Good Sam Club

We are still here in Peculiar, Missouri and will be for another week and a half.  Not much going on so I thought I would write about what I am doing with the Good Sam Club.

For those of you non-RVer’s, the Good Sam Club is a membership club where you get discounts on campgrounds.  I believe they are the largest and have the most participating RV parks.  They recently were purchased by Camping World (national retail chain of stores for RVer’s). Joining is something like $20 per year and you get a monthly magazine called Trailer Life.  The membership gets you 10% off the nightly rate at participating RV parks.  In addition, Good Sam inspects and rates parks so you can get an idea the quality of the park before you get there.  Good Sam also offers many other services such as chapter groups, online forums, publications, etc.  They also have, in my opinion, the best roadside assistance program (for an additional yearly charge) for RV’s. 

We have been members for over 20 years and have used it mainly for the campground discount and the Trailer LIfe magazine.  We did join their roadside assistance program a couple of years ago.  We never joined any of the Good Sam chapters in the states we lived in as we did not have the interest at the time.  Our snowbird friends from Wisconsin who we met up with last week started a chapter in Wisconsin and we talked about it.  It got me thinking that it would be fun for us to join a chapter now if we could find one that had other full timers in it.  This way we could meet up periodically with others that share our same interests. 

I contacted Good Sam and inquired about finding an “at large” chapter that catered to full timers.  The representative got back and could not find any such chapters but did have some other members that would be interested in joining such a chapter.  Since we use South Dakota as our address they put me in touch with the South Dakota State Director for the Good Sam chapters and he has offered to help me, along with the corporate representative, to see if we can set this up and make it work.  I am amazed that somebody else has not raised this to Good Sam before and really excited to see if I can get this up an running and see who is interested.