It rained all night Saturday night, and when we woke up yesterday morning, we were greeted by a gray drizzle that lasted all day long. The temperature never got over the mid-60s, and heavy clouds hung low over the rolling hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We drove back to the Giant Center and finished setting up our vendor booth for the Hershey RV Show. I wanted to check out the room where I’ll be doing my seminars, but it was locked. So we trudged all the way around the main level of the stadium to the show office to see if we could get inside. We had to wait fifteen minutes or so while the lady there tried to straighten out a problem for another vendor, and then were told to go back to the Registration Tent where we were yesterday.

There we found the person in charge of speakers and seminar rooms, who told us that the room was indeed locked, and that we couldn’t get inside to know what equipment I will need for my seminars. As far as she knew, all that the rooms had in them were screens, so I’ll have to use my own LCD projector and laptop for the seminars. I also got her to agree that during my thirteen hour seminar on Sunday, which I described in yesterday’s blog, I can get two potty breaks and a short nap.

Once we had the booth set up, we drove back to the Verizon store where we got our new phones the other day. I had not been able to get my e-mail on my Android phone and needed help. Apparently there was some glitch in our e-mail program, which originates from Yahoo, which hosts our websites, that would not let the Droid in to access my e-mail.

A very nice Verizon tech named Jaimie Zamora worked on the problem for over two hours, eventually calling Yahoo’s technical support. Between Jaimie and the Yahoo tech, they finally got the problem figured out, and now I can get my e-mail on the go. I get upwards of 200 e-mails a day, a lot of it junk that folks insist on forwarding to me, and my big reason for having a smart phone is to manage it when I’m away from my desk. Otherwise, it can pile up and backlog pretty quickly. I really appreciated all of Jaimie’s hard work!

The Giant Center is right across the street from Hersheypark, an amusement park that is popular with families from all over the east coast. My buddy Greg White would love this place, because he never quite grew up, and loves riding roller coasters. I never grew up either, but I never had the stomach for those contraptions, even as a kid. So if we’re ever here together, Greg will just have to ride alone. I’ll stay on the ground and eat all of his cotton candy!

Can you stand one more picture of the neat old buildings we keep seeing in this area? I hope so, because here you go. We spotted this handsome old farmhouse near Hershey the other, and really admired it.

There are so many beautiful old buildings around here that we are gawking like typical tourists everywhere we go. Don’t be surprised if I slip a few more pictures in the blog before we leave the area. For folks who live in the east, places like this may not be any big thing, but after spending most of our adult lives in the west, where there aren’t nearly as many structures like this to be seen, they’re pretty awesome.

After we finished at the Verizon store, we grabbed a quick dinner at a Chinese buffet we had discovered when we were in Harrisburg a few years ago, teaching at Life on Wheels. Then we made a quick stop at WalMart, and headed back to the Thousand Trails campground, where we spent the evening inside the motorhome, printing out a supply of our different camping guides to sell during the RV show.

Bad Nick doesn’t like going outside in the rain and the cold, so he stayed home yesterday to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled Screaming Kids. Check it out and leave a comment.

Hopefully, today it will clear up a bit and we’ll see some sunshine.

Thought For The Day – How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.

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Yesterday we drove over to the Giant Center in Hershey to pick up our name tags and parking pass for the Hershey RV Show. It was a lesson in frustration.

First, there had been some miscommunication about what the show expected from me, in terms of being a speaker, as well as our vendor booth. Like any big operation, there seems to be a lot of people in charge of something, but apparently they don’t always communicate with one another about anything.

We drove around the massive Giant Center twice before we could find a place to park, and then went to the Registration Tent, only to find nobody there. So then we had to find the show office. The ladies at the ticket booth didn’t know where that was, so they had to make a telephone call or two. Once they pointed us to the show office, we were told to go to the tent. I told them nobody was there, and was told they were there now. So back we went.

Sure enough, the girl was back, and she quickly located our packet. Now the only problem was that it contained the parking pass and my name badge, but not Terry’s. The young lady was very nice, and quickly made Terry a name badge, but she insisted that the mistake had to have come from our end, not theirs. Apparently they are all infallible.

