Hello, my name is Robert Mahon and I’d like to tell you a bit about myself and my family.
I’m 44 and my family and I live in Milwaukee, WI.
I’ve worked as an IT engineer for a software company for the last 20 years. Yes, I lived the "Y2K" from the inside.
My lovely wife Amber and I have two kids.
Our oldest daughter Jasmin is 13 (and doesn't like to be photographed as much now hah) and our younger Brianna is 10.
My wife and I do our best to keep the kids active and healthy. We’ve enrolled them in various sports and activities.
Brianna plays piano and enjoys rock-climbing with me. She excels at it, especially for someone her age.
I like to think that I’m pretty well-read. I enjoy non-fiction accounts of outdoor adventures. “Into the Wild,” and “Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer are two of my favorites, but I try to read a new book every week or two.
As a kid and young adult I loved reading comic books, and as an adult they remain a guilty pleasure; I “borrow” the occasional comic from my girls, who get quite a laugh out of it. What can I say, I love reading about adventures of all kinds!
I also enjoy the latest crop of comic book based TV shows and movies. I’ve always loved action adventure movies, like Indiana Jones, but Amber prefers dramas. I’m coming around a bit on them, but I still can’t stand her guilty pleasure; I make time to read when she decides to tune into reality TV.
I love my job, but as a teen and young adult I had very different plans. I spent my summers backpacking and rock climbing, and assumed that I would work in the outdoors in some capacity. In college I discovered that I had a knack for working with computers, and this developed into my career. That said, I still enjoy the outdoors and have made it a priority to share this with my family. I take Jasmin rock climbing as often as possible, and the whole family takes frequent bike trips in the summer.
I’m a loyal Black Diamond shopper when it comes to climbing gear. A rented Black Diamond ice axe saved me from a broken leg on a vacation trek up Mount Whitney in my early thirties, and I’ve bought their gear ever since! When it comes to bikes, I ride a Giant, but the girls prefer Treks. For camping, I’ve relied on Coleman gear for years, and my favorite hiking shoes are made by Keen.
Everyone in my family enjoys camping. When Amber and I first got together she wasn’t sure if it would be something that she liked, but after a few trips she came to love it as much as I do.
When we began having kids (still unsure if we're "done" having kids :P), we prioritized taking them on camping trips to familiarize them with the great outdoors, something that the kids loved as well.
Now that they have reached their teen years it has gotten a little more difficult to orchestrate longer camping trips, but we still manage to make it happen every few months.
I’m not embarrassed to say that as I got a little older, it got more challenging taking the family on longer trips. I started missing my comfortable bed! We also found it challenging cramming everyone and their gear into my car or Amber’s small SUV when we traveled.
That’s when we first started thinking about getting an RV. We wanted everyone to have plenty of space and entertainment to keep them from getting on one another’s nerves while in motion.
The entire family could enjoy a nice bike ride together; an RV would make bringing all the bikes much easier than with the car or SUV.
So Amber and I started looking at RVs. One of my close friends bought one several years ago, and he kept telling me how much his family loved it, so I began doing research.
Starting out, I didn’t know what we could afford, or even what we would want, so I had a lot to learn!
I discovered, like I’m sure a lot of you have, that there is so much great information online but it’s scattered all across the web! To get a detailed answer to a question, or even to understand the big picture of a particular RV, you have to spend hours visiting different sites, scrolling through forums and then following a link to yet another corner of the world wide web!
Our first RV, 2012-2014
We eventually found all the information we needed to purchase and outfit our RV, but Amber and I joked about how the process itself proved to be a long journey.
Then she made a suggestion.
“Robert,” she said, “You know how to find this information now and with your IT background you can build web pages in your sleep. Why don’t we build our own site that collects all this information so other people like us can spend more time enjoying their RV’s instead of researching them!”
Instantly I was hooked! I knew that with her help we could build a great site centered around welcoming people into the RV community, and helping them get the information that they need to fully enjoy their RVs.
That’s what this site is all about! Giving you the opportunity to learn from my experience with shopping for, outfitting and even repairing my RV. Additionally, I bring together all the best information that I can from hundreds of websites and forums, and make it easy for you to quickly learn from it.
That way you don’t have to spend the hours traversing the internet like Amber and I did, and instead spend that time enjoying RVing!