RV Karma Can Come From Any Direction… or How We Met the Wynns

One of the great things about RVing is the far-flung friends you make who would never have appeared on your radar otherwise. The route that led us to Jason & Nikki Wynn came through a single RV park, even though neither of us was staying there at the time.

Our plan when we hit the road in 2003 was to escape the corporate rat race and find some great new place to settle down. It wasn’t our intention to full-time indefinitely. By the time we discovered that the place we wanted to be was everywhere, our funds were running low, so we had to figure out how to work on the road if we wanted to stay mobile.

We began designing websites for RV parks as RVgeeks.net in early 2007, which pre-dates our videos and YouTube channel by more than 4 years. This allowed us to continue living a nomadic life, while using our now-considerable knowledge of RVing to craft a business around it.

In 2009, we were hired to design a website for a wonderful RV park on the Oregon coast — McKinley’s Marina & RV Park in Waldport. This was back in the early days of RVgeeks, when our business model included driving to a client location, photographing the park ourselves, then designing and implementing the entire project while we were personally there onsite. That changed shortly thereafter, when a park in Florida wanted to hire us while we were in the Pacific Northwest (we did the math: Website Revenue – Diesel Fuel = Bankruptcy). ;-)

In April, 2013, we stopped at McKinley’s again for a visit. We had recently seen that another full-timing couple we’d been following online was planning to head up the Oregon Coast during that upcoming summer. We’d long admired their blog, and especially the superb videos they created to showcase RV parks they visited in their travels. That couple was, of course, Nikki & Jason of GoneWithTheWynns.

With their beautiful RV park and marina on the Alsea Bay and River, we realized that McKinley’s was a perfect subject for one of those fantastic Wynns videos. We thought it was such a great idea that we showed Pat & Gary, McKinley’s owners, some of Jason & Nikki’s RV park videos, suggesting that their park was (in our humble-and-possibly-biased opinions) nicer than many of them, and more than worthy of this kind of promotion.

Pat said she’d be interested, so we reached out to Nikki & Jason for the first time, and the rest, as they say, is history. They visited McKinley’s on their way up the coast later that year, and worked their video magic on the park. We’re so proud to have videography that we respect so highly, embedded into a website that we designed, for a park that we love. You can see that wonderful video above, with Jason & Nikki’s usual exuberance shining through (“We’re gonna go crabbin’“ is our very favorite Nikki-ism ever!), and we’re so happy to be sharing it here.

View Nikki & Jason’s feature article all about McKinley’s & Waldport, Oregon.

As is typical in RVing, we were destined to cross paths with the Wynns in person at some point. That same year, Jason & Nikki were featured speakers at the Abbotsford, BC RV Show while we were staying nearby in the Fraser Valley. After connecting at the show, they came out to spend a wonderful week with us.

If you look back at our older videos, you’ll see that they were pretty rough early on, lacking scripts, voice-overs, background music, or even a tripod. They were very basic — hold the camera in one hand… do the work with the other hand… describe what was being shown (right off the top of my head)… sometimes while standing on a ladder or lying on my back under the RV. Post-production was single-track editing in its simplest form.

Beginning in the fall of 2013, after the Wynn’s visit with us, their guidance and inspiration helped us really up our production values, and we’re now so much more proud of our work, thanks in large part to our newfound friends. We were also honored to be featured in the Wynn’s excellent Make Money & Travel series about full-time RVers earning a living on the road.

If you ever find yourself along the Orgeon coast, be sure to stop into McKinley’s for a great RVing experience and some awesome Dungeness crabbing (if they’re in season). And be sure to tell them the RVgeeks said “Hi” (we’re hoping to swing by for another visit this coming year).

We’re happy to call Nikki, Jason, Pat, Gary (and Anna!) friends. RV karma is the best. :)

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Note:  The video above was produced by the Wynns for McKinley’s Marina & RV Park, and is proudly featured on their website’s Home page. We’re pleased to be sharing it here too, as we still get inspiration from Nikki & Jason’s mad video skills. Follow their adventures at GoneWithTheWynns.com… if you don’t already!

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