 Today, we're going to talk about RVers that had to flee the wildfires in California, how I'm not scared when I can't buy myself in places like this. There are some new COVID closures that are affecting some of the camping out there. A big sale is coming for Jackery. We're going to talk about all of that today and more. Happy Sunday, everybody, and welcome to an all-new Sunday morning view cue where I answer your questions about my full-time RV life. First, let me say that I hope you're all staying happy and healthy out there. There's been a lot going on lately including some massive California wildfires. So really quick, I'm going to pop over to my friend's campground and she's going to tell us how she and one of her co-workers had to flee from the wildfires more than once in their RVs. This is my friend Donna and recently she was fleeing the California wildfires in her RV and she's going to tell us about it. What happened? Well, I was work camping at the R Ranch in Napa, California and one morning we woke up and within an hour of being at work I was told we might have to evacuate. There's a fire. 30 minutes later they came through and said go pack up your rig. We're going. So we just threw literally threw everything in the RV, loaded the animals and then we continued to work for another three hours evacuating our horses. We had 50 horses on property and from there we went to an RV park. We helped take care of the horses for 14 days actually. When we got laid off because of the fire we decided to just take our time at first to come back to Arizona. We had three more months to go of work yeah and then we got caught up in another fire and we fled there and actually I have a travel partner that I was traveling with and she went in one direction and I went in the other and the smoke was so bad everywhere we went we traveled four and a half hours just to get to a spot where we can park a Walmart. Wow. So Donna's solo on a class C with a toad and she's got Stewie which is the cutest dog and two parents. So it was just you and your animals that drove the four and a half hours and were able to stop at a Walmart. Stopped at a Walmart and I wanted to spend and get a good night's rest. It was 114 degrees when we got there at five o'clock in the afternoon and I just had no means of cooling everybody off. Right. I tried running my generator but because I think the RV was so hot I could feel the heat coming up from the floor from running the generator and it just the AC wasn't touching it. Right. Only thing I can figure I had the jackery. Yeah. I was able to plug in two fans one found the bird one on the dog and we were able to get like three hours of sleep which I really didn't get much sleep but I was able to get him from stopping you know his panting so bad. Right. We slept for about three hours and again I never travel at night but at like three o'clock in the morning I got in the rig and started driving again. We could not get out of the smoke. I drove all the way to Arizona nine hours just to get to Lake Havasu and I used the jackery while I was driving so that the birds could have fans on them. So how do you charge how do you charge the jackery? I plug it into my 12 volt and then I have solar panels when I'm not driving. Yeah. Then I can plug them in. So how long does it take to charge and how long were you able to run the fans? The fans had no problem with the three hours and then of course while I was driving I had it plugged into right the dash while I was driving so I could still run. So you had it plugged into your dash while you were driving and had my fans for the animals in the back. Yes. Oh it's genius. I was in a windstorm recently in the desert a couple and I thought about you because in my last video I talked about how bad the dust is out here and literally you could breathe in dirt. It was in my mouth and I couldn't keep the windows open and it was like 95 that day and I did the same thing. I plugged three fans into my jackery and kept those going. You know I'm sometimes afraid of how much I'm plugging into it and how much I can and I try to be careful with it, try to save the battery but at those moments at that moment it didn't matter. I didn't know if I could plug two different fans into it and my cell phones and it was just like here we go. Yeah. We're trying it and it did beautifully. It really it really made a huge difference. If I didn't have that I don't know what I would have been able to do. Yeah. Literally at one point over the radios at the campground the employers were yelling we can see the fire coming up over the ridge behind us. We can see the flames you know and that just amps everything up and when I say I threw everything in my RV there's no lie. Coming off the mountain and Napa is just S-turn after you know S-turn all the way down. Wow. You could not walk through my RV because I did not secure anything. I've been there. Donna has a great Instagram page by the way it's called at Donna's Gang RV Adventures. Yes. Yeah if you guys check her out there. Thanks so much for telling us about it. I appreciate it. You guys might have seen a few months ago that I did a review of several power boxes including that jackery 500. Right now I happen to be testing out the Jackery 1000 to do a review on that. I can tell you so far I love it. It charges all kinds of things. Love the company. Love the brand. If you guys have been wanting one now's the time because tomorrow and the next day are Jackery's eighth anniversary. So if you go over to Amazon or to their website you can get 15% off any of their products the 500 the 1000 whatever the solar panels they're all great. I'll put the link for you below. Now I'm going to get to the next biggest question that I got asked a bunch of times in my last video which was about desert camping. A lot of you asked how I'm not scared out here while I'm camping by myself and I'll tell you since I've been on the road I've been scared a few times. I did a video when I very first started that said am I