Moscow, ID – Life on Wheels Conference

July 17, 2004

Moscow, ID – Life on Wheels Conference

It’s been an interesting week here at the Life On Wheels conference – for several reasons. The conference is at the University of Idaho. We are parked on the campus blacktop parking area and were fortunate to get into the section with electric hookups. Since we’re not skilled at “boondocking”, we figured this was one less thing to worry about. Remember, we’re here for a week living off of a 36 gallon water tank and 56 gallon holding tanks (black and gray combined). As Andy just said – “you guys try that!” Ha! You learn quickly just how much water is wasted in everything you do – showers, hand washing, brushing teeth, washing dishes, etc. This make-shift campground is also tight quarters, so you have to consider your neighbors. Each RV is given a space 2-parking spaces wide. Thankfully Jim and Chris are on one side so we don’t have to worry about annoying them – we love doing that! We open our front door, Chris opens her window by her desk and we talk. Our awning is used to shade the side of their RV and our slide-outs touch the yellow lines on the other side. It’s that close.

Close Quarters on Campus

The other interesting thing about this past week is the atmosphere. We have 4 classes a day, 1 ½ hours long each. We ride our bikes around campus to get to our classes. We get lost finding our classes. We can get showered in the gym locker room. We carry around notebooks and basically look and act like college students. After school, we are all usually so tired we don’t want to do anything else. I think most of us had forgotten how tired you get sitting and listening for 6 hours a day.

Here is a list of some classes we’ve attended:

Andy: Ford Gas Engines, All About Batteries, Radial Tire Safety, RV Electrical Systems, Suspension & Handling, RV Exterior Care, Back Clinic, Boondocking, and he may have taken more but he did skip two sessions…

Diane: Basic RV Maintenance, All About Batteries, There’s More to Writing Than Words (4 parts), Inverters/Chargers, Generators, RV Awnings Care, Digital Photography, Taking Great Pictures, Solar Power (2 sessions), Hosting in NW State Parks…

Granted, maybe Andy’s classes were more technical, but at least I’ve attended a class in each session!

The negative about all this wonderful information we are receiving is the expense. Now we are considering upgrading some of our parts to increase performance, safety, etc. We never considered this outcome when we came here.

We’ve also been wowed by the city of Moscow. The local businesses and Chamber of Commerce have really enticed the RVers to come into town. They’ve offered discounts at most restaurants and stores, a free barbecue, and even free tickets to the theatre. It’s been really wonderful how excited they are by this conference. Last numbers I’ve heard is there are 666 RVers (about 300+ RVs) in attendance. We were happy to contribute some money to the local microbrewery and winery.

We graduated! We wrapped up our classes Friday and went to the closing seminar, but didn’t win any of the door prizes. There were some big ones too – a 24-day trip to Baja Mexico; 6 tires from Goodyear; and much more. Oh well, we usually aren’t very lucky with raffles anyway. This morning we got up early to go get the rig weighed. We’ve weighed it several times on our trip at truck stops, but those scales generally can’t weigh the left and right sides separately – only each axle. The good news is that we are good on the side-to-side weighing. The bad news is that we are still a little heavy on the rear axle, but we’ve known this and have tried to make adjustments. We can’t control it all though since all of our tanks (holding, fresh-water, gas, propane) affect the rear axle.

Most everyone has left the campus by now. We’ve decided to hang out another night here. They’ve taken away the electricity and water hoses, but we just weren’t ready to leave yet…we haven’t even decided where we are going next! Today we went to the Farmer’s Market to get produce, we’ll decide our plans for tomorrow, and we’ve been looking at our new “projects” since learning all of this new stuff this past week.

Here are some more pictures from campus that were taken throughout the week:

Our Campus Campground

University of Idaho

Football Gargoyles

Movie Night at the Guld's

And pictures from the area:

Pastural Scenes

A Big Red Barn

The Surrounding Sights

Sidenote:  Here is a picture of our route to get here compared to Jim and Chris’ route. They went North, then West whereas we went West, then North.

Permalink