Early in my journalistic career, before RVs were as omnipresent as they are now, I met a couple whose home on wheels was a stunner.

  It was sleek and beautiful and had all the comforts of home. Curious about it, I struck up a conversation with them and was surprised to learn that it was their full-time home. They’d sold their traditional home to buy it and had been on the road ever since.

  Truth be told, I was a bit jealous. There’s something about the freedom of being able to go wherever you want without actually leaving home that appeals in varying degrees to many of us. 

  Fast forward a few decades – to a very different sort of motor home.

  Regular readers may recall a column about my granddaughter and her husband converting an old Air Force bus into a motor home. It’s become a thing to do that. Most of the buses being converted are former school buses; thus their nickname:  schoolies.

  Kelsie and Christian have been on the road in their schoolie for nearly a year and a half now. They’ve been to 25 states, the farthest east being Ohio. They’ve seen a lot of sights, had some great times, met a lot of interesting people.

  The adventure hasn’t been without challenges, though. The schoolie broke down once and took a week to fix. To pay expenses – the schoolie gets about 8 mpg – they’ve had to work a variety of jobs. Kelsie has a teaching degree and has taught online. They’ve worked a beet harvest and as campground hosts. Christian has done electrical and plumbing work, cut trees, operated heavy equipment ….

 As you might expect, it isn’t always easy to find a place to park a vehicle as big as a school bus.

  “When we’ve been somewhere for just one or two nights we’ve had to stay in some sketchy places, like truck stops or Walmart parking lots,” Kelsie said. “All Walmarts used to be RV friendly, but now some are saying no overnight parking.”

  In Arizona,  a long-term BLM parking fee that used to cost $180 for six months now costs $800.

   “Another negative,” Christian added, “is that you’re rarely in familiar routine. When you go shopping, you don’t know the store. You don’t know whether it will be open, whether you can park there and whether they’ll have what you need.”

  Their favorite city so far is Austin, Tex. Their least favorite: Memphis.

  “There was trash everywhere, and it felt dangerous,” Kelsie  said. 

  That surprised me. My wife and I had a good impression of Memphis being clean, safe and friendly when we were there. But that was a long time ago.

  They say the trip has changed them.

  Kelsie says their time in the schoolie has taught them “a lot of life lessons. I feel like I understand different types of people better. I don’t necessarily agree with them on everything, but now when I don’t agree I have a better understanding of why they’re the way they are and why they believe what they do.”

  “You realize your problems are just you,” Christian said. “It’s not where you are.”

  They may live in a conventional home again one day, but for now they’re happy with life in the schoolie and plan to keep it for trips even if they do buy a house. 

  “The best thing about it is the freedom,” Kelsie said. “You take your house with you wherever you want to go. If you’re somewhere you don’t like or working somewhere you don’t like, you just get up and go.”

  As good as that may sound, I’m a bit too settled for it now.

  But I’m still jealous.

                                                ***

  Two readers emailed about my recent column on my wife’s being hacked. They thought it embarrassed her for me to write about her for falling for a phone scam. One went so far as to say that I deserved a good beating for writing it.

  For the record, she read the column before it was published and was okay with it. Her reasoning was that it was worth a bit of embarrassment if it helped others avoid what happened to her – a scam evolving into a seemingly endless nightmare. 

  Several readers wrote to say that pretty much the same thing happened to them. All, like my wife, are smart, savvy  people who didn’t think that was possible. 

  Several readers suggested not answering the phone if the number of the caller isn’t recognized (now the practice at our house). One said she only provides personal information if she’s the one making the call.

  Greg Feeler wrote to recommend www.identifytheft.gov and a government publication, “Taking Charge: What to do if Your Identity is Stolen.” Find the PDF version at: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/taking-charge-what-do-if-your-identity-stolen. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  We all think we’re too smart to get fooled by a telephone hacker, right?

  It’s one of those things that happen to other people. People who aren’t as smart as we are. People who aren’t as savvy or well informed. People who are naive or overly trusting.