scared in the thumbnail if you go back and look at it and I tell you honestly about some dumb situations I was in where I was scared but every time it was because I did something myself that got me into a situation where I had to be scared but I've never been in fear of another person out while I've been camping which I think is what a lot of people are alluding to. When I go outside here at night there's so many stars in your eyes acclimate you open up your blinds you open up your windows you become part of the environment instead of being so scared that it's like a death by a thousand cuts. I'll tell you when I have been more scared it's when I lived in a sticks and bricks and I had to park my car in a dark parking garage and walk through that garage to get to my apartment every night or when I had to be in traffic all day every day with a bunch of people with road rage. Those are the things statistically that were more likely to hurt me than being out here by myself. I've said before that my biggest fear is having a medical issue because the response time obviously would be a lot slower to come to me here. Look I could sit in here all day and imagine that there's a guy outside with a hook. If he did walk by he would set off my lights and he would set off my motion sensor alarms and I would hear him coming and then I'm prepared inside this rig but I find that that doesn't really happen it's just really calm and it's really peaceful. I'll tell you my first year I wasn't that comfortable but then you just learned that you're just part of nature out here. You know the biggest thing I have going on outside is there are a couple little foxes that run around at night you know there's some beetles. That's about it. I like it out here. I find that I'm really not scared at all. Now I'm going to answer a couple of questions about mail. In my second to last book Be a Nomad Changed Your Life I did a lot of research on banking and also how nomads can get their mail. Somebody said they lost their ATM card and they were having trouble getting it replaced because credit card companies and banks generally only want to send an actual card to your physical residence address. Sometimes they'll make a one-off exception to mail it to a mailing address but they'll only do it one time a year let's say. I've had this problem before there are a couple of ways to get around this. First of all you could have one of the mailing services like you can get through Good Sam or Escapies. I have those links in my books and in prior videos on mailing services. You can have that be your primary residence address have the card sent there and they forward it to you or maybe your primary residence address is in a place where a friend or family member can forward you the card. I've had that done but the other thing that I've done is I choose a bank for my primary banking that has a lot of branches. Last time I looked Wells Fargo had more branches country-wide than anybody else so if you have a bank that might have a branch in your area another way to go is to ask that vendor to send the card to a local branch for you to pick up usually they'll do this with debit cards so if you've misplaced your debit card you can say look I live in Washington but I'm traveling through Nevada there is a Wells Fargo there could you send the replacement card there where they can check your ID. The next question I've been getting a lot is how camping is changing right now because of COVID closures. Now we've all been in and out of this right? I know in the spring when COVID first hit everybody was kind of scrambling because there were a lot of state closures happening and people were afraid they were going to be travel bans and like everybody my plans were disrupted I've said before I was planning to go to Moab that didn't work out and then I was going to do the New Mexico State Park Pass for the year and that didn't work out because they were closed I had to find a mooch docking spot and people looked for RV parks and those were all full so that has gotten a little bit better but now that we're going back into the fall things are changing again so I researched again today and this is what I'm finding there are three states on the west coast where a lot of us are now that have some variation of travel restrictions or travel guidance so Washington, Oregon and California are asking people to travel into that state from out of state to quarantine for two weeks which is not a big deal for us because that's like what we do right so no big deal you do your shopping you go out to camp and we're there for two weeks anyway but I am starting to see some other closures so New Mexico for example has closed down all state recreation like state parks for example and then BLM for example in that state has a lot of ranger stations that are shut down or BLM campgrounds that actually have spots for camping not like this I'm in a BLM spot right now in the desert the actual campgrounds themselves are only at 50 capacity allowed in some places like Taos for example I anticipate that you know it's going to keep changing through the fall because the cases are rising so just make sure that you have a plan B and a plan C if you need to go back and look at the video never get stranded that I did about probably four months ago where I show you every app I use and like walk you through on my phone every step I take to make sure that I am never going to be stranded on the road don't take for granted that anything is open you can always call a local BLM office or national forest office or any kind of a campground state or private and find out while you're on the way and a lot of them have really great updates on their websites if any of you have any up-to-date information about any closures please do put them in the comments below and if you have any questions for me for the next view queue put them there as well I hope to see you all out on the road sooner doing something you love until then everybody have happy travels and be free