Hello, everybody. Welcome to RV podcast episode 511. I'm Mike Wendland, and this is my lifelong traveling companion and my bride, Jennifer. And we're tired. It's been a busy 5 weeks. It has been. I think today has been a little bit of a challenging day. Yes. We'll talk about it in a, you know, in a bit, but we are back in the USA. Mhmm. We, have been, spending the last 5 weeks in Canada with the, fantasy RV tour of the Maritimes,
and what an awesome time we had. I hope you've been looking at YouTube, at our videos. We've got one up on the Fundy Bay in New Brunswick, and then one up, just this past weekend on Nova Scotia. We've got one coming on Prince Edward Island. But just a one sentence summation of of our, of our Maritimes tour. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to go. Yeah. We haven't. We had some questions we'll answer at the end of this podcast on it. But we
are back in Maine. We have just, the tour just ended, and, we are in a little town called Canaan, Maine. It's a little south of Bangor, and, we are overnighting here as we begin 1,015 miles from here back to our home in Michigan. But we had a had a wonderful time. And I, just can't say how nice it is traveling with a group of of kindred spirits. Wasn't that fun? Yeah. We're going to miss them right now. We have one couple that we're still traveling with. They're right next door.
The Wilsons are still with us. Yep. And last night, we had another couple that by chance Yep. We all had dinner together. And everyone enjoyed this. Yep. And, it's really been fun. It's gonna be hard to be just, the 2 of us and Beau. Now speaking of Beau, we are going to have our conversation of the week about a topic that has gendered a lot engendered a lot of of great controversy, and that is the CDC's very confusing rules on, bringing your pet back from Canada. They took effect August 1st.
We're gonna talk about what happened to us when we brought Bo back from Canada. I'll just say, we're back. Bo is with us. So, obviously, it worked. But I will say we were very surprised. And we'll talk about that in the, in the conversation of the week in just a moment. But first of all, we want to, tell you, have you checked out our books,
our travel guides? We have updated so many of them now, and this is the time of year if you're thinking of Arizona in the winter, if you're thinking of Florida in the winter, if you're thinking of a fall RV trip out west or in Michigan, you need our travel guides. You can find them at rvlifestyle.com/books. We've got all sorts of bundles built so you can save money if you like, for example, we have, 3, travel guides for Florida. If you wanna get all of them, you can save some money there.
In, Michigan, we've got upper peninsula and lower peninsula. Just go check them out. And before you go, these are travel guides, that get right to what you need to know as an RVer, and we urge you to check them out. All have been updated recently, and, we think you'll find, lots of helpful information. Alright. Speaking of helpful information, one of the best places to find it is on our social media. We've got, Facebook group. How many members we have? 400 and? 430. 430?
432. It's growing like crazy. And our very exciting RV lifestyle community, which is off Facebook, and that's at community.rvlifestyle.com. Wendy Boyer is the one who keeps track of all the stuff that's going on in our RV lifestyle social media channels, and she does for us every week a program, a little segment called the social media buzz about RVing.
And here's Wendy. Hi, everybody. Over in our RV lifestyle communities, mods and DIY Tweak Space, we recently asked everyone if there was a personal design or storage solution that they had made in their RVs that they would like to share. And this was a great thread. A couple, I think, things that were shared included one from Brian. Now Brian built a sewer hose storage under his 5th wheel. He shared a
picture of what he did. It looked like 2 square hollow, maybe aluminum, tubes that he put underneath his rig, and now his hoses can go there. It was neat. It looked very efficient. Now Paul, he also shared something he did. He added a shelf in his bathroom cabinet for his 2017 Leisure Travel Van Unity. That looked like a great way to add a little more space in that bathroom area. And Bert, he and
his wife, well, they had this issue. They had command hooks in their bathroom to hang their bath towels to dry, and the command hooks were pulling the wallpaper off the wall. So what to do? They got a shower rod, put it right next to their shower door, made it the same color. It was black, and then they got those s hooks, and they put their towel on the s hooks that they hung from their shower rod. It looked professional like it was supposed to be there. It was super sharp and great
storage saving idea from them. So if you're looking for a few ideas like this, make sure you check out that thread. Also in our community, another great discussion was in our general discussion space, and it was from Greg. Greg said that he had recently heard not to sit on a closed slide, and he was concerned because he and his wife on travel days, they would sit at the kitchen table and eat their lunch, and they did this while the slide was in. So he asked the group what to do.
Is is this dangerous to do for his rig? And there tended to be 2 streams of thought on this. The first was from Suzanne. Now Suzanne, she said when she asked Alliance about partly opening her slide so that she could get to the refrigerator, she was told that she did this to be sure not to step on the slide because the slide is elevated a little bit, and it could be damaged. Now Suzanne, she had a rack and pinion slide, and it sounds like that is the same type of slide that Greg has.
