the raw experience of actually doing it we gain more and more knoweldge. Sometimes we learn things we probably should have known 15 months ago when we left for this journey; other things we learn are just the “tricks of the trade” that make the RV life easier or more efficient! (I love efficiency!) We do realize we will always be learning in this type of lifestyle, but I guess that is true for any kind of life you lead.

Tonight I wanted to share one of the great tips we received from veteran full-timers this past summer. You have to know two things though- first, Jordan and I don’t have any kind of RV memberships because they are often times $400-$1500 per year. This doesn’t make any sense for us! We are often too mobile to really take advantage of the parks that the memberships include. We constantly bounce around from one side of the country to the next. Second, we can’t afford something of that cost! Our budget is tight and that is a huge chunk of money to hand out to a membership we might not use.  This is why we stay overnight in Walmarts or use freecampsites.net or allstays.com to find a quick overnight FREE parking spot. It gives us just enough rest to get back on the road. So with that being said we were discussing this with our friends over dinner and they introduced us to Passport America. It sounded pretty perfect for the way we RV! You pay $44.00 per year to become a member and you get half off (or more) at over 1900 RV parks across the whole U.S. We especially needed this for our third trip out in Destiny because we have transformed our shower into a closet for Justin. Instead of paying to dump our tanks and paying a truck stop for showers we could just use the Passport America membership to do it all at half the price! Most RV parks have decent showers (we always bring our sandals in though!) WI-FI and some have cable, pools or club houses.

Even though this sounded like a perfect fix for our latest adventure on the road we were still a little leery about actually joining a membership. I hate to waste money on things that aren’t truly needed! But we bit the bullet and did it anyway.

So far we have used it twice and have saved $30.00. We paid $15.00 at each of the two parks for one night of full hook ups. One of them had cable.

If we didn’t get the membership our costs would have been $10.00 to dump tanks twice and $40.00 for the three of us to shower at a truck stop twice.

So we have spent $60.00 for the membership and the two nights of camping,  without it we would have spent $50.00 with no future benefits of discounted sites. I would have to say that it is worth it?!

I will warn you that only one out of our two sites wasnt very nice. So it could be hit or miss but I don’t mind, I am keeping track of where we stayed and taking notes so that we won’t stay at the not-so-good ones again. We are pretty excited to be able to stop and “plug-in” along the road of our adventures with a membership that has almost paid for itself already in two nights. Dry camping is only fun for so long!

We may be gypsies but we still love to be clean! If you RV or are thinking about going on a short trip I recommend you check out the site for yourself.  It could save you some money and we all love that!

I would love to hear some of your RV secrets and tricks of the trade!