Travels With Miranda

The Travel Channel asked me to share with my readers information about their latest sweepstakes.

The grand prize is a flight to Arizona and a week’s rental of a luxury RV, with a trip to the Grand Canyon. It sounds like an awesome prize!

Unfortunately, this contest is only open to U.S. residents.

Visit the Travel Channel for all the details about their Arizona RV getaway sweepstakes.

(This was a sponsored post in that I will get a link back from them, but I do not get anything from anyone participating. I just thought some of you might be interested in this contest.)

I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty details of my financial situation and what’s been going on behind the scenes, but I have had a lot of unexpected expenses in the past months and even with expenses being low and hospitality being high, finances are dire. It’s just been a bad patch and I finally had to ask for help.

A few generous sponsors stepped in and put a finger in the dike in a number of different ways (THANK YOU), but the fact is that there is way more going out than coming in right now and that I am heading into a country where my cost of living is fully twice what it is now, no exaggeration. So it’s all a little much.

Truth be told, I had issues like this earlier on in my RVing life and I wouldn’t say anything about it. I’d just get an increase on my credit card or go hungry for a few days or whatever. But it’s getting harder and harder to be that silent on the blog because my readers (and according to Google Analytics, there are 20,000 of you a month!!!) aren’t allowing me to stay quiet for long. I also feel an increasing need to correctly and realistically display what an unstable lifestyle is like with variable income.

There was a time when I was embarrassed to accept donations in any form, feeling that my financial situation is my own responsibility. But I met someone this winter who had a very different perspective.

How many hours do I spend updating this blog and doing research for it, my ebooks, and articles? How many hours do I spend answering emails from folks with questions? RVing is literally a full-time job for me. It’s also my passion and the only thing I want to do.

How much do I earn from it? It’s at best a minimum wage part-time job.

The amount of time I spend being a public RVer and the expectations people have for me is disproportionate to the amount of money I make from it. People don’t seem to realise that every hour I spend working on the blog and doing any other RVing-related activity is an hour that I am not earning income. Just about all the other really well-known RVers out there are retired and people lose sight of the fact that I’m not.

I’d much rather be a professional RVer than do any of the other stuff I do. I love this lifestyle, I love keeping on top of the market and the technical stuff, and I love to educate other people about it. I wish I could live and breathe RVing. I know folks who succeed at doing so. And the reason they do is because they treat it like a job and expect to be compensated for it.

So I no longer accept ‘donations’ because that makes me sound like a charity case. Instead, I accept sponsorships. They can be anonymous or public, and the public ones will be highlighted/advertised on both this blog and the new site I’ll be launching shortly.

Sponsorship doesn’t have to be in the form of a PayPal payment. It can be taking me out for a meal or offering me a driveway. How about sponsorship as an exchange of services? You could notice that I’m going by your cousin’s tire place and that he could use some advertising. So why not ask him to put some new tires on the rig? Cheaper than a billboard and a much wider audience reach. Or maybe you went to a small brake repair shop last year and you let them know that they could get some publicity in exchange for doing maintenance on my truck.

One of the earliest sponsorships I ever got was from someone who used rewards points on her credit card to get me a gift card to a store I frequent. And of course, there’s always my Amazon link. These are ‘free’ ways to sponsor that really help my bottom line.

Sponsorship is a win-win for everyone. I get paid to do the job I love, sponsors get advertising, and my readers get more information.

Something in my life has to give and I’d really rather it not be this lifestyle I love so much. I really am afraid that I will have to downgrade RVing to being a hobby that is last to everything else, especially with my rig getting older and needing more maintenance and repair.

Thank you again to everyone who has sponsored Travels With Miranda, and not just in the last month or so. You all know who you are and you have all made me a firm believer in both karma and the principle of paying things forward. I am so grateful to my tribe.

Here’s the link to the sponsorship page.

Late June, I’ll be talking about my trip this winter at the RV Owners Lifestyle Seminar in Kelowna, BC. This is the third time I’ve been invited and I knew if I said no again, I’d never get another chance.

From the topics page:

The presenter will share tips on how to find free or inexpensive places to park your RV, whether it be overnight or for several weeks, by providing examples and resources from her 2012-2013 trip through several states, including Louisiana and Texas.

I’m really excited to attend the seminar as it sounds like a really fun weekend. That said, it has thrown my summer completely off kilter. This is a volunteer gig, so I’m not sure yet how I’ll finance all that time off to prepare and attend the seminar. I am thinking of looking for sponsors, although I have no idea of how to go about doing that.

The RV Owners Lifestyle Seminar is like attending RV College for a long weekend, with lots of things to learn and plenty of opportunities for socializing. If you’re thinking of being in BC this summer, maybe as you’re heading up to Alaska, you might want to squeeze this event into your calendar.

This morning, the proverbial camel’s back broke as it regards webhosting for uskeba.ca and all its addon and subdomains, including the Travels With Miranda blog.

I am developing a new site, which I was working on this morning. Or, rather, trying to work on. My connection was literally cutting out every five minutes for several minutes.

The current webhost is Jumpline. They bought out the old host, 100 Megs Web Hosting. I was with 100 Megs for the better part of a decade and they were dependable. I don’t remember having server outages with them.

Jumpline is a terrible webhost that does not understand the product it is selling nor does it care about its customers. This morning, I filed a complaint about them with the Better Business Bureau for breach of contract.

One of my complaints is that Jumpline is refusing to refund me for the rest of the year of service I have paid for when they have amply demonstrated that there are neither able nor willing to provide for the service I am paying for.

The BBB has sent my complaint to Jumpline. I would not consider it below Jumpline to cut off my service without notice. I have a full backup of all my sites and am working with a new webhost to transfer me to more reliable servers. That part should be fairly effortless.

However, it can take 24 hours to transfer DNS information, that is what directs a domain name to a particular ISP. So there is going to be so inevitable downtime in the next week or so.

I may not be able to provide notice that the blog is going down. Please visit Twitter or Facebook for updates if the blog is down. You don’t need to be a member of either service to access the Travels With Miranda accounts on them.

My email will also be down during this transition time and I would appreciate not receiving emails informing me that the blog is down or that it is back up as I can monitor everything from my control panel.

I will continue to post as usual to Travels With Miranda until the last possible second and except for the 24 hours of downtime during DNS redirection, readers will not be affected by this move as the URL is not changing.

Thank you for your patience during this transition period. You all mean the world to me.

If your life is not working for you, why not design a better one?

Lessons the Road Taught Me: a Canadian’s memoir of full-time RVing is the story behind the RV lifestyle blog Travels With Miranda. In this ebook, the author shares many stories for the first time, including details of her first work experience on the road, the time she was nearly arrested, and the war she waged against a formidable foe.

While the blog is the story of her physical travels across the continent, Lessons the Road Taught Me is the journey of her soul, from that of an unrealised individual to that of someone who firmly knows her place in the world.

Long-time Travels With Miranda reader Linda Sand had this to say about Lessons the Road Taught Me:

“All you blog readers want to buy this book. Trust me, it has the stories behind the stories that we all wanted when reading the blog. Plus, it’s a fun read.”

Price: 4.99 USD (PDF document for all eReaders)