3 Great “Secret” Deals Uncovered

Now that I’m a happy, penny-pinching early retiree, I’ve got nothing better to do all day than search for great deals that will cost as few pennies as possible!  (when I’m not working away to prepare the house to sell and start full-time RVing, of course!).

In the past few months, I’ve discovered quite a few good deals.  Most have been very obvious and easy to obtain, but a few have not been.  In fact, they’ve literally seemed buried deep within their popular corporate websites, needing some sort of secret handshake or top-secret NSA backdoor security clearance to unlock!

Well, I’m here to reveal 3 of these favorite “secret” deals for you now.  If you don’t see a new blog post from me within a couple of weeks….Putin may have put me on a plane to Siberia!

Finding My “Way” in the Dark

Ever since getting a bit of “dumb luck” in shooting this photo a few winters ago at Joshua Tree National Park, I’ve been fascinated by night photography, particularly night landscapes.

Last year, I discovered the Into The Night group on Flickr (as well as its excellent companion blog by Royce Bair) which provided a never-ending source of inspiration and knowledge.  But it seemed every time I tried to plan a nighttime photo shoot, I was stymied by one thing or another—wrong camera, wrong lens, wrong exposure settings, wrong time of year, wrong moon phase, or wrong weather.  With each failed attempt, though, I learned a tiny bit more than I had known before, so “progress” none the less.

This year, I set a goal for myself to finally capture photos of the Milky Way.  It’s taken months of planning and waiting for just the right conditions, but finally (FINALLY!) two nights ago, I did it!

My New Folding Bike

My inflatable kayak wasn’t the only thing to get upgraded lately—I’ve been on quite an “upgrade shopping spree” this past month!  Every item in the Winnie (yes, everything!) has been evaluated—have I used it enough to warrant keeping it? Is it the lightest, smallest, and/or best-quality item I can get?

Then, as I’ve been going through my house and garage, similar questions are being asked on a daily basis about those things—do I love it enough to keep it? If it’s small enough to bring in the Winnie, is it durable enough to withstand the highway rattles and rolls inside a “rolling home”?  If not, should I upgrade to something better?

So, after the kayak, the next area of focus was the bike.  My garage had a big, heavy hitch-mounted bike rack and 2 bikes—a small 20” folding Dahon, and a full-sized, heavy electric bike (which also had a big bike cargo trailer).

A few of my favorite things!

Wow, it’s May already.  For most working “weekend warriors” in the northern states, May signals the start of a new camping season!   Time to pull the RV out of storage, or maybe even head on over to the nearby RV dealer to trade-in or buy a first RV for the new camping season!

Around this time of year, I start getting more frequent requests from readers who are looking to get started into RVing and wanting suggestions on how to outfit their new rigs.

But, lets face it, they’re not the only ones!  Around this time of year, us old-timers are usually looking for something fun and new to add to our camping enjoyment too!

With that in mind, I decided to organize a collection of 300 of my most-favorite things for RV travel.  Some of these “finds” are things I’ve blogged about in the past and/or have featured on my RV Gadget Favs or Mobile Tech Favs pages.   But lots more items have never been featured before—even though I love and use them often!

So, today, that changes! 

I’d like to introduce you to the WinnieViews Gear We Love website! 

Here, I’ve gathered 300 of our favorite RVing, Travel, Reading, Tech, Entertainment, Photo, Hiking, Biking, Paddling, 4-wheel drive, and Camping items into (hopefully) a single, easy-to-navigate website.

Not to be left out, Millie has also contributed a collection of her favorite doggie stuff as well!

We’re using Amazon storefront technology to showcase these items, so you’ll not only see our own comments about each item, but Amazon’s customer reviews and pricing as well.

The site also features an Amazon Shopping Cart to facilitate any purchases you might want to make from them (WinnieViews is not at all involved— it’s all “normal Amazon” once you begin the check-out process and you’ll see Amazon’s familiar full website and shopping cart to complete your transaction).

The only thing I’ve not found very intuitive with this new site is how to add items to your Amazon Wishlist (if you want to save something for the future).  The best work-around I can suggest is when you’re on one of Gear We Love item pages (like the screenshot above), click the “customer reviews” link.  That will take you to the full Amazon site, and you can add it to your Wishlist from there.

In the coming days, I’ll be reorganizing my previous RV Gadget Favs page to just show the remaining favorites we could not include on this new website (i.e. the non-Amazon things like my recent discovery of Elgato Software’s EyeTV 3, and others).

You can get to the Gear We Love website via the link below, or from it’s tab along the header of our blog page.

Hope you find these “favorite things” helpful, and I really hope you might find a little gem in there that delights you as much as it’s delighted me (and Millie)!!!   If you have questions or want further feedback about anything, just contact me via comments below or email me at winnieviews@gmail.com.

Happy camping!

 

Check out 300 of our most-favorite things!