Yesterday we left Show Low Lake Campground and moved to the campground at the Elks lodge. Since we were only going about three miles, we didn’t bother hooking up the van to tow, Terry just drove it and followed me.

The Elks lodge has fifteen full hookup 30/50 amp gravel sites in the pine trees, which at $15 a night is a heck of a deal in this resort area. The sites are not very level, and we are once again wishing we had leveling jacks.

When we arrived, we were the only RV here, and there was a sailboat on a trailer in one other site. A couple of hours after we got settled in, a pickup with a large overhead camper arrived and parked with the boat. Shortly after that, a very nice Mountain Aire diesel pusher arrived, so now we have some neighbors.

For RVers who travel as much as we do, membership in the Elks and Moose can be a real money saver. Many lodges have dedicated RV parks like this, and even more will allow traveling members to spend the night in their parking lots. The fee, if they charge any at all, is usually very low compared to local RV parks, and the money we pay goes to help support the lodges’ community work, so everybody wins!

After being on a site with just electric for two weeks, it was time to dump our holding tanks, and then Terry started a load of laundry. With those chores out of the way, we drove a few blocks to my daughter Tiffany’s house, where son-in-law Jim threw some steaks on the grill.

Tiffany had seen a Holiday Rambler diesel pusher in a yard nearby for sale, and she took me over to check it out. It was a 1996 model, and just in looking at its outside condition, I knew it was not something we would be interested in.

The owner told me that she and her husband had purchased it five years ago, had driven it less than 2,000 miles, and it has been sitting for over two years. She said nobody had even been inside it in over a year, and I could sure tell that the minute she opened the door! It reeked with a musty, mildew smell, the furniture was faded from the sun, and the roof had obviously suffered some water damage. She said they owed “about” $36,000 to $38,000 and just wanted to get enough out of it to pay the bank off. I wanted to tell her lots of luck, but I just told her it didn’t fit our needs and we left.

It is unfortunate that there are so many people who are buried in RVs that they will never be able to sell for what they owe on them. And then there are hopeful sellers who are just unrealistic in their expectations. We have been actively shopping for a used diesel pusher, and have seen some very good deals out there. But we have also seen people asking 20 to 30 percent more for their coaches than other similar rigs are going for.

I exchanged e-mails with a gentleman who read in the blog that we were shopping, who has a five year old upscale diesel coach for sale. He and his wife fulltimed in it until she passed away last year, and he no longer travels. He paid $225,000 for it, and he wants $185,000 firm. The coach is way out of our price range, but I sent him several online ads for the same year and model coaches with asking prices of $100,000 to $125,000 so he would know why he wasn’t getting any offers. He replied that losing $8,000 a year was bad enough, and he would just keep advertising it until the right buyer comes along. It’s a nice rig, but I think he’ll own it a long, long time.

Thought For The Day – You know you’re into middle age when you realize that caution is the only thing you care to exercise.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

Quite a few readers have written to tell me that they took their military DD 214 (discharge) to a Verizon company store, as I suggested in a recent blog, and indeed are now receiving 15% off their Verizon bill. Pretty cool! Who can’t appreciate saving a few dollars every month? I think it’s very nice of Verizon to honor our nation’s veterans in this way.

Another blog reader who likes to save money sent me a link to a neat website where she has found some great bargains, www.woot.com. I checked it out, and I can tell you that I’m going to be a regular. The website sells one item per day, and once that item is sold out, that’s it. No back orders, no rain checks, buy them when you see them, because there are no more.

Some of the merchandise is weird, and some is really neat. Yesterday’s item was a two pack of digital emergency roadside flares for just $9.99. Some previous deals included refurbished Asus EeePC 900 Netbook computers for $149.99 + $5 shipping; New Pentax 10MP digital cameras, for $79.99 + $5 shipping; and a two-pack of Vector FM and NOAA Weather Alert Radios with built-in flashlights for $19.99 + $5 shipping. These may not be the latest technology, but what a deal! And the folks at Woot seem to be honest; one item offered recently was billed as the “World’s Crappiest Projector.”

We plan to leave Show Low in about a week and head for Escapade in Sedalia, Missouri. The original plan was to stay here at Show Low Lake Campground until we leave, but now it looks like we’ll move over to the Elks lodge today. We like our site here, even though it just has a 30 amp electric hookup, with water bibs scattered around, and a dump station.

Dee and Diane, the new campground hosts are very nice people and we have enjoyed getting to know them, but Recreation Resource Management (RRM), which runs the campground for the city, seems to be staffed by airheads. When I tried to pay for another week yesterday, the new workamper on duty told me I could not pay for the week here at the campground, which we have been doing up until now. Instead I needed to call RRM’s toll free reservation number. When I did, I was told there would be a $9 charge for a reservation, since I was making it over the phone. Huh? Didn’t I just try to pay in person?

