By Chuck Woodbury
editor, RVtravel.com
I once traveled with a cat. His name was Rocky.
Rocky was forced upon me in a campground in Grand Junction, Colorado where I had met up with a reporter from the Denver Post who was writing about my newspaper Out West.
The reporter and I traveled around the countryside for a day. I gathered stories and reporter Pat O’Driscoll asked me questions. That evening we drank beer by a campfire and talked about journalism, newspapers, and probably women. Back when I was younger, when I got together with guys we talked about women: now we talk about ailments and our respective surgical procedures.
The cat, a gray tabby, was homeless. He was hungry. So I fed him lunch meat. Of course, that made me his new best friend. So while Pat and I talked by the campfire, the cat sat nearby and stared at me. “More lunch meat, Mister,” he would say. His name was not yet Rocky. His name was still Stray Cat.
The next morning Pat stopped by my campsite to say goodbye. He handed me two shopping bags. Inside: a litter box, kitty litter, cat food, a collar and a leash. “You need to take the cat,” he said. I said “no way.” But I gave in. He suggested Rocky for a name, after the Rocky Mountains. That was fine with me, and Stray Cat didn’t care as long as I fed him.
Checkout time was soon upon us. The newly dubbed Rocky Cat followed me into the motorhome in search of lunch meat. I slammed the door. Hah! He was trapped! The engine roared. I drove toward California.
Rocky was a cat possessed. He leaped at the RV’s door, occasionally attaching his claws to its screen. Where he saw “freedom” I saw wasting money replacing the screen. At rest areas, Rocky scanned his surroundings through crazed-cat eyes and then wanted back into the motorhome. We made it back to my then-hometown of Sacramento. No longer moving, Rocky was happy again.
I tried another trip with Rocky, just for a weekend. He went crazy. Next trip, a long one, I boarded him. It cost me $250, which was more than I paid for campsites. This was not working out.
I began a search for a new owner. My father took him, but reluctantly, and only with an “opt out” in the arrangement. Rocky liked his new life in the Sierra foothills where he could catch an occasional lizard.
But he soon developed an annoying habit that drove my father nuts. He began to “meow” with every step he took. He never shut up. The solution was to remove his legs (just kidding!) or attach a muzzle. My father found another one: Pawn the cat off to someone else. And that’s what he did.
I never saw Rocky again.
There was a terrible traffic accident last week. A rented motorhome with 13 people on board blew a tire and then veered off the highway into a tree. Two people were killed and nine injured. Two of the passengers were thrown from the vehicle.
The photo is of me in my first motorhome printing black and white photos in my portable darkroom. I snapped the photo in the late ’80s with a self-timer, back when I was roaming the rural West as a freelance writer.
With it, I could send my stories, complete with photos, from just about anywhere. I was too impatient to wait until I returned home, and, truth be told, I needed to get paid fast because I was usually on the brink of financial collapse. Besides, printing photos was good entertainment in those days without a TV, and before the Internet was invented. At first, I wrote with a manual typewriter (torture!).
Last week I told you about the 
I am always looking for strange looking animals — most often fake ones — like the photo above of a T-Rex that appears to be intent on terrorizing a town. Actually, it was a statue in Vernal, Utah. A small sign in front said, “Welcome to Vernal.” To snap my photo, I walked down the street a few hundred yards and used a telephoto lens to make the dinosaur appear large and menacing. It remains one of my very favorite roadside shots!
I will drive out of my way to photograph anything that’s the “World’s Largest.” I have stopped several times in Winlock, Wash., for example, to photograph the “World’s Largest Egg.” In Brunswick, Missouri I proudly photographed the “World’s Largest Pecan.”
Occasionally, a photo simply presents itself, like the friendly chipmunk that showed up at my campsite in the Lassen (Calif.) National Forest. The little fellow demanded Cheez-Its. This was back when I fed wild animals (naughty me). Looking at the photo of this cute little guy peeking over my coffee mug always makes me smile.
Many years ago, I wrote about how the terms RVing and camping differ.
Camping, on the other hand, is practiced with smaller RVs that are meant for weekend outings and family vacations. RVs are typically small travel trailers, pop ups (like in the photo), truck campers and modest-sized motorhomes, say, 25 feet or less. Of course, camping doesn’t require an RV — a tent or a sleeping bag will do. Some tent campers would argue that anyone who travels with an RV is not camping.
You want a peaceful night’s rest? Then don’t camp by railroad tracks.
DO YOU KNOW when you are half-asleep how sounds can startle you, and how your imagination can play tricks? Well, when the trains rolled by that night — about every half hour — I would panic. I would think, “That train is going to derail right into my RV and I will be dead!” I would hear a train approach in the far distance, and then it would be closer, and then it would be RIGHT UPON ME, roaring — shaking the earth and my puny motorhome. I waited for the impact — the terrible instant when I would be crushed like an ant. Death! If I were a little boy I would have put my blanket over my head, but alas, I learned at about age 35 that blankets are no help keeping away monsters, or in this case, derailed trains.
Do California campgrounds cause cancer or birth defects? Well, maybe so. No kidding!
Camco’s outside water faucet solves that dilemma with a lightweight plastic faucet that attaches between your water supply and your RV, and also allows your water hose to hang straight down without kinking where it enters your RV.
You return from just a brief trip to the store, or a short hike, only to find that the sudden williwaw that blew through your campground while you were gone wrapped your awning over your RV’s roof and bent the arms beyond repair.
Before the digital age of photography, we used film. Oh, how things have changed! If you’re like me, you have countless photos, negatives and slides that are sitting in drawers or albums. Here’s a way to turn those old images almost instantly into digital files, which you can then store on disks or print on your computer or an instant photo machine at a store.
One option to convert those negatives and slides into digital images is to use a commercial service. Costco does it cheap. But you have to wait days or even weeks to get the images back.
Even if you don’t feel that you need any help, a hand support can help prevent slips or falls as well as providing more stability.
To replace the rivets, a rivet gun and a supply of rivets are required. Rivets commonly come in steel and aluminum, and I keep a supply of each so I can replace the rivet with the same material as came out — in other words, use aluminum with aluminum and steel with steel.