MAIL FORWARDING: HOW DO FULLTIMERS GET THEIR MAIL?

After a windy (but short) drive on Wednesday, we settled into our favorite site at the Placerville Elks Lodge - which is actually located in Shingle Springs, California, about 5 miles from my parents' house. Only one other rig was here, so we snagged the site next to Luna's favorite rock, in the little garden between Scoopy and Jules.

Then we headed to my parents' house to visit with them and await the arrival of my sister Nancy and Auntie Carol, the Carol of Paws and Hooves Ranch, in Sunizona, Arizona. She is here visiting her brother (my dad). It was a fun, mini-family reunion.

Then it was time to tackle the mail.

One of the questions most frequently asked about full-timing is: "How do you get your mail?" Most full-timers use a mail forwarding service; of these, the two most well-known are the Escapees Mail Service in Livingston, TX (part of the Escapees RV Club) and Alternative Resources in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

In general, your choice of mail service depends on your choice of "domicile state" - the state that you choose to call home as a fulltimer. We chose South Dakota as our domicile state. We register our vehicles there, have SD drivers licenses, and use Alternative Resources as our mail forwarding service.

We try to have Alternative Resources forward our mail to us a couple of times a month, but that doesn't always fit our travel plans. Because we didn't know our specific itinerary between leaving Arizona and arriving in Sacramento, we didn't receive our mail for at least a month. Approaching Sacramento, we instructed Alternative Resources to forward our mail to my parents' address. We asked the Escapees Mail Service, the forwarding service for the Boomers (we handle the Boomer mail as volunteer Membership Coordinators), to send the month's accumulation of Boomer mail along, too.

We also placed several online orders for various goodies, and directed the packages to my parents' house: new lacings for my LaFuma lounge chair, a birthday present for Odel from his daughter, an order of Teavana tea, and some glow-in-the dark tape for my hoop. We had a heap of packages when we arrived to visit my parents.

Odel immediately opened his gift (a beautiful new golf club) and I checked on the orders - the fun stuff. That left our personal mail and the Boomer mail, two fat packages that represent NO fun!

When we lived in our house, getting home mail delivery was usually somewhat fun, a combination of (too much) junk mail, (too many) glossy catalogs, monthly magazines, bills, and maybe a card or postcard or some other bit of personal snail mail. Bills came in small numbers on any given day.

On Wednesday, our personal mail package included three bank statements to be balanced, two credit card bills to be checked, half a dozen medical billing statements from Medicare and Blue Cross (none of which we can figure out), the sickening statements for our investment accounts, half a dozen envelopes marked "Important Tax Information Enclosed" and a few RV club magazines.

With all the junk mail and catalogs tossed by Alternative Resources (a good thing!), the distilled essence of a month's worth of snail mail is an unhappy prospect, and I expect to spend the rest of today balancing accounts and tackling our 2008 taxes. A month's worth of Boomer mail (new memberships, renewals, checks to be deposited... even some cash!) took most of Thursday to process.

It's far better to get the mail forwarded weekly, or twice a month, which we will do for the next month while we stay in Sacramento. But now... into the mailbag I go.