A Time of Magic

We all dread the cleaning off of the lawnmower and assorted other things that need doing before everything is packed away for the next season, don’t we?

One of the more easily overlooked things to tidy up is 5th wheel insurance. Sure, you’ll get around to cleaning everything out, but I’m sure most people just let the insurance on their rig just tick over from one year to the next. That’s just as much of a mistake as not getting quotes for your car insurance. More so in fact as you’re probably paying a good deal more on the RV insurance so there’s that much more to save.

Just about everyone has a camera phone these days but they’re not really up to recording your memories of a holiday as they basically don’t have enough memory nor have they the flexibility to do that.

For that you need to start trawling through the camcorder reviews where you’ll come across a whole new world of acronyms and technologies. However, it’s not nearly so complicated as it first appears.

To begin with you need to think about whether you want to use a card, DVD or tape based camcorder. The DVD ones get quite bad press sometimes basically because not all DVD players can cope with the small DVDs that these camcorders use and there’s the issue about how long they could be expected to last. The tape based ones have been around a long time and use the miniDV standard which will hold about an hour of video. They’re larger than the card based devices and you’ll need to use cables to copy the movies on to your computer.

The other consideration is whether to use standard or HD video. In practical terms there’s not much of a difference in cost these days and HD will almost always be your best choice. This will use up more cards but doesn’t require any space on the tape as compression is used with the miniDV standard.

Finally, there’s the issue of what to do with the used media. With miniDV you may as well keep the original tapes as they’re very cheap but the cards can become quite expensive. If the only copy you’re keeping it that on your computer, don’t forget to keep backup copies as otherwise you’re sure to lose your movies at some point in the future.

An RV purchase means some serious cash no matter what size of rig that you’re looking at.

That being the case, if you’re in the market for one it seems only sensible to try and reduce the cost by looking at used motorhomes, but is that a sensible thing to do? The snag is that RVs vary a LOT in how they’ve been used. You can find one that’s basically only been used a couple of weeks per year over a number of years but then what about the mileage that was ran up during those couple of weeks? Actually, the mileage is rarely the problem but where the rig was taken might be: low mileage on unpaved roads would usually be worse than high mileage on paved roads. Finally, there’s the usage of the equipment inside although you’ll generally not have too many issues on that front.

It’s definitely worthwhile having a look but make a long checklist of questions before you begin.