I explained that I did not need a reservation, I was already on the site and had been there two weeks. The girl said that was impossible, the computer showed the site as already occupied. Uh, yeah, that would be me occupying the site! That message didn’t seem to transmit, even though I tried to explain it several times. Then she said I could pay for a week, but since I didn’t have a reservation, I might have to move if somebody reserved the site.

Again I say, “huh?” If I’m in the site and have paid for a week, how can it be reserved by someone else after the fact? But apparently, even if I pay for a week, if I don’t pay the $9 reservation fee, I don’t really have the site, I’m just in it, and I can be told to move if somebody else reserves it. Folks, we really need to add some chlorine to the gene pool!

For the same $15 a night this site costs us with my Golden Access discount, we can move three miles to the Elks lodge, which has full hookups. And I won’t get a headache from dealing with space cadets.

Thought For The Day – The best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

Yesterday started out windy here in Show Low, Arizona, but by noon it had calmed down quite a bit. My daughter Tiffany and her family stopped by for a visit in the early afternoon, and it’s always a treat to spend time with them.

My son-in-law, Jim, crawled under our Ford van to unbolt the winch we had mounted between our bucket seats to pull my motorcycle inside the van. With the bike gone, the winch was in the way, and Jim can use it on his ATV, so I told him if he’d remove it, he could have it. Jim also replaced a leaky gasket on the cap of the power steering reservoir on our bus, getting himself nice and dirty in the process.

Meanwhile, our two granddaughters, Hailey and Destiny, kept Terry and their mom busy, turning over rocks to look for bugs and taking a walk down to the playground here at Show Low Lake Campground.

Later in the evening we went to Tiffany and Jim’s house for a delicious pasta dinner Miss Terry made. My granddaughters have an endless supply of energy, and they just love crawling over their Grandpa. They are always coming up with something, including decorating me with their little plastic hair clips. The things I do to entertain those girls!

We have had a great time visiting our family and friends here in our old hometown, but Terry and I are both getting a bad case of hitch itch, and we’re looking forward to getting back on the road in a little over a week.

I’ve been looking at routes we can take to Sedalia, Missouri for the Escapade rally, and though we can get there in two or three days if we push it and take the interstates all the way, what fun is that? I think we’ll take Interstate 40 as far as Tucumcari, New Mexico, and then follow U.S. Highway 54 across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and into Kansas.

U.S. 54 will actually take us across Kansas and into Missouri, within an hour or so of Sedalia. But, depending on our schedule, we may detour north toward Kansas City for a visit with Terry’s cousin Carolyn Henley and her husband Mel on the way. I have been doing some researching on the internet and have found several places I’d like to stop along the way to gather stories for the Gypsy Journal.

Whenever we can, we always prefer following the U.S. Highways and two lane roads in our travels. They are never as fast as the superslab, but we enjoy the slower pace, and that’s where we have found the real America.

Let’s face it, a Denny’s restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona and a Denny’s in Toledo, Ohio are pretty much the same. My late friend Dave Baleria referred to it as Generica, the one size fits all cookie cutter land of corporate franchises that you can find at every interstate highway off ramp in the country.

We much prefer the small town diners and Mom and Pop businesses we find on the back roads. If you have lunch in any small town diner in America and do a little eavesdropping, by the time you finish your dessert, you’ll know who’s cheating on who, who just got their pickup truck repossesed, and who’s kid just got expelled from school.

And besides, the blueberry pie always tastes better in those places than the cardboard fare they serve in the chain restaurants!

Thought For The Day – Lead your life so you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

No matter how long you’ve been a fulltime RVer, you can still forget the simple things. Or at least I can. Tuesday night Miss Terry was washing some dishes and noticed that our water pump was making a low moaning noise. Hmmm…. I like to think that I’m the only reason moaning noises are coming out of our bus. I decided I’d better check things out.

I grabbed a flashlight, went outside and opened our water bay, and sure enough, our freshwater tank was almost empty. It was late in the evening, so we decided that we’d skip our baths that night and wait until the next morning to refill the tank.

So yesterday morning I got out my 50 foot water hose and stretched it out toward the nearest water bib here at Show Low Lake Campground. Way too short. No problem, I got out my backup 25 foot hose. I was still short, by about five feet. I started to get out my backup to my backup 25 foot hose, and discovered that it was missing. Then I remembered lending it to someone at our Gypsy Gathering rally in Casa Grande, but apparently I never got it back.

