Archive for August, 2006

>Betty Marchon is not your ordinary grandmother.

Your ordinary grandmother wouldn’t pile her grandchildren into a motor home and spend three weeks driving them thousands of miles cross-country.

Which Marchon did more than once and lived to tell the tales, going so far as to write an aptly-titled book about them, “In Grandmother’s House We Go!”

After her husband, Don, died in 1994, Marchon never thought she’d be happy again. She had lost her travelmate and her best friend, and she thought she’d never get over her grief.

Slowly but surely, she grew content. After reading an article in RVing Women magazine about women who travel alone in their motor homes, Marchon decided to pick up where she and Don had left off, arranging to take their two oldest grandchildren RVing along the Oregon Trail.

Early in the summer of 1995, Marchon picked up cousins Danielle, then 11, and Aaron, 9 – she knew better than to take two siblings along – and they were on their way.

In the summer of 1999, Marchon took her four oldest grandchildren – Danielle, then 15; Aaron, 13; and Lauren and Justin, both 11 – on an expedition along the Lewis and Clark Trail.

This time it was sisters Danielle and Lauren and brothers Aaron and Justin, and Marchon warned them before departing that if any one of them got three strikes, she’d send him or her home right away. She didn’t have to follow through with the threat, though, and she doesn’t know that she would’ve had the heart to. “They’re all good kids,” she says. Full Story…

MALIA LANE has a valuable new eBook titled “>MALIA’S RV CHECK-LIST – Instant Download – Cost $11.95

>Duane Hanson laughs at the thought of being homeless. So does his wife, Anne, though the couple have never really attached that word to their situation.

But the description sort of fits.

“Our last home was in Cedar Falls,” Duane says.

They moved out three years ago. No foundation. No permanent address. No shingles overhead. No garage … Duane lets loose another belly laugh, the kind those in on a secret enjoy.

No property taxes. No homeowners insurance. No utility bills … Others gathered around the picnic table, including Edna and Del Orr, smile and nod approval.

The question for these folks and many others during the summer — or in many cases yearlong — is not whether a person can survive without a house. The question is, why choose a lifestyle anchored on a foundation, particularly when the weather warms and fireflies dot summer evenings?

“We don’t really miss our house. Not anymore,” Edna says. Full Story…

MALIA LANE has a valuable new eBook titled “>MALIA’S RV CHECK-LIST – Instant Download – Cost $11.95