Northern Indiana Exploring

Our time in northern Indiana hasn’t all been consumed with bus projects – we did get out and play a little too.

Elkhart

While still at Elkhart Campground (our review), RVillage founder Curtis Coleman hosted an impromptu meet up at his coach – which was very well attended. We hardly had time to talk with even a quarter of the folks who stopped by.

Amazing to see RVillage working so well to bring people together! RVillage.com now has over 8000 members, and new features have been regularly rolling out. It’s been really awesome to see this project grow.

While In Elkhart, we created a quick 3-minute video tour of RVillage – and that video is now featured on RVillage’s landing page. So if you haven’t checked it out yet – go view the video to get a taste of what it’s all about.

Click here:

We also spent an afternoon with Curtis exploring the RV Hall of Fame, which was a pretty incredible collection of RV history.

Many unique and vintage RVs are on display for touring – and they have an incredible library upstairs that contains every RV-related magazine published.

After we left Elkhart Campground, we then visited Bradd and Hall for new RV seats and then ended up at Master Tech RV for our unexpected project marathon.

 Indiana Dunes State Park

After three all-nighters in a row, we took a day long nap and then were desiring being somewhere more in nature. We didn’t want to go too far from the area, as we had already committed to joining Nikki & Jason at the Fleetwood & FMCA GLAMARAMA Rally in Goshen, IN.

So on Tuesday we headed up to Indiana Dunes State Park (our review) on the shores of Lake Michigan, just a bit over an hour away.

We were able to snag a sweet spot next to a dune and enjoyed some much needed chill time on our own. As the park was completely booked up for the weekend, we were only able to grab 3 nights – but I kept an eye on ReserveAmerica, and was able to book a last minute cancellation to stay Friday night as well.

We enjoyed the many hiking trails within the park, and the quick walk to the beach for a lovely view of Chicago across the lake. We’d definitely return, especially during the week when it’s not crowded. We’d love to make use of the train station at the entrance to head into Chicago for the day too.

Campaign Success

Our Indiegogo Campaign for the re-write of The Mobile Internet Handbook came to an exciting close while we were at the Indiana Dunes State Park!

When we decided to try crowdfunding to cover the costs of editing and art work at least, we seriously thought that setting a $3000 funding goal was dreaming. And setting stretch goals all the way up to $10,000 to fund adding new chapters to the book was extremely ambitious. We thought maybe we’d get one or two of them funded.

We started the final day of the funding off already funded near $8000, and felt beyond satisfied with that. And the contributions kept coming in all day long, including some very generous ones.

In the final hours, we hosted an impromptu live video chat that lasted nearly 2 hours to share the excitement and take viewer questions. At the end of the campaign, we had raised a stunning $10,264 thanks to 272 supporters – meeting every single stretch goal we had set out. Including signing up 105 founding members to our new premium membership site.

Just incredible, and so very humbling.

We are so thankful to everyone who supported us in this campaign and we’re busy working away on the re-write, including getting in a bunch of test gear to review. We are determined to create a fantastic resource for RVers who need to keep online in their travels.

We have a lot of writing ahead of us, as we now have *seven* new chapters to research and write. To watch the progress, we have a new Facebook Page for the book, and we’re keeping our Mobile Internet Resource Center updated as well.

Back to Elkhart & Goshen

After our four glorious nights at the dunes, we headed back to Elkhart to attend the graduation party of Austin – Master Tech RV owner’s son. It was a fun time, and we enjoyed getting to know the family better.

On Monday morning, it was off to Goshen to meet up with the Wynn’s for our early arrival to the rally. We’re already having a fabulous time hanging out with these guys and there will be stories to tell later!

For anyone else who happens to be attending the rally, Nikki & Jason have scheduled their first RVillage meet up for Saturday afternoon at 5pm. We’ll of course be there too.  Details on RVillage!.

What’s Next? We have scheduled a bunch of packages to arrive to meet up with us in northern Michigan next week at a friend’s house – so we’re heading that way. We’ll spend the next few weeks finding a variety of spots in northern Michigan (including the UP) to test out various mobile internet boosting gear in places we know signal can be more faint. All for science, of course!