So that was one train of thought. The other was from people like Randy. Now Randy, his rig is a super c, and he said the seat belts on the seats are in the living room are on a slide. Now, obviously, if there's seat belts on these seats, the dealer's thinking you're gonna sit on them while in motion. And so they have been sitting on these seats no damage at all, but his slide was different. It's on a hydraulic slide extender.
So the bottom line seemed to be to find out from your manufacturer what your slide is built, how it's built, and then determine from there whether or not it's safe to use. So great discussion. And then over in our RV lifestyle Facebook group, we had a post that got hundreds of responses, and it was from John. John wrote, hi, friends. Any advice for staying
at a Walmart for the night? Now John sounds like he's a new RVer, never stayed before overnight in a Walmart, and so he asked the group for some suggestions. And I love this because that's the purpose of these groups, not only to form community and share our enthusiasm, but to help one another. And there are always newbies coming in, and there are always experienced campers who are friendly and willing to share some help. And that's what happened in this post.
Many, like Leah said, John, make sure you check with the manager because some city ordinances do not allow parking, overnight in Walmart lots. And Leah, she also said, you know, this is what I do. My husband and I, we go in the store. We buy a few items. We go to the customer service desk. We ask if it's okay to overnight, and then we go to the back of the parking lot. We park under a light. They go to the back to keep those
spots in the front available for customers. And then, of course, they don't set up camp. They don't bring out their grill, for instance, or their lawn chairs. They just are good guests, kinda staying in their rig, getting their sleep, and going on their way. And many agreed with that. Helen, she added in the morning, you know, just just get up and go. Don't stay too long. You know, don't make this your 24 hour camping spot.
And Bill, he was the man who suggested John get an app like RV parky so he could see even while he's on the road. You're getting tired. You know you gotta pull over soon, and you can see whether or not the Walmart coming up even allows this sort of thing. Great tip. And there were, again, lots of great tips, and we have written extensively about this subject on our blog and our YouTube
channel. So if you're looking for more tips about camping or overnighting, I should say, in a Walmart, Make sure you check those things out as well. And I'm Wendy Boyer, and I'll see you next time in the RV lifestyle community or Facebook group. Thank you, Wendy. I think everybody looks forward to, what you have to say and what you've learned and what you share with everybody. So thank you from all of us. Yep. And, all the people who, benefit from you and
your team of moderators. Hats off to all those moderators who, particularly in Facebook, keep things going. On our community, it's nothing but niceness. And, we invite you if you haven't already joined. If you're tired of the nastiness of Facebook that comes, you know, with so many people on Facebook, come on over and try. Community.rvlifestyle.com. You'll be very pleasantly surprised. Many different RV interest groups are right there, and we'd love to have you be a part of it.
Community.rvlifestyle.com. Alright. We're gonna have our RV conversation of the week. And, this is one that, has kept us thinking all summer long. Back when the CDC, the Centers For Disease Control, seemingly out of nowhere, announced some sweeping changes for what happens if you take your dog, out of the country. In particularly, particular of interest to our viewers is what happens if you take your dog out of the country to Mexico for a vacation or, more commonly, Canada as we just did.
On August 1st, new rules came into being. But before that, there was so much confusion. Wasn't there? There really was. You had to have your dog chipped. Micro chipped? Do you I don't think anybody really minded doing that to their pet. Well, it costs money. It it does cost money. And the second thing was your dog had to have a rabies shot after being chipped. After. So so in our case, for example, we had Bo Bo gets his annual rabies vaccination on the January. In January, and he did.
But with these new laws, we had to get it microchipped, and then that rabies vaccination had to be listed after the microchip was in. And that rabies vaccine couldn't be a 1 year. It had to be a 3 year. So we complied. We did that with Beau, and it cost us a bunch of money, for the vaccination, the veterinary fees. But then under the original rules that they put the for us, we had our vet had to send in a form to the USDA, Department of Agriculture.
They had to look at all that information and then file it back and say that, yep, they approved all that. And then we had to have that to submit to bring Bo back from the border along with sending a picture of Bo. And we couldn't do it except 1 or 2 days before we came back, and we had to do it at the border. And you had to choose. Yeah. You had to tell ahead of time what because we weren't sure which which border crossing we were gonna
do. Well, just, before those rules took effect on August 1st, they backed off because I heard so many complaints from veterinarians and from, dog dog clubs and people who travel with their pets into Canada. And they modified those so that you simply had to fill out a form online and then, have proof that the dog came from a low, like Canada, which is a a a low risk rabies country, and that that they had a vaccination and a microchip.
