Hi everyone,
This may be a long rant, but I need to vent lol. Recently there was a thread started about running your generator during quiet hrs. People wrote in with different reasons why they did or didn't. This brought up the subject of special needs campers.
Most people are very understanding when it comes to special needs or anyone with health issues, and in fact go out of their way to make you feel welcome. However there seem to be a few who still live in the dark ages, and seem to think special needs people don't deserve a chance to enjoy some sort of life other than a nursing home.
Our 40yr old son was involved in an auto accident 8ys ago. He broke his neck in 3 places as well as his back. We are very lucky to still have him. However he was left a total quad with no movement at all. His wife of 15ys divorced him, stating she couldn't deal with it.
DW and I decided to bring him back home with us, and become his full time care providers. Best decision we ever made !! This poor kid can't even turn his head, as he has steel rods holding his head in one fixed position. Well, we decided we wanted to get back into camping somehow, and bought a MH and had it converted with a wheelchair lift/powered hospital bed/ and larger inverter to handle the extra load because of his equipment.
My son is also on a ventilator at night for breathing, and this can draw the batteries down rather quickly on top of everything else. We do very little dry camping because of this, knowing we will prob have to run the genset from time to time.But sometimes we have no choice if we're traveling and need to put up.
We always discuss this with anyone near us, and explain why we may need to run the genny for an hr or 2 during the night. Most everyone understands and it's never been a prob to anyone around us. May I add that we have an Onan quiet diesel so it's somewhat quiet.
However... every now and then you get the chosen few who feel we shouldn't be allowed to, and this type of person to me? Well you can imagine what goes through my head.
I'm just sick and tired of the people who seem to feel my son shouldn't be allowed out to enjoy what life he may have left, because it may inconvenience them for an hour or two out of their lives.
What the heck am I suppose to do? Put him in a nursing home for the rest of his life where he can be seen but not heard? like so many others do? God forbid anyone be inconvenienced these days !!
I'm so sorry for this rant, but I'm just upset and having a bad day.
How do you all feel about people trying to Rv with special needs family members?
My hats off to you for what you are doing! While my family hasn't had to deal with a special needs person, we have friends who fostered, and adopted, many of these truly-special folks.
While camping during Memorial Day, I was waiting for my wife outside the bathhouse and struck up a conversation with a gentleman waiting for his son. After a few minutes, a young man 20-25 came rolling out of the men's room in a full-blown motorized chair including a ventilator. He was a paraplegic, but life didn't seem to be slowing him down much. I applaud folks like his, and you, that take on the challenge and figure out how to give these folks as 'normal' a life as you can.
With that in mind, the noise of a Onan like you have, or a Honda 650 like someone mentioned in the other thread, should be embraced by your neighbors.
Keep On Camping!!
Todd
Todd
1993 Ford E-350 pushed by a 1988 Wilderness 24' TT
First of all let me give kudos for what your doing for your son. You are very caring people and I'm certain that not everyone would have done what you did.
We too have a special needs child. Wes is developmentally disabled, has hearing, speech and vision problems and basically will be a 5 y/o boy his whole life. He will turn 22 this month. In the beginning he had to have a 120V monitor attached to him all night long in case he stopped breathing. We were fervent campers that never before needed utilities but this monitor required we change our style a bit.
Wes loves camping and riding his bike, he also enjoys Nintendo as it's one of the few things he does well.
I understand your frustration but, when it comes to my son for whom we have made many concessions, I don't expect others to conceded to his needs. We adapt to the situation be it a physical issue or otherwise.
Your situation seems fairly easy to address, make plans well in advance and make sure you have electricity available. Or, invest in batteries and an inverter to run his device during quiet times.
Others have the right to expect everyone to abide by the quiet hours rule and if you think about it, it would be rude of us to purposely occupy a site where we know we'll be waking someone else up in the middle of the night for 2 hours when we could have made other plans and avoid disturbing others.
Good luck to you!
Scott
* This post was
edited 06/08/12 10:48am by ScottG *
Scott, Grace and Wesly
2003 Dodge 3500 4x4, 6 speed Cummins (lightly bombed),
2004 Forest River 25RKS many, many mods.
H0NDA eu2000i
I sure can't speak for everyone else but I really don't think any one would have a problem with camping with others who have special needs. Heck camping is for EVERY one! Kudos to you for taking your son with you on camping trips.
Quote: I'm just sick and tired of the people who seem to feel my son shouldn't be allowed out to enjoy what life he may have left, because it may inconvenience them for an hour or two out of their lives....
