Five Easy Ways To Stay Fit While Traveling In Your RV

Since Bob and I travel so much, we needed to find good ways to stay in shape. We have a gym membership that we use while we are home, but while we are traveling keeping in shape becomes more of a challenge. Here are five simple ways to maintain your fitness while Rving.

1. Yoga - Yoga is one of the most beneficial things that you can do for your body and mind and is a tremendous way to start the day. I have been doing yoga for about 30 years now, and it is an essential part of my daily routine. I highly recommend the Rodney Yi morning yoga routine on the "AM and PM Yoga" DVD because it is very gentle on your body and easy for beginners. The best thing about doing yoga while camping is that you can do it outdoors, and enjoy some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable.
2.   Floor exercises - I do about 100 stomach crunches followed by some core stability and abdominal exercises such as the plank and side plank. Click here to see some good abdominal exercises.   
3. Weight Work - Weight work is essential to maintain bone strength and prevent osteoporosis as you age. We carry 2, 5, and 10 pound weights and a stretch band. Included in my workout are curls, hammer curls, front and side deltoid raises, upright rows and triceps extensions. Free weights are great because of the variety of exercises they allow you to do. I use a stretch band around a chair to do seated rows. I try to do my weight work routine about three to four times a week. About.com has great exercise pages that can help you with your weight workouts.   
4. Walking - Since we are in such beautiful locations, I try to take full advantage of the wonderful hiking trails that are available to us while we are camping. I try to get at least two miles a day in, sometimes much more. I walk my dog every morning for about a mile, and repeat this at night. Any additional walking is a bonus.
5. Biking - We try to get in a good bike ride around three times a week. I especially like to burn off part of my dinner by taking a bike ride about an hour after we eat.

The most important thing that you can do is to maintain consistency. It can be difficult to stick to a routine, since while you are traveling you always feel as if you are on vacation and it is easy to take a day off. However, you have to push yourself if you want to stay healthy and continue to enjoy the traveling life style.

Army Corps of Engineers Parks - The Best Camping Bargain in the Country

Bob and I stayed at an Army Corps of Engineers park for the first time in 2010 on the way to California.  I had heard from fellow campers that these parks were always clean, well designed and spacious, and that they were a real bargain for anyone with a Golden Age or Golden Access passports (these passes have now been replaced with the Inter-agency Senior or Inter-agency Access Pass), since the sites are reduced by 50% with these cards.  Most of the sites are already very reasonable, so the 50% reduction makes these sites some of the best camping deals we have ever seen.

Our first experience was at Goose Point on Philpott Lake in Virginia.  There are campsites right on the lake that are outstanding with water and electric for $22.00 a night, $11.00 with one of the passes.  This beautiful lake has swimming, fishing and boating.  We were so impressed with this park that we are returning for two weeks in August.

We next stayed at Floating Mill Park in Tennesee where we had full hookups and a very large concrete site right on a lake.  There are two swimming beaches - one for the campground, and a public day area beach.

Next was Maumelle Park in Arkansas, which offered a beautifully shaded site on the Arkansas River with full hookups.  The park is conveniently located near Little Rock if you want to tour the city.

We stayed at two more parks on the way home from California.  John Day Lock and Dam in Washington provided us a great campsite with full hookups from which to tour the Washington wine country.  Cochiti Lake in New Mexico had water and electric, but no sewer.  As usual though, we found the campsites to be very large and the park well designed.

Goose Point Campground, VA

Floating Mill Park, TN

Maumelle Park, AR

Not one of these parks was a disappointment, and compared to private parks that we have been to, they are far superior in the spaciousness and beauty that they provide.  If you are looking for a great deal, try out these wonderful parks.  You can reserve them at https://www.recreation.gov .

Our Trip of a Lifetime

Yellowstone National Park

My husband Bob and I love the National Parks, and have made a point of visiting these treasures during our travels. So far we have visited 25 of the 58 National Parks, as listed below:

Acadia National Park
Badlands National Park
Bryce Canyon
Carlsbad Caverns
*Crater Lake - Oregon
*Glacier - Montana
Grand Canyon
Grand Teton
Heleakala
Hawaii Volcanoes
Joshua Tree
*Kings Canyon
*Mount Rainier
*Olympic
*Petrified Forest
*Redwood
*Rocky Mountain
Saguaro
*Sequoia
Shenandoah
*Theodore Roosevelt
Wind Cave
*Yellowstone
*Yosemite
Zion

We visited 11 of those parks (the ones with asterisks) in one trip!  In 2010 we took a fabulous trip that we designated the “Trip of a Lifetime” since we don’t think that we will ever get that ambitious again. We traveled 14,000 miles in five months , and not only got a good tour of those 11 National Parks, but also Custer State Park, the Cooley Dam and some other wonderful state and federal parks. We even traveled over to Vancouver Island in British Columbia Canada. Since Bob and I love wine, our trip had to include a tour of the California, Oregon and Washington wine country. We bought ourselves many wonderful bottles of wine, and then were presented with the problem of what to do with them when we entered Canada. We had no idea that you were not allowed to bring the wine over into Canada without paying a huge amount of taxes. We were in Olympic National Park before we took the ferry over to Canada, so we rented a small climate controlled self storage container in Port Angeles (the monthly rate was only $50.00). We would have had the wine shipped home, but we live in New Jersey and they do not allow wine to come into the state. On the way home we had the misfortune of breaking a trailer axle and got waylaid in Santa Fe New Mexico for nearly three weeks. We were going to stop in Santa Fe anyhow, but we got to know it much better that we expected to. If you are going to get stuck somewhere, it’s certainly not a bad place to hang out. We quite enjoyed it even though at this point we were anxious to get home. Outside of that the trip was one of the most memorable experiences that we will ever have.

Butchart Gardens, Victoria BC

San Francisco

Feeding the Donkeys Custer National Park

Yellowstone National Park

Mount Ranier in July

Hiking in Mount Ranier

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Sun Lake State Park Washington

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park

Oregon Coast

Redwood National Park

Crater Lake National Park

 Glacier National Park

Rocky Mountain National Park

Custer State Park, SD

Crater Lake

Robert Mondavi Winery Napa Valley

Washington Winery

View from our campground in Victoria BC

Custer State Park

Victoria, BC

Mount Saint Helens

Golden Gate Bridge

Sequoia National Park

Rodney Strong Winery Senoma CA

Point Reyes National Seashore