  Until it happens to us.

  It happened to my wife, who is one of the smartest people I know. That she’d fall victim to a hacker on the telephone was so out of character as to be almost unbelievable. That it did happen shows just how slick these guys are at preying on people.

  It seemed to start innocently. The caller said he was with our satellite TV provider and that the company needed to install some new fiber optics equipment because ours was outdated. The installer would be out the following week. The caller said to be sure to check his ID to make sure he was legitimate. The installation was free; the only charge would be a $10 co-pay. Then he asked for a credit card number for the ten bucks.

  A friend who was visiting and overheard the conversation on the phone speaker thought it sounded fishy.

  “Ask him why you can’t just pay the installer with your credit card when he gets here,” she said.

  The hacker was quick with an answer:  the installer wouldn’t have a machine to process credit cards, and the company didn’t accept cash or checks.

  A couple of hours later, someone claiming to represent our credit card company’s fraud department called and asked whether she’d given her card’s number to someone that morning.

  “Yes. Why are you asking?”

  “It’s a scam,” the caller said. “They’re using your credit card and have gotten into your bank account. You need to give us some information so we can stop them before they clean you out.”

  Her reaction: instant panic.

  But still wary. 

  “How do I know you’re really my credit card company?” she asked.

  The caller said she could check by calling him back.

  “But instead of using my head and calling the number on the back of the credit card, I called the number on the caller ID. They answered by saying they were the company’s fraud department. Then they said they needed my passwords, user ID and Social Security number so they could stop the hackers. I know now how stupid it was, but by then I was panicking and I  fell for it hook, line and sinker.”

  Worried, as anyone would be, that the hackers were about to empty her bank account, she told the “fraud department” that she was going to call her bank. And was told not to do that.

  “They said that if I did, the hacker would have access to that number and could do more damage. By this time I’d also given them all my credit card numbers and told them about what the balance was in my bank account.”

  As mentioned above, this was utterly unlike her. It was all but  unbelievable that she’d given out that much information.

 “My brain just stopped working,” she said. “If he’d said the sun rose in the West I probably would have believed him. … They’re so good at it! They study people’s possible responses so they have a quick comeback for anything you say to them.” 

  The fallout from that one phone call:

  The hackers withdrew $2,800 from our bank account, spent $1,300 with an online-retailer, charged $1,300 on one credit card and $500 on another. This all happened within minutes.

  Damage control took much longer. My wife estimates that she spent about 12 hours a day for two weeks on it.

  She canceled all her credit cards. 

  She closed the bank account we’d had for decades and had to change the direct-deposit and autopay information used by Social Security and other income sources. She changed passwords, contacted utilities, her doctors, the credit bureaus, had an alert put on her Social Security number …

  We also had to get rid of the landline telephone we’d had forever and get new cell phone numbers, because the hacker had forwarded our calls to himself! And of course we had to tell all the friends and others who used our old numbers that they wouldn’t work any more.

  Weeks have passed since the hacking, and I still miss the landline phone we’d had ever since the house was built. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to make a call where that dependable old phone graced the kitchen before remembering once again that it’s gone.

  Of course it goes without saying that we had to tell all the friends and others who used our old numbers that they wouldn’t work any more.

  It takes a while to realize just how many places those numbers were used. One example: I now have scores of utterly useless business cards.

  We were lucky in one way. The damage control worked. My wife’s immediate and diligent response to the scam got all our money back.

  Countless other victims haven’t been as fortunate.

  Luckily, there are ways to protect ourselves. Two of the Federal Trade Commission’s tips:

  Don’t give your personal information to anyone who calls out of the blue. Legitimate organizations will never do that.

  Don’t trust Caller ID. It can be faked. It may say that it’s your bank, a government agency or a company you’ve done business with, but it could end up being your worst nightmare instead.