The only thought I would have on your specific problem is there are designated quiet times posted at CG's/Parks where gens might be used, which you are asking to be exempt from. Campers pull into parks at all hours and setting up and may not even know your circumstances, other than they hear an RV in the park that is breaking a CG quiet time rule. I don't think you can construe 'that' as a camper that has a problem with handicap people. The CG's are not going to start making exceptions for one and not another. Perhaps adding more batteries to your battery pack would extend the use to fit your needs thru the night.
I've been on the road full timing now across the US for over 4 years and I have yet to be caught come the days end without a CG with full hookups. IMHO I would focus more on finding full hookup CG's to accommodate your son's needs instead of placing blame on other campers of being anti-handicap.
"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us".
ScottG wrote: First of all let me give kudos for what your doing for your son. You are very caring people and I'm certain that not everyone would have done what you did.
We too have a special needs child. Wes is developmentally disabled, has hearing, speech and vision problems and basically will be a 5 y/o boy his whole life. He will turn 22 this month. In the beginning he had to have a 120V monitor attached to him all night long in case he stopped breathing. We were fervent campers that never before needed utilities but this monitor required we change our style a bit.
Wes loves camping and riding his bike, he also enjoys Nintendo as it's one of the few things he does well.
I understand your frustration but, when it comes to my son for whom we have made many concessions, I don't expect others to conceded to his needs. We adapt to the situation be it a physical issue or otherwise.
Your situation seems fairly easy to address, make plans well in advance and make sure you have electricity available. Or, invest in batteries and an inverter to run his device during quiet times.
Others have the right to expect everyone to abide by the quiet hours rule and if you think about it, it would be rude of us to purposely occupy a site where we know we'll be waking someone else up in the middle of the night for 2 hours when we could have made other plans and avoid disturbing others.
Good luck to you!
Scott
I agree with you Scott,
And we do plan well in advance but sometimes unforeseen things pop up.
Although we've been very lucky for the most part.
Also as I had mentioned, we have very seldom run in to any fellow campers who were not very caring and understanding.
We always try to be very respectful of other campers, and hope to get the same in return.
My hats off to you Scott for not letting your sons disability stop you from trying to live a somewhat normal life my friend. I know how hard this can be sometimes.
We boondock and I have a CPAP machine....we have to keep the batteries at optimum or I have to sleep without it. I know there are people out there that are very light sleepers and a generator running at night would bother them......and there's nothing like a cranky person that hasn't gotten their sleep. And remember, noise travels a LOOOOONG ways at night. We recently camped where some campers tried to run theirs all night to keep their freezer going!!!!! Nope - that didn't work. Our most recent trip in a new (to us) rig showed something was wrong -- either our batteries were worn out or the charging system is bad. Had to run our Hondo 2000 14 hours to get the batteries up to par. Of course, we're out in the boonies where we couldn't get batteries!!! I'm positive your son's equipment uses up batteries far faster than mine does, however, be sure to check (or have checked) the charging system, get golf-cart batteries and even see if they can rig an extra battery up just for his equipment. We're going to install a 3rd battery JUST for my CPAP.
Best of luck to you -- I admire you for what you're doing for your son!
amandasgramma wrote: We boondock and I have a CPAP machine....we have to keep the batteries at optimum or I have to sleep without it. I know there are people out there that are very light sleepers and a generator running at night would bother them......and there's nothing like a cranky person that hasn't gotten their sleep. And remember, noise travels a LOOOOONG ways at night. We recently camped where some campers tried to run theirs all night to keep their freezer going!!!!! Nope - that didn't work. Our most recent trip in a new (to us) rig showed something was wrong -- either our batteries were worn out or the charging system is bad. Had to run our Hondo 2000 14 hours to get the batteries up to par. Of course, we're out in the boonies where we couldn't get batteries!!! I'm positive your son's equipment uses up batteries far faster than mine does, however, be sure to check (or have checked) the charging system, get golf-cart batteries and even see if they can rig an extra battery up just for his equipment. We're going to install a 3rd battery JUST for my CPAP.
Best of luck to you -- I admire you for what you're doing for your son!
Thank you, and yes I did just replace all our coach batteries with new.
I'm sure this will help to get more time out of them when needed. Before I could only get 5-6 hrs out of them max before needing a charge. I tested them and they tested good, but I still replaced them knowing they were getting tired lol. About 5ys old or so.
Better to have and not need, than need and not have lol. When all my sons equipment is on, we draw right around 18-22 amps. That's almost like running the a/c units. So you can see why it takes alot of battery power to keep up. I did also add a 5th battery to the 6volt coach batteries and I hope that will help. No room for any more lol.
We may never need to use them, but it's nice to have them just in case.
* This post was
edited 06/08/12 02:03pm by trickyvic3 *
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