So that changed a lot. And we found out all of this when we were We found out the changes The day before we were we were in Maine, and we were ready to cross over to Canada the next day. That evening at the welcome dinner is when we found out you didn't need all this. But I think That they changed their policy. They backed it off a little.
They're still pretty strict, though. I think what was hard was all the stress that it caused by the vets didn't know anything about it, trying to get this all organized so that Beau would be street legal. And for me, I just said, I don't wanna go. You know? And I was that well, you know, got this trip or plan. I I don't wanna vaccinate my dog. I don't want more rabies vaccine in him. He was just vaccinated, a 3 year vaccine. Had to do that? I don't wanna do this
to my dog. I don't know what kind of effect this is going to have on him. And when you contacted the CDC, they just were very that's the procedure and followed. It's all online. It was very confusing. Alright. So they backed off. They changed that. And it was too late for us because we complied to what they said because we were leaving July 22nd and coming back after August 1st. In fact, this fantasy trip that we went on, one person didn't go. Canceled. Because they didn't wanna
subject their dog. I presume they had one dog. To more vaccinations Yeah. They already had. Right. So, what is it like? Well, it's now after August 1st, and we've come back with Beau. Now I have been carefully monitoring it. Our Wendy has been monitoring it, and our social media team, Jen's been reading all the comments, and several people have reported that that they were able to do so. Sometimes they asked for the papers. Sometimes they didn't. Where is your dog's papers?
Now we've never been asked. We've always keep Bose records up to date. We've never been asked in dozens and dozens of crossings into Canada over the past 12 years, but we were ready for this one. So we had all this stuff. The night before, I went online. And you do have to do this. Remember, this is still effective. You have to go to the CDC site. Just search CDC dog import form. CDC dog import form. It'll take you there.
And you have to go online, and you have to, identify your dog, certify that he's healthy, and that you're bringing them him back. And you have to have, a description of him, his breed, and his color. It's it's actually very simple form to do. You send that in electronically, and then, within just a couple of minutes, the, the CDC sends you back a form saying, okay. Here's a receipt that you sent that form in. You should print that out. In our case, I didn't have a printer accessible.
But they accept, just show the email that confirmed the receipt. So I had that. It's on my phone. All ready to go. And, I had the proof of his vaccination for rabies, which I'm supposed to have. You're still supposed to have that. And we had his microchip number, which I was supposed to have. So we came across the border. We crossed at the same place we entered
Calais, Maine. It's a small little town. Northern Maine is on the gateway to, New Brunswick and, and some of the maritime provinces that we visited, and we came right back that way. We were in an RV line, and, boy, they were, like, 8, 10 RVs ahead of us. Right? Quite a few. Yeah. I mean, they were a lot. And, everybody, of course, was coming back from Canadian vacations. I did. And, we had Beau prominently in the back seat.
We came up to the, up the up to the, count the, you know, the booth there that the customs border patrol guy's in. Hello? Y'all coming from? Then we we're on a tour. We've been up to Prince Edward Island and then back on. Coming in with you that you didn't leave the US food food plant stage in the border? No. No? Nothing. Any other back on? Nope. Have a camper or firewood? None. Oh, no. Anyone open the camper for me? Sure. We handed him our passport IDs.
He asked us, you know, what we were bringing back, standard questions, and, and then, he asked if he could go in the RV. I'm like, well, well, sure. And we noticed he'd been going in every RV in the line. So I got up, and I opened the the door, brought the stairs down, had to put out the slide a little bit so he could go look throughout, make sure, I guess, there wasn't anybody in the RV. And then he looked in the refrigerator for fruits and vegetables, which we had gotten
rid of. You're not supposed to bring those in from Canada. We put the slide back in, put the lock back in the refrigerator, and he said, thanks. Here's your ID. And we drove off, and we said, but wait. He didn't even ask about Beau. So we were really surprised. Not a word. And as we have looked at other people's experience, it was typical. These guys, they're already overworked. These border patrol customs guys. This is our first line of defense in our country.
And up here in Canada, they have been you know, they're they don't have enough people. They're working really hard. Nobody said this to us, but I suspect this is not a real popular rule that the CDC met with the customs and border patrol folks. He didn't even ask. Just as every other time we've gone into Canada and brought Babak, they don't ever ask. We always have his records if they do, but and you should too.