So it was off to Wally World for a new hose, I needed one anyway to replace the one I lost, and you can never have too much water hose, right? Back at the campground, I finally could fill our holding tank, and it was a good thing I did! If Miss Terry doesn’t have her morning coffee, she gets a bit testy. Throw in the fact that if I don’t get my shower, I get a bit ripe, and it’s not a recipe for romance.

In case you are wondering how we could run out of water, I have a good excuse. Nick happens. It explains a lot that goes wrong in my world.

We don’t have monitors on our fresh or waste water tanks. They never work anyway, so when we built our bus conversion, we didn’t mess with them. I have enough aggravation in my life already, I don’t need the hassle of tank monitors to add to my stress level. We know about how long we can go on a tank full of water before it’s time to refill, and I can open the bay and look at the tank if I need to be sure. This time around we were just so busy that it got away from us.

In case you’re new to RVing and don’t know it yet, holding tank monitors never work. Especially the ones in your waste tanks. I have seen newbies fret themselves into a tizzy over the fact that they just left the dump station, and their monitors still show the tank is full, or half full, or whatever. If you live this lifestyle long enough, you learn to ignore the monitors. Otherwise it will drive you to drink.

Over time (and not much time at all), gunk builds up on the contacts inside of the tank and give false readings. I’ve heard of a hundred ways to clean the contacts inside a holding tank, from pouring ice cubes down the toilet and driving around to knock the crud off, to filling the tank with water and baking soda, or bleach, not to mention all of the commercial chemicals you can waste your money on. Trust me; none of them work long term.

If you spend much time in an RV, you’ll get to know about how long you can go before you need to dump, depending on the size of your tank and how many people are in the RV. Of course, if you drink a gallon of that stuff my doctor made me drink before my colonoscopy, all bets are off. Either get a full hookup site, or park at the dump station, because you’re going to need it!

Experienced RVers can usually tell when the black tank is getting full based on the way it sounds when they flush. Or you can just follow Uncle Nicky’s RV Potty Rule, which I’ve shared with hundreds of Life on Wheels students, but am now going to tell you too, “If you flush the toilet and your butt gets wet, it’s time to dump!” Trust me, it’s much more reliable than any darned holding tank sensor on the market!

Thought For The Day – I finally got my head together, now my body is falling apart.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

We can tell it’s getting warmer down in the desert, because people are starting to head up to Arizona’s cool mountains. Last week Phoenix had its first triple digit day, and over the weekend we had an influx of neighbors at Show Low Lake Campground. Up until now, we’ve pretty much had the place to ourselves, except for the camp host and managers, and one other camper.

This is the best time of year for fishing Arizona’s high country lakes and yesterday we watched some of the action at Show Low Lake, across the street from the campground. One fellow was casting with a fly rod, his line trailing out behind him as he whipped his limber rod back and forth.

We had to chuckle at a couple in a boat who were coming in from fishing and almost swamped their boat trying to get out of it at the dock. It was kind of like watching newbie RVers trying to back into a campsite.

Of course, it’s not just newbies who have occasionalproblems. After ten years of fulltiming, we pretty much have it down to a science, and with Miss Terry’s expert guidance, I can usually get into any campsite on the first try, with maybe just a little bit of fine tuning once I’m in. But, if there is a crowd of people standing around watching, I’ll run over the utility box, the hose bib, a stray French poodle, or anything else without the good sense to get out of the way. I just don’t do well under pressure!

Terry got the last of the envelopes stuffed with the new issue of the Gypsy Journal over the weekend, and today we’ll drive back to Flagstaff to drop them off at the mail service. Then hopefully we will have some down time to enjoy our grandkids before we hit the road again.

While she was busy with that chore, I was working on lining up entertainment for both our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally next March 8 – 12 in Yuma, and for the Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally, September 28 – October 2 of this year.

Melissa and Larry Beahm from One More Time wowed the crowd in Celina, Ohio last year, and they will be coming back with a brand new show this time around. We’re excited to have them performing for us again. Melissa and Larry are a fun couple, and they have been making a name for themselves performing at RV rallies and other events from New York to Texas. We’re excited to have them back again.

For the Arizona rally, we are bringing in an excellent performer named Michael Hargis, who has shared the stage with such big name acts as Chubby Checker, The Drifters, and The Oak Ridge Boys. After listening to Michael’s demo recordings, Terry and I both knew that we wanted to hear more from this talented entertainer. His range is really amazing!

If you haven’t made your plans to attend one of our rallies yet, mark them on your schedule now. And don’t forget, we still have vendor spots open at both rallies, so reserve your space now while it’s still available.

Thought For The Day – Standing in the middle of the road is dangerous. You will get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally