Escapees Travel Guide 2016 Cover Photo + RV Batteries

Escapees RV Club 2016 Travel Guide
Photo by: Mark Fagan

The 2016 edition of the Escapees Travel Guide is out, and on the cover is a wonderfully vibrant Arizona sunset photo that Mark took.

The Travel Guide is a handy little book published by the Escapees RV Club for its members, and it lists nearly 1,000 RV parks across the continent (including Canada and Mexico) where Escapees members get discounts of up to 50%. It also provides state maps showing their locations for route planning.

The Escapees website also provides a map of them all here.

In addition, this listing includes the 19 RV parks that are under the Escapees umbrella. One of the neat things about Escapees RV parks — for the budget conscious — is that they always offer a few dry camping campsites in addition to their full hookup sites.

In our experience, these campsites are never full, are sometimes quite spacious, and don’t really need to be reserved in advance. Best of all, they’re just $5 a night for Escapees members.

One of our favorites was “Dry Camp A” at Rainbow’s End in Livingston Texas, which quickly became “Wet Camp A” during our stay due to several days of downpours.

It was roomy and had as much of a woodsy camping feel to it as is possible in an RV park. You can see pics of the campsite here.

The Escapees Travel Guide also lists members who own property and are willing to let other members park their RV on it for a night or more. We were very grateful for this unusual kind of RV parking when we got smoked out by a wildfire in Oregon a few years ago. How heartwarming it was to enjoy the special hospitality of fellow Escapees who let us stay in their yard while we got our wits together.

Escapees offers a ton of services for RVers besides campground discounts, from mail fowarding and domicile assistance to advocacy work on behalf of all RVers to bootcamp instructional programs for new RVers and special RV weighing services. They have an excellent online discussion forum and there are loads of RV rallies and gatherings and RV tours as well.

Escapees Magazine Jan 2016 Feature: RV Batteries
By: Emily and Mark Fagan

When we first started RVing full-time, I couldn’t imagine traveling any other way and was very surprised that Escapees also offered travel tours for its members that did’t involve traveling in an RV.

Yet, now that we’ve been at it a while, I totally understand the desire to mix it up a bit and jump on a plane or a boat to go somewhere once in a while. And why not do that with friends who like to RV too?!

Escapees Magazine

Our favorite benefit of being Escapees members is the very informative Escapees Magazine that arrives in our mailbox every other month. There is a wealth of knowledge shared in its pages, and the topics that are covered touch on every imaginable aspect of life in an RV.

In the January/February 2016 issue of Escapees Magazine there is an article of ours about RV batteries.

We’ve been living on 12 volt battery power for nearly 9 years now, between our boat and our trailer, and we’ve learned a lot about what it is that batteries do, how to install them, how they get charged, what kinds of TLC they like, how and why they fail, and why certain kinds of batteries are better than others.

Our article offers an overview of RV house batteries basics.

There is a ton of info about RV and marine batteries on this website as well, and for a more detailed study of what it is that makes RV batteries tick, the following tutorial pages get into the nitty gritty:

• RV and Marine Battery Charging Basics – How do batteries work and what’s the best way to charge them?
• Converter, Inverter/Charger and Engine Alternator battery charging systems – Each charging system is very different!
• Solar Charge Controllers – How to optimize battery charging from the sun!
• Solar and Shore Power Charging Combined – What happens when you run solar and shore power at once?
• Wet Cell vs. AGM Batteries – Why is one battery type superior to the other and how do you wire them?

We joined Escapees in our first year of full-timing. If you are thinking about joining Escapees too, visit the Escapees webpage here.

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