Yesterday we had hoped to sleep in a bit, to catch up on all of the sleep we had missed during the rally, but we were both awake by 9 a.m., which was still better than the early hours we had been getting up during rally week.

It would have been nice to just relax all day long after our hectic week, but while we are busy with a rally, life goes on, and so do our other responsibilities to our business. So we had a lot of work to catch up on. I spent some time answering e-mails that had backed up, and updated both the Small Town Festivals calendar and the RV Rally calendar on our RV website. Miss Terry spent most of the day resolving the books for the rally, so we can settle our bill with Elkhart Campground. Hopefully we’ll have enough left over to get out of town afterward

There is a tremendous amount of paperwork associated with any RV rally, and it was compounded this time around because some attendees made their reservations through us, while others paid the campground directly. So Terry and Gita have been trying to get everything sorted out so we know who paid who. There were also several people who made their reservations through us, but then decided to take a weekly or monthly rate at the campground, so Terry has to get that all straightened out and issue refunds to those who paid us and then the campground. If we ever hold a rally at a campground again, we’ll just collect the rally fee and have the attendees make their reservations directly with the campground, to avoid all of this confusion.

Greg White has had the bay doors off the passenger side of his American Eagle motorhome for the last week or so, because Michele Henry at Phoenix Commercial Paint was repairing damage from an unfortunate encounter with a boulder out west a while back. During the early afternoon, he picked them up from Michele, and I helped him reinstall them on his motorhome. My contribution to the project consisted of helping to hold the doors in place while Greg bolted them to their struts.

During the day, several people stopped in to say hello, to thank us for all of the fun they had at the rally, and to say goodbye because they were heading out.

Our mail arrived, as well as a UPS shipment of three boxes of my books from the printer, inventory for our vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show. Included in the mail was the contract for our Western Gypsy Gathering rally, which will be March 7-11 at the fairgrounds in Yuma, Arizona. Make your plans now to attend. I’ll be posting a rally registration page in a few weeks.

For those who really want to plan ahead, our next Eastern rally will be September 26-30 at the Mercer County Fairgrounds in Celina, Ohio.

About the time we finished going through the mail, Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour came over to say hello. Chris and Jim are going to spend the winter in Florida, and we made a tentative date to meet up with them at the Peace River NACO preserve for some kayaking while we’re in the area.

About the time Chris left, our pals Mike and Elaine Loscher arrived to take us out to dinner. These two are such great friends and supporters of our work that we should have been the ones buying them dinner, but they insisted.

Back at Elkhart Campground, I was getting really droopy, so I took a nap on the couch. Later in the evening Stu and Donna (Froggi) McNichol came over for a visit. We really enjoy these two, and never get enough time with them. They left about 10:30, and a couple of minutes later, Elkhart Campground owner Gita Patel called and said she wanted to stop in and give Miss Terry some delicious soup and rice cakes, a traditional Indian dish she wanted to share. We visited with Gita for a while, and when she left, I wrote the blog and got it ready to post. By the time that was done, we were both tired and ready to call an end to our day of “rest.”

Thought For The Day – One father teaches more than a hundred schoolmasters.

Whether we’re in our motorhome or our van, whenever time allows, we always prefer to travel the two lane back roads wherever we are going. A Denny’s or a Flying J truck stop are pretty much the same, whether they are at an interstate highway exit in Arizona or Tennessee.

But on the back roads you see the real America; the small towns, the neat farmsteads, the old courthouses with their Civil War statues, the fields of corn, and the roadside produce stands. You can’t travel as fast on the back roads as you can on the super highways, but why would you want to, anyway? There’s too much to see along the way.

Yesterday we drove back up to Allegan, Michigan to pick up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal from our printer. Our route took us up State Route 40, through the small towns of Marcellus, with its handsome old houses and storefronts; and Lawton, where the beautiful old stone railroad depot is now home to an American Legion post.

We passed a lot of farm fields, those roadside produce stands I mentioned above, and several lakes. I’d like to get our kayaks wet up here, and I bet there is some good fishing in these waters too!

I always like driving through the busy little town of Paw Paw, just for the name if nothing else. Paw Paw is the home of the St. Julian Winery, which offers free tours and wine tasting.

The Paw Paw Police (as opposed to the cantaloupe cops), have a neat old 1950s-era police car that we had hoped to get a picture of, but it wasn’t in its usual parking place, so we’ll have to try again one of these days.

We enjoyed the ride up to Allegan so much that, once we loaded the new issue into the van, we drove right back to Elkhart along the same route. (Of course, it’s the shortest and easiest route, so that helped too.