Next, we went down to the main vendor floor to locate our booth space, and ran into our friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart. Al brought a beautiful old 1915 Model T camper to display, and he will be presenting two seminars a day during the show. They have me down for my Highway History And Back Road Mystery seminar every day during the show, and as it turns out, Al will be doing his seminars in the same room. According to the map, it looked to Al and I like the room was upstairs, so we went up and walked all the way around the arena, with no success.

Then Miss Terry called to tell us that she had found the room, and it was down on the main  floor, just a few steps from where we started. The Giant Center is a huge sports complex and hockey arena, so Al and I had to trudge all the way back down the steep steps to the main floor, which is actually the ice rink, which is covered by thin temporary flooring. We could see ice under the edges in a couple of places. Note to self – wear warm socks to the show.

Miss Terry was looking over the schedule, and discovered that my seminars are Wednesday through Saturday from 4 to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 2:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M.  That’s going to be one heck of a long seminar! I’m good, but I really think I’m going to be hard pressed to find enough to talk about for thirteen hours! I’d think it was just a typo, if I didn’t know that the show folks are infallible.

We unloaded a truckload of Gypsy Journals to pass out to the show crowd, and then we retired to Al’s Newell motorhome for a cold drink and a chat. Then we all three piled into the van and drove to a nearby Fuddruckers for dinner.  I found the restaurant in my GPS, but when we followed the directions it gave us, we ended up at a retirement and rehabilitation home. Al and I agreed that we probably need rehabilitation, but we decided we didn’t need it that day, so we drove another mile or two, found the restaurant, and had a nice dinner.

After we dropped Al back off at his motorhome, we stopped at Sam’s Club in Harrisburg for a couple of items, and then drove to a Verizon company store, where a very nice and helpful young lady named Carin helped us select new phones. I replaced my Blackberry Storm with a Droid Incredible, which I think will be a major improvement. Miss Terry replaced her LG Decoy with a Samsung Alias 2.

Unlike the pushy guy at the mall in Lebanon the day before, who just wanted to sell something, Carin was very patient, explained the pros and cons of several different phones, and then transferred all of our contacts from both phones, and set up our e-mail on the phones. Unfortunately, while Terry’s e-mail works fine, mine didn’t take for some reason, so I have to give Carin a call and have her try to walk me through setting it up.  Once I get a little more familiar with the Droid, I’ll have more to report. 

In yesterday’s blog, I reported that we had opened registration for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma next March. Dave and Lynn Cross wasted no time being the first to register. A couple of folks e-mailed me to say that they were having a problem with the registration link when they tried to pay, but I think that was a temporary glitch that has been cleared up now. If you run into any problems, you can just log onto www.paypal.com and make payment to editor@gypsyjournal.net, and make a note that the payment is for the rally.

Today we’ll go back to the Giant Center and finish setting up our booth for the show. The show hours are from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., so we’re going to be very tired by time it’s over.

Thought For The Day – Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.

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Every time we come back to our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona to visit my daughter Tiffany and her family, poor Terry suffers from terrible allergies. When we lived here it wasn’t as much of a problem, but having been gone for almost eleven years, she has lost  whatever immunity she had to the local pollen. So her eyes are red and itchy, she is sneezing and coughing, and she’d surely shoot me if I tried to take her picture right now.

We’re at 6500 feet here, and a few miles up the road, Pinetop-Lakeside is over 7000 feet, so we both feel the effects of the altitude quite a bit. I keep telling Tiffany that she’d be much happier living somewhere else like, oh, say Aransas Pass or Rockport, Texas, and that we’d visit her much more often there.

Yesterday was another windy day, and since Miss Terry was feeling under the weather, we stayed home and I spent the day working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal. This will be our Eleventh Anniversary Issue, how time flies! The brainchild I conceived sitting at our kitchen table when we were trying to decide if we could earn a living on the road has grown every year, thanks to the support of so many of our loyal readers. We feel very blessed to be able to make our living in such a fun way.

Except for a potty break or two, and stepping outside to show the propane delivery guy where our LP tank is, I was at my desk all day, until it was time for dinner.

