Longtime Gypsy Journal and blog readers probably already know that I am fascinated by those small world encounters that we have or hear about all the time.

You know what I mean, those chance conversations with a new friend in a campground, where you suddenly realize that you both worked at the same company 20 years and 3,000 miles ago. Or discovering that the longtime acquaintance you have always nodded to at RV rallies when you cross paths is your second cousin’s brother-in-law. Or pulling into an RV park and finding that the folks in the next site are people you shared a volunteer project with last summer. I call it small world syndrome, and we have had it happen to us more times than I can count.

Among my past publishing endeavors, years ago I put out a racing newspaper. I was standing in the press box of a small town dirt track once and got to talking to a gentleman who was visiting from out of state, looking for a race track to buy, which would be the fulfillment of his longtime dream. He said that now that he was retired from being a school administrator, he finally could get his racetrack. Can you imagine the surprise we both got when we talked a bit more, and discovered that he had been the incoming principal of my high school back in Toledo, Ohio the year I graduated early to join the Army?

Just last summer, Terry and I were helping our buddy Al Hesselbart by playing tour guides to a group from the Heartland Owners Club at the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana. One custom built RV on display at the museum has emblems from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York incorporated into the design.

One of the men taking the tour pointed the emblems out to his wife and said that they reminded him of his old days in the Army. I spent a couple of my Army years teaching firearms and close combat at West Point, and after hearing his comment, we got to talking. It turns out that he left the Academy a few years before I arrived, and I had taken over his old job!

It has happened to us more times than I can count. We have pulled up to an intersection and looked over and seen friends sitting in their RV across the street; been filling our motorhome’s fuel tank and had other RVing friends pull in to the fuel island next to us; and stopped in roadside rest areas for a stretch and potty break, and met up with fulltimers we have crossed paths with all over the country. None of these unplanned meetings were expected, they just happened.

We had another small world encounter yesterday. We drove 100 miles north to Cordes Junction, Arizona to meet Bill Smith, head pressman for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper in Flagstaff. Because there is so much snow on the ground up north, and we don’t have snow tires on our van, Bill had volunteered to drive 100 miles south to meet us halfway and deliver the new issue of the Gypsy Journal to us.

I have known Bill close to 20 years, ever since my newspaper days here in Arizona, and Terry has known him over ten years. Yesterday we were telling Bill about our travels, and he asked if we ever got up to Maine. We told him we had, and about visiting Saint Johns, the old grade school Terry had attended in Bangor.

Bill said he had grown up in Bangor, and then shocked us by telling us that he had gone to the same school! Of course, Bill is so old he has moss growing on his back, and Terry is only a few years out of puberty, so they weren’t there at the same time, but it was still fun listening to them reminisce.

Bill asked Terry what part of Bangor she had grown up in, and she told him that her father was stationed at Dow Air Force Base there, and they had lived in post housing. Bill blew us away again, when he said that when he joined the Air Force, he had been stationed right there in his hometown, at Dow!

I know our experiences are not unique. How many small world encounters have you had?

While we were out making new memories, Bad Nick was home writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled I Like Arizona! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Many of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. Sing your songs now.

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We publish several guides to help make the RV lifestyle less expensive and easier, including our Guide To Free Campgrounds & Overnight Parking Places, our Casino Camping guide, and the Guide To Public RV Dump Stations, to name just a few. They can all be found on our online bookstore, along with a lot of other great RV reading.

Another of our top selling publications is our Guide To RV Good Guys, which lists honest and reliable repair shops from coast to coast. I developed this guide because I know how hard it can be to find somebody to work on our RV or van when we’re in some strange town where we don’t know anybody to ask for suggestions.

Businesses cannot buy an advertisement in our Good Guys guide. The only way a business gets listed is if we have dealt with them ourselves and had a good experience, or if they are recommended by somebody we know and whose opinion we trust. I have a new business that I am going to add to this guide.

We want to replace the tires on our Winnebago motorhome. They have a lot of tread left, but they are seven years old, and that means it’s time to get some new rubber on the RV. Most RVers never drive enough to wear out their tires, but over time the sidewalls can weaken and crack, which can lead to a blowout. Having survived a front tire blowout on our bus at 65 miles per hour a few years ago, it’s not an experience we want to repeat.

The other day, I spent some time calling tire dealers in the Mesa and Apache Junction area, getting quotes for six new Michelin tires. One of the places I called was Fletcher Tire on Crismon Road in Mesa. The gentleman I spoke to there said they could not help us, because they don’t carry the big 22.5 tires we need, and our RV is too big for their equipment.

But, the salesman asked for my cell phone number and offered to make some calls for me and try to locate a couple of shops who handle big rigs. True to his word, he called me back a short time later with the phone numbers and contact information for two tire shops that stocked our size tires and can handle a big RV.