How would you like to spend the morning driving through all that pretty scenery I just showed you, and come back to find this parked next to you? No, the Beverly Hillbillies didn’t get a motorhome and hit the road, that’s my buddy Greg White’s American Eagle. Greg managed to scrape up his bay doors on a boulder or a panhandler, I forget which, so he took them off and our pal Michele Henry at Phoenix Commercial Paint is fixing them like new again. In the meantime, I just had to pick on Greg, because you know what they say, you can take the redneck out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the redneck.

I was feeling a bit droopy by the time we got back to Elkhart Campground, so I laid down for a little nap, and woke up when my friend Orv Hazelton called to tell me he and his lovely wife Nancy had arrived and were parked next to us. We went over to check our their beautiful new Allegro four-slide diesel pusher, I fussed over their little mutt Duffy, who is almost acceptable for a wannabe dog, and then the four of us went out to dinner. We haven’t seen Orv and Nancy in quite a while, and it was nice to have some time to visit and catch up.

When we got back to the campground, I wanted to take a little walk, and then go inside and get caught up on e-mail from the day. But before I could, a series of folks stopped by to introduce themselves, say hello, ask about the rally, and to  talk about my Bad Nick Blog posts. I’m afraid I can’t remember everybody’s name, but they included Phyllis Schell,  and subscribers Gary and Elaine Regelman. My apologies to those whose names I missed, but my brain capacity is a bit exceeded right now.

I finally managed to get in a couple of laps around the campground, stopped to visit with some folks along the way, and got back to the Winnebago in time to check out the new series Hardcore Pawn on True TV. We managed about 20 minutes of the half hour episode and changed channels. It’s obviously an attempt to cash in on the popularity of A&E’s Pawn Stars, but we both felt that it pretty much sucked. We won’t waste any time on it.

Thought For The Day – If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.

Proving just how hard it is to break a bad habit once it gets established, I was awake by 7 a.m. yesterday morning. That’s about four hours after the time I normally get to bed. This really has to stop!

The weather report had called for scattered thunderstorms in western Michigan, and soon after I woke up, strong winds began to rock the motorhome, followed by rain.

Now we had a decision to make. Do we go ahead with our plan to drive to Elkhart, Indiana, hoping we can find a window of good weather to travel in, or do we sit tight at Fisherman’s Landing Campground in Muskegon?

Normally, we would stay put and avoid traveling in bad weather. But the storm passed by in a few minutes, and the weather report called for more of the same for all of this week. Add to that the fact that our power had been kicking off every few minutes at the campground since the night before, even though we had turned off the TV and Dish network receiver, switched our water heater and refrigerator to propane, turned off our air conditioning, shut down our computers and wireless router, and set the battery charge rate on our inverter to just 5 amps. It doesn’t do you any good to have a 30 amp RV site if the campground is crowded, their power is crappy, and everybody else is running everything they have.

We didn’t feel like paying another $25 to dry camp, and with temperatures in the mid-80s, it wouldn’t have been very comfortable anyway. So a little after 9 a.m. we pulled out, stopped at a Bob Evans Restaurant to meet Berni and Rocky for breakfast and a last goodbye, and then headed south on U.S. Highway 31.

Fortunately, we got a break in the weather, and except for a few sprinkles, we had a nice trip. Well, except for the road construction.

Michigan has two seasons; winter and road construction, and we’re smack dab in the middle of the latter. We hit a couple of construction zones on our trip south. I’ve never understood drivers who come into a construction zone and ignore signs telling them to merge right or left, instead speeding forward until the every last minute, then trying to muscle their way in. All they do is create a bottleneck and make things harder for everybody, themselves included. Just get over as soon as you see the signs and keep on rolling. At least until you have to slam on the brakes to keep from running over the idiot trying to wedge in ahead ahead of you, who didn’t.

We pulled into Elkhart Campground a few minutes before 2 p.m., and the place is packed! A lot of folks are here early, just hanging out before our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

By the time we got unhooked, Greg and Jan White had come out to greet us, Jan with a batch of freshly baked cookies in her hand. What a beautiful sight! A pretty lady with a handful of goodies beats the heck out of an angry woman with a revolver, a rolling pin, or a restraining order. Trust me on this!  Several other folks came by to say hello as we were getting set up, but I was busy and didn’t get everybody’s name.

Bob and Gita Patel, owners of Elkhart Campground, have really been busy this summer, adding a lot of new 50 amp full hookup sites, and upgrading older sites. If you’re a regular here and haven’t seen all of the improvements yet, I know you’ll be impressed.