In the evening, my cousin Rocky Frees sent me a link to a newspaper obituary for my uncle Charles Saxton, who was killed in action during World War II. Rocky had found the link on a Google News Archive search, and if he wasn’t almost 1800 miles away in Muskegon, Michigan, I’d kiss Rocky right on his face! My genealogical research on my dad’s side of the family has been nearly impossible, but within just a few minutes of searching on the website, I found my grandfather’s death notice, as well as those for two of my dad’s sisters and one of my brothers, and a ton of other information. I knew I should have been working on the paper, but I couldn’t resist logging onto Ancestry.com and inputting all of this new information, which in turn led me to even more data! I could have stayed at it for hours, but I had a blog to write.

After I wrote in yesterday’s blog that I would be sponsoring people to join the Elkhart, Indiana Moose lodge during our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, I had a couple of e-mails from ladies asking if the Elks and Moose will accept women as members. Yes, I have sponsored several women to both organizations.

Today I’ll be back at it, but if Terry feels any better we may sneak away for an hour or two to go into town and visit Tiffany. I have grandkids to snuggle with, and I haven’t been near a Dairy Queen in weeks.

Thought For The Day – Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

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We had a long day yesterday. We left Apache Junction about 9 a.m. and drove to the fairgrounds in Yuma to check out the buildings we’ll be using for our RV rally in March.

Instead of taking Interstate 10 south all the way to Interstate 8, and than taking I-8 west to Yuma, we usually take State Route 347 through the small but growing community of Maricopa, hook up with State Route 84 for a couple of miles, and then hit Interstate 8 at Exit 151. This saves about 30 miles of driving, and except for a few miles of divided four lane roadway, the rest is a nice two lane road without much traffic.

We have noticed another possible route, State Route 238, which goes west from Maricopa to connect with Interstate 8 at Gila Bend, but we had never taken it before. Since we were in the van yesterday, we decided to give it a try. The first half of the two lane road was pretty bumpy, and the second half was a series of dips and sharp curves. We shaved ten miles off our trip, but because the road isn’t nearly as nice, it took us almost exactly as long as going our regular way. If you like drives in the country and have a smaller RV, it would probably be okay, but I don’t think I’d take my 40 foot motorhome through some of those dips.

We stopped at Augies Quail Trail RV Park in Gila Bend to drop off a sample bundle of papers. The Escapees had their Boot Camp for newbie RVers there earlier in the week, and we were hoping to run into anybody we knew, but in driving through the campground, we didn’t see any rigs that looked familiar. We know a lot of folks that stay at Augie’s when passing through this area, and it looked like a nice, clean little park.

When we pulled into the fairgrounds in Yuma, Gypsy Journal subscribers Ed and Stevi Hackenbruch greeted us. We met this nice couple several years ago, and have seen them a few times since then. They winter in Yuma, and were at the fairgrounds getting their table set up for a craft show this weekend. Running into them was a nice surprise.

We spent a couple of hours at the fairgrounds, making notes on the buildings, looking over the areas where we’ll be parking RVs, and going over some final rally details with the fairgrounds staff.

Then we stopped at the local Domino’s Pizza to talk to them about ordering over 100 pizzas for our traditional Wednesday evening pizza party. The price they quoted us was about 60% more than the Domino’s in Casa Grande or Celina, Ohio have charged us at previous rallies, and they’ll have to sharpen their pencil if they want to earn our business.

With all of that done, we drove around dropping off bundles of sample newspapers at some of the RV parks in Yuma. As we were pulling into one RV park, I told Terry that our friends Smokey and Pam Ridgely are workamping in Yuma this winter, and the name of this park sounded familiar. Just then Terry spotted Smokey’s beautiful Peterbilt truck coming out of the park. I stopped, jumped out, and waved Smokey down. He turned around and led us back to their fifth wheel, where we spent an hour or so visiting with Smokey and Pam. We have not seen them since they made a brief stop at our rally in Ohio in October, and we were glad we had the chance to visit for a while.

By then it was getting late and the sun was sinking low. We drove back eastward on Interstate 8, stopping to take a couple of pictures of the mountains near Wellton glowing in the last of the sun’s rays. That is not a natural lake you see in the foreground, just evidence of the how much water came down in last week’s storms.

On our way home, we passed by the Harrah’s Ak-Chin Casino near Maricopa, spotting 15 or 20 RVs dry camping in the parking lot, and made a mental note for future use if we’re nearby and need a safe, level place to park overnight.

