A couple from Omaha, Nebraska, now displays FMCA membership number F500000.
By John Johnston, Associate Editor
October 2019
Stacey and Shari Froemming hit the road about 30 days a year in their Leisure Travel Vans Unity motorhome, and they expect to do more traveling after Stacey retires next year.
Stacey and Shari Froemming bought a motorhome in April 2016, and before long, several RVer friends urged them to join FMCA. After putting it off for a while, Shari finally told herself, “I have to do this.” She called the Cincinnati office the afternoon of July 15, 2019.
Her timing, it turned out, was perfect.
“The fellow on the line was very happy to help me,” Shari said. That fellow was Paul Walker, who works in FMCA’s Member Services Department. He got everything squared away. “And then,” Shari recalled, “he said, ‘Okay, now write this down, because this is a very important number. . .’”
Ever so slowly, Paul began to recite the Froemmings’ membership number. “F . . . 5 . . . .” The long pauses puzzled Shari, and then Paul continued, “Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. You’re our 500,000th member!”
The first thing to know about the Froemmings, who live in Omaha, Nebraska, is that they were trip-takers long before they bought their Unity motorhome 3½ years ago from Leisure Travel Vans. They have been to Hawaii (three times), Alaska (twice), Mexico (twice), the western Caribbean (twice), the eastern Caribbean (twice), the southern Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Thailand, and Tahiti.
Stacey and Shari Froemming hit the road about 30 days a year in their Leisure Travel Vans Unity motorhome, and they expect to do more traveling after Stacey retires next year.
All those trips were freebies — Shari earned them through a sales incentive program offered by Close to My Heart, a direct-sales company that specializes in scrapbooking and stamping products. Shari has been an independent consultant with the company for 21 years.
“I went into it not as a hobby, but as a business,” she said. “I like sales. People will say, ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet, your little scrapbooking business.’ Well, does your work give you trips to Tahiti and Thailand?”
As for Stacey, once a year his work takes him to Belize, a Central American country bordered on the east by the Caribbean Sea. It’s not a pleasure trip, but a medical mission. He accompanies a doctor from Omaha’s Children’s Hospital & Medical Center, and they perform catheterization procedures on several children who have heart disease.
Stacey is manager of the cardiac catheterization and electrophysiology lab at the Omaha hospital, where he has worked for 32 years. He is part of a team that diagnoses and treats structural heart disease. He likens them to carpenters: “We fix holes that aren’t supposed to be there, and we put holes where they need to be.”
A catheterization procedure typically is minimally invasive — a catheter is inserted into tiny holes in the blood vessels in a child’s leg or neck. But difficulties can arise, so the team always is ready to perform open-heart surgery, if necessary. That happened one day with a 6-month-old. Stacey was scrubbed and ready to help, and when the child needed CPR, he used his fingers to massage the baby’s heart, which was about the size of a walnut.
The team repaired the heart. The child survived.
Such work is rewarding. Also stressful. Buying a motorhome, Stacey said, “was the best decision we’ve ever made. The second I sit down in the driver’s seat, all the weight of the world just goes right off my shoulders.”
“It was always a dream we had,” Shari said of RVing. “We do it to see places, to explore, to have adventures.”
Soon after buying their motorhome, the Froemmings discovered that no matter where they go, they immediately make friends with other RVers.
They bought a Unity model from a Leisure Travel Vans (LTV) dealer in Colorado. They named it Franklin, after the turtle character of children’s books and animated TV series fame. Shari explained that a turtle is a little like a motorhome. “He goes wherever he wants, and at night he stops, pulls in his arms and legs, and he’s in his house.”
About the fifth day they owned it, on the drive home from the dealership, Shari briefly thought she might regret the purchase. They were stopped for the night in Bayard, Nebraska, when a severe storm blew in. The winds were so strong, “I was scared they were going to tip us over,” she said.
But since then, they haven’t looked back.
As new LTV owners, the Froemmings attended a company rally in September 2016. They were invited to join Midwest LTVers, a chapter of the Leisure Travelers Club, and Shari graciously offered to help the chapter leader at future events. A month later, Shari received an email from the woman, who said she had relinquished the post and that Shari was the new leader.
“So, here we are,” Shari said, “never been RVing before, never been to a chapter rally before. And now I’m the head of the chapter? Uhhh . . . ” But in fact, it has been a great experience, she said, and she plans two events a year for the group. “You’re instantly friends with people who own LTVs,” she noted.
It was their LTVer friends who urged the Froemmings to join FMCA.
Buying a motorhome was the best decision they ever made, said Stacey, who manages a cardiac lab at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
The couple received their FMCA membership emblem in August. “It will probably create some conversation from people (who’ll say), ‘You’re member number 500,000?,” Stacey said. “I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool. That’s a huge milestone.”
Stacey also is approaching a milestone. He plans to retire in June 2020. “That means we can take longer trips in our RV,” Shari noted. And that means more places to explore, more adventures to enjoy, and more memories that Shari can preserve on specially created pages. “There’s a saying in scrapbooking,” she said. “If it’s not scrapbooked, it didn’t happen.”
What usually happens when the Froemmings drive away in Franklin is that they avoid interstate highways in favor of less traveled, two-lane roads that wend through scenic countryside and into small towns.
“Since we bought our motorhome, we have discovered that anytime you go somewhere, you instantly make new acquaintances and new friends,” Stacey said.
Through FMCA, they can expect to make even more friends, each with their own unique membership number. But none quite as special as F500000.