Here is our Winnebago on the right, and Greg and Jan’s American Eagle on the left. Don’t you just love a spacious RV site?

Once we were all settled in, and had time to check our e-mails and rest up a while, we went to dinner at Famous Dave’s BBQ in Mishawaka with Greg and Jan. We like Famous Dave’s because they serve huge portions, and everything on the menu is delicious. We always have fun with Greg and Jan, and the time went by fast as we talked about the upcoming birth of their second grandchild, about our mutual RV travels, and anything else that came to mind.

Back at the RV park, we visited for a while more, and then Greg and Jan called it a night. Soon after they left, Frank and Marlene Hinman stopped in to say hello and welcome us to Elkhart. We love visiting with our friends wherever we may be!

Another couple of wonderful friends of ours, Jerry and Suzy LeRoy, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and are spending the summer on their lot at the Escapees co-op in Benson, Arizona. This is monsoon season in Arizona, which was always my favorite time of year when I lived there.  Jerry has some awesome photos of the dramatic cloud formations that fill the sky during monsoon season in their blog. Check them out, I think you’ll be impressed.

Thought For The Day – I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

We were up way too early again yesterday morning, a habit that I am going to start working very hard to break. But we had reservations at the Thousand Trails in Las Vegas, and the person I spoke to on the telephone there advised us to try to arrive mid to late morning for the best selection of RV sites, because the campground is pretty full.

We pulled out of the hilltop RV dry camping area provided by the River Palms Casino in Laughlin at 8:30 a.m. and began the seventeen mile long uphill climb from the Colorado River to U.S. Highway 95.

I was curious to see what our Winnebago would do on a hill like that from a standing start,  so I just left it in high (sixth) gear and let the Allison automatic transmission do its thing, instead of manually downshifting. We averaged between 38 and 40 miles per hour on the steepest sections of the road. I can live with that.

Greg and Jan White followed along behind us in their 1999 American Eagle motorhome, and since their coach has the same Spartan chassis and 350 horsepower Cummins diesel engine that ours does, and we both run with the Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitoring system on, I was on the radio comparing notes with Greg. On the steepest inclines, the computer showed I was getting about 2.7 miles per gallon, while Greg reported back that his was showing about 3.5. Once we got onto U.S. 95, we had a long, gradual climb toward Searchlight. On that, I was averaging about 6.7  miles per gallon,and Greg reported just over 7.  Since our odometer just turned over 40,000 miles, and Greg’s rig has about 91,000 miles on it, I don’t know if his is more broken in or what. Of course, the  3/4 ton Ford extended length cargo van we tow probably weighs a little more than Greg’s Dodge Dakota pickup, so that may be a factor too.

We arrived in Las Vegas about 10:30, and Greg and Jan dropped off to stay at another nearby RV park. Our GPS steered us wrong, telling me to take Exit 70, instead of 69, where Greg got off. This resulted in us coming back toward the Thousand Trails from the wrong direction on busy, divided Boulder Highway. But I got lucky and managed to make a U-turn at a traffic light with no problems, and got back to the campground.

About 1/4 mile or so from our destination, our PressurePro tire monitor suddenly started beeping, telling us that we were down to only six pounds of pressure in the left rear tire of our van, and then the display dropped to zero. I thought that we must have had a blowout, but once I could stop and check the tire, it was fine, and my tire gauge said it was right where it should be. I have no idea what set it off and gave us the wrong reading, but I seem to recall that Mike McFall from PressurePro once told me that they will sometimes pick up stray radio signals and send a false report, so I assume that’s what happened.

The sites here at the Thousand Trails are pretty tight, but we got our 40 foot motorhome backed in, and confirmed that our HWH leveling jacks and slide-out rooms still would not work. I called my friend Phil Botnick, one of the best RV techs around, and even though I am known for my lack of mechanical skills, he patiently talked me through troubleshooting the system.  Phil’s diagnosis, based upon his experience with the coach last week in Yuma, and what I was telling him as I tried the things he suggested, was that the motor was shot. He suggested that I call HWH in Moscow, Iowa and get their input.

Phone calls to both the Winnebago factory and HWH confirmed what we already suspected. One motor runs both the jacks and slide-outs, and it was kaput. The nice lady at HWH gave me the part number for the motor, and suggested a couple of local shops to call. I did, and nobody in Las Vegas had the motor in stock. I was going to order it directly from HWH, when I remembered that our friend Mike Loscher had suggested 3Ts RV Service in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. They have worked on Mike’s jacks, and he was very pleased with them. Shoot, we were just in Lake Havasu City on Tuesday!

