I got a call from my daughter Tiffany the other day, telling me that her grandfather, Jim Zipf, had passed away. Even though I had not seen the man in almost 25 years, and even though Tiffany’s mother and I had parted company long, long ago, I was still sorry to hear the news. I always liked Jim, and we got along very well.

Tiffany and I were talking about families, and how she has now lost all of her grandparents, her aunts and uncles on my side of the family, and other people she loved. I hated to tell her that as she gets older, it will happen again and again. We never know when our own, or somebody else’s time on this earth will end.

One of the things I love about the RV lifestyle is that it gives me the freedom to visit family and friends in every corner of the country. Since we hit the road over twelve years ago, I have been able to reestablish relationships with cousins I had not heard from in years, high school and Army buddies I had lost contact with, and recently, my nephews and a niece, right here in Florida, that I had not seen in over 25 years. It is amazing that so much time can pass, yet with many of these people, we have been able to pick up right where we left off, and the connection is still just as strong.

In one case, I’m glad I did, because I was able to visit with one of my best friends from high school several times before he died suddenly earlier this year. Like I said, we never know.

The RV lifestyle also has allowed Terry and I to see places and do things that we had only dreamed of before. How many people can say that they have paddled their kayaks in the Florida Keys, or ate fresh lobster in Maine, or watched the leaves turning on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or been serenaded to sleep by coyotes in the Arizona desert?  How many have been able to walk the hallowed ground at Arlington, or roamed the narrow streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans? Many RVers have done all that and more in the same year!

Sometimes I burn Miss Terry out, because I want to be going and doing all of the time, and once in a while she needs some down time to recharge her batteries. I need that too, but I have known so many people who were always going to do something “someday” and never made it, because their calendar ran out before “someday” arrived.

I know that we need to stop and smell the roses now and then, but there are so many new adventures and old favorite places waiting for me just around the next bend in the road and over the next hill. I want to get to them all while I still can!

Thought For The Day – Making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as making a ‘life’.

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The Hershey RV Show finally ended yesterday, and it was the longest week of our lives. We are so glad that it is over! We have worked a lot of RV rallies over the years, but this was our first RV show. I’m pretty sure it will be our last, too.

The good news is that, according to the folks running the Hershey Show, they had record attendance. Uh huh. Here is a picture of the vendor aisle where our booth was yesterday about mid-morning. Sunday was supposed to be the other “super busy day” of the rally. Does this look familiar? If not, look at my last couple of blog posts. Oh yeah, another record setting attendance day!

My friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart was displaying this really cool 1915 Model A camper at the show. Pretty cool, huh?

Al set a record of his own at the show yesterday morning, when absolutely nobody showed up for his always popular 100 Years of RVs seminar. I didn’t want Al to feel too bad about that, so I also had nobody at all at my Meandering Down The Highway seminar at 2:30 p.m. 

After about 15 minutes of sitting in the room alone, I began packing up my computer and projector, and one of the show dweebs poked her head inside and told me I had to stay in the room in case anybody did eventually did show up.  Well, you know how well that worked out, don’t you?

The show was supposed to end at 5 p.m., and vendors were not allowed to start packing up until then. But there were no customers and we were way past fed up, so I went back to our booth and we started packing things away and taking them out to the van.

We were about finished when another show representative came by and told us that we were breaking their rules by leaving early. Yeah, and your point is?

In looking over our totals for the show, we have taken in much more money on the very first day of many RV rallies with only a few hundred RVs attending than we did in our week at the “biggest RV show in the world!

While the show was a total bust, we could have lived with that if the folks putting on the event were more organized, and treated their vendors with some respect. But when they have so many rules that even they can’t agree on them; when you arrive and get a hassle just to get your name badges and parking permits; when nobody can tell you even the most basic information about where to park to unload your inventory; when they  treat you like an idiot and blow smoke up your butt about the numbers, it’s just too much to deal with.

But at least it’s over, and we’ll spend today licking our wounds and getting some much needed rest. We have a few more days here at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground, and then we’re going to Gettysburg for a couple of days before we continue on to Washington, D.C.