But we want you to know that the biggest surprise after all the work we did, all the expenses we spent, all the hours we spent trying to figure out these changing CDC laws, he didn't even ask about Beau, whether he'd been microchipped, whether he had a rabies vaccination, whether he was healthy. So we're back. He was some stray that we picked up along the road. Yeah. He was. So, I don't know how it'll be for you, but, the stress level, you know, because you're always
worried. Because if they the CDC said, if you don't have all of this done, you can't bring your dog back. Well, I I mean, does the border patrol have a bunch of cages now ready to keep these poor dogs? You know? So, none of that happened with us. And the reports that we have seen, from many different other RVers now who have come back after August 1st with pets is that it was a similar thing. Some of them just handed them with their passports, those
papers. And one of the one of the persons, who did that said the passport guy looked at it says, oh, you really went and got all these forms, Didn't even look at them and handed them back to them and sent them through. So they do go in your RV, and they're looking basically for fruits and vegetables or anybody hiding in there, which is more than understandable. The guy could not have been nicer. The the hardest part about the whole crossing
is waiting about a half hour. It took us waiting in this line behind all these other folks who were 45 minutes. 45 minutes. Yeah. From start to finish. So we're back. Beau is back, and, there was just no hassle at all. And that was the surprise. After all the talk, all the controversy, all the concerns, one even asked about it. Well, I am just so grateful that I went because I didn't wanna subject Beau to getting vaccinated. We always canceled ourselves because he's
lost. Was already vaccinated for rabies. I thought that can't be good for him. But, I love the trip. I would recommend the Maritimes to anybody. Yep. And don't worry about coming back to Canada, from Canada. It was it was it was great. Now, again, you should have all these papers, so do it alright. Don't you know, because they may change it. You know? Don't leave home without all the papers for your pet. Yep. And, and when you leave, thank the border
patrol and customs guys. They have a really tough job, and we really appreciate their service out there for us, and be nice to them. They don't like to hold people up either as they're as they're trying to get, done back home from their vacations, and, we couldn't have had a better experience. So we're back as is both. Now if you have questions or, you go to that CDC line, just just again search the
CD just search online. Go to Google and search dog import rules from CDC and you'll find all you wanna know and probably more. If you have a different experience, if you had a different one, please send us an email or put that in the comments, below. Thank you guys for, watching all this. And I hope that this helps. And if you've been anxious about bringing your pet, from our experience, you'll be surprised too how easy it went. Alright. RV questions of the week, and we got a couple.
This one is from Robert, and he wants to know how have the campgrounds been in camp They they were all clean and tidy, and, we enjoyed all of the campgrounds that we were at. A lot of them didn't have the 50 amp. They only had 30, but we got along just fine with 30. That meant we ran 1 air conditioner at a time, not both, or we didn't run any air conditioners when I was running the washing machine. We had to be energy aware, which is probably good for anybody to be energy aware.
So if you have the 50 amp unit, make sure you take that dog bone that adapts the 50 amp to 30 amp. Several of the campgrounds we stayed in 10 different campgrounds now Mhmm. In the Maritimes. Several of them did have 50 amps, and that was great. But, most were 30 amp, and they were fine. Several were crowded, close together, yet and others were very spacious. You had lots of room. But they were really good campgrounds, and we had great experiences in all of them, really. No issues at all.
One of them, there was, someone who was rather authoritarian in the rules that she prescribed, but the campground was so drop dead gorgeous that, we all forgot about that. And, actually, she was so kind and nice to us. She was really nice to us. To park. I mean, because you needed help because we had a new truck and backing in, and we got a big rig. And, she made it, and there was just this little space we could get into. She was
excellent. Yep. Now some of the other people objected, but, and the and the reviews on the campground were kinda spotty, but we didn't think they were they were warranted because it was such a great clean campground, and it was just great on the Bay of Fundy. The other question is, how has your Internet been? And it's been awesome. Yeah. No problems whatsoever. As you know, we have Starlink. We used it, every day. We kept in touch. We did our videos. They were all up, and it was awesome.
So we had great great coverage with Starlink, and, we look forward to continuing that as we now head back to Michigan. And then one final question is, will you guys be doing another fantasy RV tour? And the answer to that is maybe. I can't believe we both said that at the same time. Yeah. I wasn't sure what you're gonna say. Yeah. Maybe. We don't know yet.
We will probably look at some and talk with them, but, I guess if you ask us, do we recommend them, We can say we recommend them wholeheartedly. Will we be doing another one like we did this, opening it up to our supporters? I think it's sold out in a day, day and a half, something like that. I don't know. They they're booking out well into 2026, and, and that's a long time out. But, they have some great tours.
And we'll we're gonna think about it. We're gonna give ourselves some time, some space away from this after we finish the edits, and we've got some other things we'll move on to. And then we'll we'll make a decision, but we'll let you know. So you got a question? We'd love to hear from you. Mikeandjen@rvlifestyle.com. And that is the podcast for this week. Wish us luck getting home, and, we'll, look forward to seeing you guys on Ask Us Anything, next Sunday night. See you then. Happy trails.