When people hear that we live fulltime in our motorhome, their first question is almost always, ‘How do you get your mail?’ I guess it’s thinking about that mundane daily detail of life that is most able to spark the imagination about what it would be like to live this nomadic life. For the first several years, we used Jim’s father’s address as our mailing address. Then we would send him an occasional email with the address of a friend we would be visiting, or a general delivery post office near where we would be staying and he would bundle up our mail and send it there. Now, our ‘home base’ RV park of Paradise Island, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida has generously agreed to accept and forward our mail.
But with this new service we’ve heard about, we may decide to use a Mail-Forwarding service in the near future. Two of them are even in Florida – our home state. A mail forwarding service is a business where you establish your permanent mailing address at their address with a number that’s like an apartment number. Then you communicate with them about where and when to forward your mail on to you.
Lately, many of these services are providing an online interface. You log in to their system and you see all the mail that is there waiting for you. For each piece of mail, you can check one of several choices, Forward, Hold, or Throw away. We have recently heard of two mail forwarding services in Florida that have added another choice; open and scan the mail. They open it, scan it, and create a .pdf document file which you can then view and even download to your computer. Within a day or so of selecting that choice, you can log back in and view your scanned mail online.
One service is called MyRVMail.com and the other is St. Brendan’s Isle. I haven’t used either of these services personally but I heard about them from other RVing friends who say they’re wonderful!
So, how do you get your mail when you’re on the road?
Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com