Somebody e-mailed me to say that they were sorry to hear that we would not be returning to this area because the show was a bust, because there is so much to see and do here that we would enjoy. No problem, we love this area and we will be back again for sure. We will just spend our time exploring and having fun, not stuck at the RV show.

Thought For The Day – It’s hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything.

Okay, maybe I didn’t shave my legs, but I was still up before 7 a.m., and I even brushed my teeth! That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

Why was I up at such an ungodly hour, you may ask? Because we’re working a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show this week – America’s “largest” RV show. I know it’s the largest, because it says so right there on their website. Uh huh, and I stand six feet tall, weigh 100 pounds, and have a full head of hair.  It must be true, because you read it right here on my blog, right?

Here is a picture I took about 10 a.m. yesterday morning of the aisle where our vendor booth is located. Everybody you see in this picture is a vendor, except for the person in the gray sweatshirt in the rear left side of the aisle.

Here’s another picture I took of our vendor aisle, from the opposite direction, just before 11 a.m. Hey, it’s a customer, the guy in the blue jeans in the rear! Everyone else you see is a vendor.

About 2 p.m. it started to rain, driving all of the people who were outside looking at RVs inside the building. We had a rush!

And here’s the vendor aisle just before 7 p.m. The guy on the left with the white hat on is a customer, the guy on the right, fiddling with the bike is a vendor. Do you see a pattern here?  While we did have a few (very few) little busy spurts, most of the day I could have fired a shotgun down the aisle and never hit anybody.

Last year, the Hershey Show claimed to have 37,000 attendees. Unless they all show up in one really big bus today or tomorrow, I don’t think they’ll be breaking any records soon.

Vendor hours are from 9 a.m., to 8 p.m., and if you have never stood on top of an ice rink for eleven hours, trust me, it’s an experience you don’t need to seek out. Just as they did Wednesday evening. a lot of vendors gave up and left a little after 6 p.m., and the place was almost empty. The show directors came on the public address system several times, warning vendors that they were not allowed to leave before 8 p.m. Many ignored them, because they had already left.

Miss Terry wanted to stick it out until closing time, and I grudgingly agreed, until somebody from the show came through the vendor area “taking attendance.” Apparently, if you leave early, they fine you, and if you won’t pay the fine, you can’t come back next year. Now, anybody who knows me well knows that the best way to get the Nixter to do something it to tell me I can’t do it! As soon as Terry told me about the attendance taker, I was packed up and out of there in about five minutes!

It is totally asinine to expect vendors to stand around on a cold ice rink for that many hours a day if they don’t have any customers to sell to! A longtime vendor told me that the number of vendors has dropped dramatically at this show in the last few years. Why do you think that is?

They tell us that today and Saturday will be killer days, with customers pouring in the doors, but it would really have to do a dramatic turnaround before we would ever consider coming back to this show. Lost time is lost time, and you can never get it back, no matter how well you do the next day. Never say never, but I just don’t see it happening for us.

Thought For The Day – The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.

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As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, I think Pennsylvania is one of our prettiest states. And yesterday we got to see some exceptionally picturesque parts of the Keystone State.

We were in bed early Wednesday night, but as tired as I was after our 420 mile day, I just couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned all night long, finally dropping off to sleep about 5 a.m., and waking up about 9.

We hit the road and traveled 41 miles east on Interstate 80, and then took the brand new Interstate 99 cutoff (which shows as U.S. Highway 220 on my Streets and Trips mapping program) south a few miles to pick up U.S. Highway 322 at State College.

Most of the 90 miles between State College and Harrisburg was nice divided four lane expressway, except for a 12 mile section between Tusseyviille and Milroy, which was two lane road, but was some of the most scenic of the trip. We passed small towns, pastoral scenes, and homes that must date back two hundred years or more.

This wasn’t a fast route, but it sure was a pretty drive. We climbed up several steep grades, and wound our way down the other side. Much of the route paralleled the Juniata River, and at one point, near Arch Rock, we admired the striations in the rock face where it had been cut away to make room for the highway.

I think it’s going to be an early and cold winter in this part of the country. In several places, the leaves are already starting to change.