It was chilly and sprinkling when we left our motorhome in the morning, but the weather was beautiful while we were in Yuma. Coming back, we ran in a downpour about five miles from home, and from the amount of standing water on the roads, I suspect it rained most of the day.

We got home about 10:30 p.m., having covered about 450 miles, and I sure was ready to get out of that van and back in our motorhome!

Thought For The Day – Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

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We know many RVers who work in RV parks around the country to offset their traveling costs. Typically, they work a set number of hours per week in exchange for a free RV site, and any hours over those agreed upon for the site are paid at an hourly wage. Some workamping RVers return to the same campground to work every season, while others prefer to move about and see new places.

Workamping in an RV park can be interesting, and can help you save some money in camping fees. However, as I always say in my seminars on working on the road, as well as in my book Work Your Way Across The USA, if your goal is to make the most possible money in a given time period, often you would be better off to rent a site in an RV park on a monthly basis, and got a job at the local Home Depot or a restaurant in town. RV park wages are just not that good in most cases.

But if you want to do something a little bit different, and still earn money, there are many, many opportunities out there to make money and have fun that don’t involve cleaning bathrooms in an RV park, serving French fries in a fast food restaurant, or working in retail stores. Here are ten jobs that RVers we know have done that you may never have thought of.  

1. Beet Harvest – We have known several RVers who have worked the sugar beet harvests in places like North Dakota and Minnesota. Jobs include everything from driving trucks to sorting the beets when they arrive at warehouses. One website on the sugar beet harvest claims that some workers make as much as $7,000 in a month or less.

2. Canoe & Kayak Tour Guide – From the Florida Keys to Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, canoe and kayak liveries are busy all season long introducing tourists to the joys to be found on the water. It’s a great job for RVers who want to make some extra money and spend the summer (or winter) paddling. 

3. Working For Amazon – During the Christmas rush, online retailer Amazon.com hires many RVers to work at their fulfillment center in Kansas. The last I heard, the wage was $11 an hour, plus bonuses, with overtime available.

4. Dealing Blackjack – The gaming industry, in places like Las Vegas, Reno, and Laughlin, Nevada, provides many working opportunities for RVers. Jobs range from dealing blackjack to working as a customer greeter in casinos.

5. Driving Tour Bus – From Alaska to the Grand Canyon to Florida, tourist areas provide many employment opportunities for RVers. Driving tour buses, ranging in size from extended length vans to full sized coaches, is a good way to make money while spending time in places where the tourists pay big bucks to visit.

6. Fish Cannery – This is hard, dirty, smelly, physically demanding work, but one fulltime RVer we know spends a full summer in Alaska working long hours at a fish cannery, and he tells us he makes enough in a season to pay for two years of fulltime RV travel.

7. Working The NASCAR Circuit – Every race car driver, from the superstars to the new guy in the pits, have somebody selling souvenirs with their names and car numbers on them. We’ve met a couple of RVers who tow a vending trailer behind their motorhomes and follow the circuit, selling souvenirs to racing fans.

8. Selling Christmas Trees – This is obviously a seasonal job, and is hard physical work, but we have known many RVers who sell Christmas trees on lots across the country, and several have told us that they have made $8,000 or more in less than a month. Many times the same companies who hire RVers to sell Christmas trees hire them to sell fireworks for the Fourth of July, and Halloween pumpkins on the same lots. One couple we know made about $7,000 in two weeks selling fireworks this past summer.

9. Horse Wrangler – I make it a point never to ride anything you can’t put gasoline in, but if you are an equestrian fan and are comfortable in a saddle, you may find work as a horse wrangler, leading trail rides at one of the many dude ranches in the Southwest. The pay isn’t usually top dollar, but tips can be good, and if you love horses, it’s your chance to get paid for playing cowboy (or cowgirl).

10. Gas Line Survey – There is a long, ongoing thread on the Escapees forum, on working as a gas line surveyor, and the RVers we have talked to who have done this work all say that it’s a great way to make good money and get a lot of exercise in the process.

For more ideas on making money as you travel, check out my Working On The Road web page. What are some of the ways you have earned money on the road?

Thought For The Day – My wife does all the driving; I just get to hold the steering wheel.

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