Now that’s service! He isn’t going to make a penny from me on my tires, he knows that I’m an RVer, not a local who might come in sometime for something else, but he still took the time to go the extra mile for me! You can bet that Fletcher Tire gets added to our Good Guys guide, and that if I ever do need tires or any service on my van, if we’re in this area, that’s who I’ll go to. 

I’m still tire shopping, and I quickly learned that prices are all over the place. Big O Tires was almost exactly $1,000 higher for the six tires than a place called Copperstate Tire in Phoenix. When I told the guy from Big O that his quote was way out of line, he asked me incredulously if I was really willing to drive 35 miles just to save $1,000. Uh…. yeah, I am!    

I’d like to get the new tires on before we go to Yuma for our Gypsy Gathering rally next month, unless somebody reading this has any leads to a good tire shop in Yuma I should call to get a quote from.

If the guy at Big O thinks traveling 35 miles is a big journey, he needs to talk to my pal Al Hesselbart, historian for the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana.

While he was at the National RV Show in Louisville, Kentucky in December, Al was approached by representatives of the Chinese RV industry who invited him to come to a large outdoor lifestyle show in Hangzhou, China next month as their guest. They explained that they were inviting representatives of different parts of the American RV industry to discuss our system at their show.

Al told me Hangzhou is about 100 kilometers southeast of Shanghai, and he is scheduled to leave March 2^nd, and he will arrive in China on March 3^rd. He will give his 20 to 30 minute presentation on the growth of the RV lifestyle and its effect on the American culture to a group of government officials on the 4^th, and to RV industry officials and show goers on the 5^th, then the group will get an officially escorted tour of the Hanzhou area on the 6^th, and will return home on the 7^th.

Al said they are flying them business class, putting them up in first class hotels, and he will have an interpreter to help him present his program. Gee, and I thought my buddy had a swelled head before! Can you imagine what he’s going to demand if I want him to come to our Eastern rally in Elkhart this year to present a seminar? I may need to sell a kidney or something, just to cover his tab!

Thought For The Day – Never take life too seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

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Miss Terry has been busy the last couple of days finishing a project on our MCI bus conversion.

When we started the conversion, we left the escape hatch in the roof of our bus, which was in the bedroom, accessible. When we had our tripod mounted HughesNet satellite dish, we installed a custom roof mount on the bus for it, and I would boost Terry up onto the roof and she would deploy the dish. She got so good at it that many times we could be online with both the Internet and satellite TV in less than ten minutes from the time we opened the hatch.

Now, this did make for some interesting experiences. Once we were parked here in our favorite spot at Elkhart Campground and Terry’s foot was in my cupped hands and she bounced up and down, doing our standard “One, two, three, and up” routine. Once she was up on the roof, the fellow in the motorhome parked next to us said “I’m sure glad to see you! I thought I was going nuts. I kept seeing this head popping out of the roof of your bus and then disappearing!”

We replaced the satellite dish with a Verizon air card and Cradlepoint router, assisted by a Wilson Trucker antenna and Wilson amplifier from the 3G Store a couple of years ago. Once we took the satellite dish and mount off the roof, Terry never had a reason to crawl up there again, so we decided to close in the hatch.

The last few days she has been busy staining wood and sealing around the hatch. Today we put the finished wood up and it looks great! But by the time the job was completed, Terry was more than ready to call it a day.

While Terry was busy putting a last coat of stain on the wood, I made a quick run to the post office to mail out a couple of orders, then stopped at the Verizon store to tell them to cancel the VZ Navigator option on my Blackberry Storm. It’s neat to have a fully functioning GPS in my cell phone, but we already have a GPS, and I couldn’t justify the $10 extra a month for the feature.

Our friend Al Hesselbart, historian for the RV Hall of Fame Museum, has been promising to take us out to dinner ever since I accused him of being a cheapskate a year or so ago, but the timing never seemed to work out. So yesterday just about the time we were wrapping up the bus ceiling, Al called and suggested we drive up to Lunker’s, a neat sporting goods store in nearby Edwardsburg, Michigan for dinner. Lunker’s has an excellent restaurant called the Angler’s Inn, and our dinner was wonderful. Did you ever notice that food tastes just a little bit better when somebody else is picking up the check?

Back at the bus, we returned a couple of telephone calls, and I wrote this blog post, edited the new Todays Hero Blog post, and by then it was time to start thinking about bed.     

Thought For The Day – If you have to choose between two evils, pick the one you’ve never tried before.

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I spent most of yesterday doing the same thing I’ve been doing all week – working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal. So I was ready for a break when Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum stopped over in the afternoon for a visit.

While we were talking, Al mentioned that he wants a website to promote his RV history seminars, which he presents at RV rallies and events nationwide. So once we get the new issue of the paper out, we’ll set down and see if I can design a website that will meet his needs.