  My wife’s advice:

  “Don’t answer the phone. If it’s not a number I recognize, I don’t even pick up. If it’s legitimate, they can leave a voicemail.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  “Why don’t you ever write any vacation disaster stories any more?”

  A question I still hear time to time from readers. When our kids were young, my wife and I seemed to experience every vacation mishap possible, many of which found their way into my columns. Readers loved them because they made their own vacations sound good by comparison. 

  We inadvertently pitched our tent on a red ant hill, blew up a camp stove.

  We had a flat tire during a blizzard on a mountain pass. While I was trying to change the tire, the jack slipped on the icy road, pinning both the jack and the tire under the car. If a friendly trucker hadn’t stopped to help, we might still be there. 

  Our generator went out on our way home from a vacation. With no generator for the headlights, we spent the night shivering at a rest stop in a VW bus, listening to sick kids cough and sneeze all night.

  During one particularly memorable vacation, I caught the chicken pox. You absolutely don’t want to get a childhood disease as an adult. It was as sick as I’ve ever been.

  As time passed and the kids grew up, however, our vacations came to resemble actual vacations more than adventures in purgatory. The catch was that they didn’t supply any column material. Nobody wants to read about someone’s routine vacation.

  Happily, my granddaughter Hailey has stepped up to fill the void.

  Her destination was the family cabin in neighboring Washington state. She’d be traveling with her significant other, Alex, four younger folks aged ten to 24, and Alex’s dog, Sasha. With that many people and a German Shepherd to squeeze in, they opted to rent a van.

  It’s a ten-hour drive to the cabin. They wanted to get an early start, but overslept. By the time they got to the airport, it was after 8 a.m. Alex waited in the car while Hailey went to get the van. At the rental counter, a surprise was waiting.

  “I’ve rented cars before and always used my debit card, but it was always when I was flying somewhere,” she said. “This time I found that if the rental isn’t connected to a flight, you have to use a credit card.”

  She’d ordered a new credit card, but it hadn’t arrived yet so she went back out to the car to get Alex’s. A good plan, except that Alex didn’t have his wallet with him.

  “He figured he’d just be dropping me off to get the van so he wouldn’t need it.”

  The “early start” was beginning to seem like a fairy tale. By the time Alex got his credit card and they came home to load the van, it was mid-morning and getting hot. Worse, the van had electric doors that wouldn’t allow them to use their car-top luggage carrier.

  “Everybody was hot and sweating and miserable,” Hailey said. “And because the carrier wouldn’t work we had to cram everything into the back of the van. We’d just finished when Alex came out of the house, opened the hatch and everything went flying out.”

  When everything was re-packed, there wasn’t room for Sasha, the aforementioned German Shepherd. It took a long time to rearrange things so that she could be marginally comfortable. By the time they got to Ontario, where they should have been by roughly 9 a.m., it was noon. 

  “We were all cranky, tired, angry and upset that we wouldn’t have an nice evening hang together. Then Ryan (her brother) suddenly said ‘Not to alarm you, but there’s a lot of ants back here.’”

  A veritable swarm of ants.

  “Hundreds and hundreds of them! They’d been living inside a half full bag of dog food that we thought would be about right for the vacation. They were everywhere. The kids were freaking out. We had to spend 45 minutes on ant patrol.”

  This should have been enough mishaps for any trip.

  It wasn’t. When they stopped for gas in central Oregon, another was waiting. 

  “We opened the doors and it was insanely windy. The wind blew chip bags, napkins, trash and other things all over the gas station parking lot. A whirlwind of debris! Alex tried to feed Sasha, and the wind was blowing the food away.”

  They’d been looking forward to enjoying some scenery, but it was wildfire season. The “scenery” consisted of smoking, smoldering hills.

  Here we will draw the curtain of mercy over these misadventures, except to say that they arrived at their destination  roughly four hours later than planned.

  “We’d been looking forward to still having some daylight and a nice evening together, but it wasn’t to be.”

  It had had all the makings, she said, of “a true Woodward vacation.” 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. 

Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.