I called and they had two of the motors in stock, so I gave the lady there my credit card number, and she promised to have one to me by UPS today. I hope so, because with both slides in, it is pretty cramped living in our motorhome. And because we can’t use our jacks either, we’re sitting at an angle that makes life interesting at times.        

Thought For The Day - Don’t dream your life, live your dream.

Yesterday morning we left the Yuma County Fairgrounds, our home for the last several weeks, and drove 85 miles north on U.S. Highway 95 to Quartzsite, with Greg and Jan White following us in their American Eagle. They had never been to this part of Arizona, so I played tour guide on the handheld radio, pointing out the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, Yuma Proving Grounds, and Castle Dome as we motored north.

In Quartzsite we left the main highway long enough to make a half loop around town to give them a feel for the place, though there were only a handful of RVs scattered about here and there, as opposed to the thousands that cover the desert in January and February.

From Quartzsite, we continued north on State Route 95 through Parker, then along the Colorado River through what is known as the Parker Strip, a land of dramatic mountains, cool water, and scenic beauty. I always love this drive, it’s a good two lane road, with plenty of pullouts if you need them. However, unlike past trips in our old MCI bus conversion, we didn’t need them. The Cummins diesel engine powered us right up the hills without blinking an eye!

Arriving  in Lake Havasu City, we parked both rigs at the Elks lodge, and I went inside to obtain permission to leave them there for a couple of hours, while Greg unhooked his Dodge pickup. Seeing the London Bridge was on Jan’s bucket list, so we drove across it, and then back again, then we parked and got out to see the historic bridge and checked out the shops in the small English themed village in the bridge’s shadow.

It must be Spring Break, because later on Greg told me that there were some pretty young ladies in skimpy bikinis and other revealing clothing. I didn’t notice them at all, because I was busy taking pictures of Miss Terry, and I only have eyes for her.

We grabbed a quick snack at Dairy Queen, then got back on the road and drove another 23 miles north, to hook up with Interstate 40. We took the interstate a few miles west to Exit 1, then got onto a narrow two lane road that had more nasty twists and turns than a politician’s biography. I’m sure Greg and Jan, following along faithfully behind, wondered just what kind of an adventure this crazy man was taking them on, and Miss terry uttered a reservation or two herself. But, eventually the road smoothed out, we rejoined State Route 95 through the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, and came in to Bullhead City, where we crossed the Colorado River into Laughlin, Nevada.

Harrah’s Casino in Laughlin has an RV parking area where you can dry camp for $5/night, or $25/week, but every other casino seemed to have signs advertising free dry camping, so what’s up with that? We saw lots of RVs dry camping in designated parking lots at casinos all through town.

We stopped for the night at the River Palms Casino, which has a free dry camping area high on a hill, with great views of the casino lights below. Security told us we could get a free permit to stay up to 14 days. Then we would need to renew the permit, but we could do so for as long as we wanted to.   

We registered, parked our motorhomes, then headed back to the casino for dinner. If you join their free Players Club, you get a free T-shirt, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, two prime rib buffets were $9.95 with the Players Club card.

The line to register for the Players Club was long, and the line for the buffet was even longer. I must have been tired and cranky. Or else the bunch of French Canadians in line in front of us just ticked me off when they let some of their friends cut in ahead of us. People in line started to grumble, and Bad Nick emerged and told them that was bulls&%# and to go to the back of the line. Two did, but one lady stood firmly and said “These are my friends!” I told her that Greg was my friend, but if he tried that crap, I’d throw him out of line too!

One of the guys in their group turned around and told me in very good English it was okay, she was with him. I assured him that it wasn’t okay, and that the next time I came to his country, I’d be sure to be a rude jerk too, He gave me that smirk some folk use when they think they are being funny,  and played the old “I don’t understand English” thing with me. I told him that I knew that he understood me very well, and that he understood exactly what I thought of him and his crowd. I’m sure I embarrassed Miss Terry, Greg, and Jan, but once in a while somebody has to stand up on their hind legs and tell the jerks of the world where to get off. Besides the only place more dangerous to be than between a mama bear and her cubs is between a fat man and his food!

Today we plan to leave early and continue on to Las Vegas. Our leveling jacks are acting up again, and would not work when we arrived in Laughlin. Hopefully we can get that issue resolved in Las Vegas, and then just play tourist and relax for a while. 

Thought For The Day - Only dead fish go with the current.