At one point, after we topped a particularly steep grade, the speed limit for trucks on the downhill side was 20 miles per hour for about four miles. Of course, that didn’t slow down the cowboys in the big rigs, who sped downhill at 50 miles an hour or more. Where’s a cop when you need him?

Eventually we crossed to the wide Susquehanna River, which is spanned by several neat old bridges.

Then we came under this strange overpass, or bridge or whatever it is. There was no road across it, and no reason for it to be there that we could figure out.

As we got into the Harrisburg area, traffic became pretty hectic, and the drivers were pretty aggressive, pushing their way into any space where they thought they could fit. We snaked our way through it all, and eventually the highway turned into a two lane road as it passed through Hershey. About six miles east of Hershey, we turned down a narrow country lane for a couple of miles and came to the Thousand Trails campground, with 160 miles behind us for the day.

The place was pretty crowded, and all of the good RV sites were gone. Those that were left were all pretty uneven, and in the first three we tried, the only way we could get level was to raise our front tires completely off the ground. That’s not a good thing. Finally, after over two hours of trying, we got into a site where we couldn’t get completely level, but we’re close enough that we’ll live with it.

This is our second visit to this Thousand Trails preserve, and I had forgotten how many Canadian geese inhabit the campground. They are everywhere, and they are apparently very well fed, because there is goose poop in abundance. This is not a place to go barefoot!

By the time we we were finally settled in, we were famished.  We drove four miles back to Campbelltown. On our last visit to this area, several years ago, we discovered a great place called A&M Pizza, and it was just as delicious as we remembered. Yummy!

Back at the motorhome, we took a little nap, and then spent the rest of the evening watching TV, catching up on e-mail, and just relaxing. There has been far too little relaxing in our lives the last few weeks!

Bad Nick, on the other hand, has been loafing a lot lately. But he’s back with a new Bad Nick Blog titled A White Al Sharpton? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – I used to be schizophrenic, but we’re okay now.

This part of northern Indiana is a stronghold of the Amish people, and wherever you travel around the communities of Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, and the surrounding area, you are likely to see Amish women  in their simple handmade dresses, their heads covered in white kapps, and men wearing black straw hats or stocking caps.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Amish people, including that they will not ride in automobiles, use electricity, or telephones. Drive anywhere around here and you will encounter horse drawn buggies and wagons on the roadways.

But, while they do not drive automobiles, the Amish will ride in them, and they frequently hire a non-Amish driver to take them to restaurants, stores, or other places too far to conveniently reach by buggy.

Drive any Amish back road in this region, and you will see small white structures in some yards that look like an enclosed telephone booth, and that is exactly what they are! Their religion does not permit a telephone in the house, and the “phone haus” is built for function, not comfort. There is no heat or cooling, and usually no chair. This is a place to do business, not sit and gab! If an Amish person advertises something for sale, they will include the telephone number and instructions to “call between 7 and 8 a.m.” or whatever time suits their schedule.

Yesterday, we drove out to Nappanee to visit with our friend Carylye Lehman at Focal Wood Products. Carlyle is a fantastic craftsman who built the desk units in our Winnebago motorhome last year, and he has a fast growing reputation with RVers for top quality custom wood furniture.

The tools in Carlyle’s shop are all powered by electricity, courtesy of a huge 40 KW diesel generator.  So as you can see, while the Amish do avoid many of the “modern” conveniences of our way of life, they have embraced some technology to give them the ability to conduct business.

We have also found it interesting to see Amish buggies lined up at the drive through window at McDonald’s, or to note such goodies as Pepsi and potato chips in their shopping carts at WalMart.

All day yesterday the wind blew hard, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour. If the wind lets up a little bit, we plan to leave Elkhart Campground today and start making our way eastward toward the Hershey (Pennsylvania) Thousand Trails preserve, where we will have a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show next week.

It’s about 600 miles to our destination, and we’ll do it in two days. I have no idea where we’ll be tonight, but there is always an RV friendly WalMart, a truck stop, or someplace else to get off the road for the night.

Thought For The Day – Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after.