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Old 11-16-2018, 02:28 PM   #5
Bill
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: The mountains of Scottsdale, AZ, and the beaches of Maine
Posts: 10,088
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Thanks to everyone for the kind words about the forum, and my participation in it. I have actually received a few dozen messages - by email and PM, plus those in this thread and the For Sale thread. They have expressed concerns for the future of the forum, and a lot of questions about me and our traveling future. It has been very gratifying.

For my wife and me, our traveling future is not yet fully planned. We have been TMing for nearly 20 years, and loved almost every minute of it. We enjoy traveling too much to quit entirely, and there are so many beautiful places left to see. Beyond that, we have friends and family spread across the country that we don’t want to miss. We know that we will continue to split our time between Maine and Arizona. So the question we are wrestling with is how to get back and forth. At the moment, anyway, we don’t plan to buy an upright trailer, though that may be open to review if nothing else works out. And although age and health are becoming issues, they are not yet the defining issues. So we have a number of options.

As for my presence on the forum, I don’t have a clear answer there, either. I was one of the original architects of the forum back in 2001, and have run it alone since then. Chris, the forum’s owner and admin, has allowed me to do this, and I’m rather proud of what the forum has become. We set out to build something different, something better than other on-line gathering places, and I think we’ve succeeded.

So will I continue with the forum? I’d like to. And apparently, most of you, the members, hope I will. I have enjoyed being a Moderator and forum historian. And being an engineer, I’ve enjoyed being a Technical Contributor as well. But I have been doing it for almost 20 years, and from Day 1, I’ve done it on a purely volunteer basis. It requires a lot of time, and like most of you, I have other interests in life. It is apparent that if we sell our TM, my technical knowledge of the trailers will gradually become stale, and I will be less helpful to owners. Already, most of you have TMs that are newer than ours, and I hate it when I find that I have given bad advice to an owner because something has changed.

A new TM would be a really good option, but the new units coming out of South Dakota are beyond our budget. Over the years, though, a lot of members have posted that “We bought our Trail Manor because of this forum!”. That makes me realize that the forum has been a very effective sales tool for the Trail Manor companies. Perhaps if a groundswell of concern about the future of the forum reached the factory, they would consider helping out. There are several ways they could do it - we’ll see. Your thoughts and concerns might make them aware. They should also reach Chris, of course, who will make the final determination about the forum. He hasn’t owned a TM in years, so there is a real possibility that the Forum would close.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of things that will go into our decisions, things that are not of general interest here. We’ll see how it all plays out. But thank you again for your interest and concern.

Bill
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