If you have not had the opportunity to see Al’s seminar 100 Years of RVs in America, he’ll be at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally in September. I have sat in on it a couple of times and always learn something new.  

I have always appreciated the odd and unusual when it comes to vehicles, which had led to me owning some really strange rides over the years. Has anybody reading this ever owned a Toyota Stout pickup? It was a boxy looking little truck with a four speed column shift manual transmission.

Another goofy little car I had, back when I was in high school, was a Daffodil, which wasn’t much bigger than a kid’s pedal car, and almost as powerful. (The Stout and Daffodil in these pictures are not the same ones I owned.)

While I enjoyed these unusual vehicles, finding parts for them can be darned hard, and if you have my limited mechanical skills, you’re better off owning something a mechanic has seen before when it comes breakdown time.

That’s why, while they would never work for our lifestyle, we really like the looks of the vintage Winnebago and Itasca mini-motorhomes. Several of them arrived at Elkhart Campground yesterday for a small rally. When Terry and I took our after dinner walk, we stopped and admired some of the neat old rigs, and took a few pictures.

Another interesting old motorhome that arrived yesterday is this Ultra Van, which is powered by a Corvair engine and transaxle. An estimated 370 of these unique RVs were made from the 1960s to 1970, and records show that some 200 are still on the road, many with over 200,000 miles on the odometer. They cruise comfortably at 60 miles per hour, and get about 15 miles per gallon. Pretty cool, huh? I wonder how many of today’s RVs will be able to meet that record for longevity forty years from now?

Thought For The Day – You know you’re getting on in years when the girls at the office start confiding in you.

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Yesterday was the first vending day at The Rally, and while vendors in the past have told me they did gangbuster business at earlier events, so far I don’t think anyone here in Albuquerque is setting any sales records.

That may be partly due to the fact that the rally attendees are parked at the Balloon Fiesta Park, and all of the vendors and seminars are here at the New Mexico State Fairgrounds. Those two locations are thirteen miles apart, so the attendees have to stand in line to ride buses to the fairgrounds and then stand in line again to ride a bus back to their RV at the end of the day.

A lot of people seem to be very unhappy about that. Throw in the fact that yesterday we had a mixture of rain and snow all day and all evening, and the wait for the buses was over an hour, and it wasn’t a recipe for success. I heard several people say they were not buying anything because they didn’t want to carry it around with them all day long, and then have to hold it while they stood in line for the bus, and then try to figure out how to get it on the bus. I guess if you were buying a book or a pocket tool, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but it you bought something like a lawn chair or a TV dish, you’d really have a transportation problem. I told Terry a guy with a van could make a few bucks just delivering things from the vendors out to the buyers’ RVs at the Balloon Park.

I’m sure glad we’re parked here on the grounds. When the vendor area closed at 5 p.m. yesterday, the line waiting in the cold rain for the bus was over two blocks long! We had considered going to the Neil Sedaka concert last night, until we discovered that it was at the Balloon Park, and was being held in a tent! No way were we going to drive that far in the rain to sit in a tent in this weather! Instead we had dinner with Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour and Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum, returned to the bus, and spent the evening returning e-mail and listening to music from the iPod, played thorough our Bose SoundDock.

Even though we didn’t do much business yesterday, it was nice to be able to help out Al Hesselbart at the RV Hall of Fame Museum’s booth. Al did his seminar on The History of RVs during the morning, and we knew when he was finished, because we got slammed with people coming by the booth to pick up a museum brochure or for more information.

It was also nice to take a break from the booth and wander around checking out the vendors. I finally had the opportunity to met Alex from the 3G Store, where I purchased our Cradlepoint wireless router, Wilson antenna and Wilson amplifier for our internet connection back when we switched to a Verizon air card from our old HughesNet internet dish. Alex and I have exchanged e-mails for a long time, and he really helped me out when I had some technical problems a while back, so it was nice to put a face with a name. I also got to meet the president of 3G Store, Michael Ginsberg, and we spent quite a bit of time visiting. He showed me some new stuff coming down the technological highway that I think are really going to excite RVers once they hit the market.

Another person I was happy to finally meet was Lance Kropf, from Guaranty RV Super Center in Junction City, Oregon. Quite a few RVers I know have had good purchasing experiences when dealing with Lance and his company, and he’s a good buddy of my pal Mac McCoy, which gives him several extra stars next to his name in my book.

Speaking of Mac McCoy, somebody asked if I wasn’t afraid that Mac would be offended by the way I picked on him in yesterday’s blog. Heck no, Mac has a great sense of humor and loves to have fun, and anybody who is going to hang around me knows that they’re fair game. (Besides, if I don’t put pictures in a blog post, Mac doesn’t look at it anyway. Anything more than a two syllable word gives him a migraine.)

Thought For The Day – How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

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