We are confirmed night owls, never going to bed before midnight or 1 a.m., if not later. But Friday night, after a week of getting up early and going to bed late during the rally, Terry was sound asleep by 10 p.m., and less than an hour later, I was sawing logs too. Saturday morning we slept in, and then lay in bed snuggling and talking about how nice it was to be lazy for a while.

We finally opened the shades and greeted the world sometime close to noon, just in time to say goodbye to Tom and Barbara Westerfield, who were headed to Tucson for yet another rally. Talk about gluttons for punishment!

Soon after they pulled out, Miss Terry and Jan White loaded up a week’s dirty laundry and headed for a laundromat, while Greg White and I went back to the fairgrounds main building to check out the gun show. The place was packed with display tables holding every kind of firearm and accessory you could ever want or need, and people checking out the goodies for sale.

After we had drooled over everything on display, and agreeing that while we’d love to have a few dozen new shooting irons, Greg and I decided that our budgets and vehicle carrying capacities were both too limited to allow that. So we went back to our Winnebago, where Greg installed a new Star Light 1000 motion detector light that I got from one of the vendors at our rally, in place of our motorhome’s original equipment porch light.

About the time Greg finished up with that, the ladies came back from the laundry, and the four of us drove to Texas Roadhouse to meet Stu and Donna McNicol, who had helped on our rally parking crew, and served as room hosts during the rally. The six of us had a nice dinner while we discussed the rally, talked about the way things went wrong on Sunday when the Early Birds arrived in a pouring rainstorm, and planned ahead for next year’s rally and how we can handle the crowd more efficiently.

Stu and Donna followed us back to the fairgrounds, where we spent a few more hours visiting, and solving most of the problems of the world, or at least the RV world. Stu is a retired fire chief, and we loved hearing his stories about life in the station house.

Did I mention that the airplanes fly really low overhead as they take off and land at the Marine Air Station across the street from the fairgrounds? These photos my pal Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School took show what I mean! But after a couple of weeks here, we hardly even notice them any more. Some people at the rally found the noise of the aircraft to be too intrusive, but as I said before, that’s the sound of freedom, and I appreciate the men and women in the cockpits and on the flight line.

We have a lot of paperwork to catch up on from the rally, several orders to prepare to send out in Monday’s mail, and I need to wash off a thick layer of mud and crud that accumulated on our van while I was parking RVs in the storm Sunday. Monday we’ll settle our bill with the fairgrounds, try to find somebody to wash and wax our motorhome, and continue decompressing from our busy week.

Thought For The Day – The greatest grief is that which we cause ourselves.

This is our last day in Apache Junction, or AJ, as the community is known locally. The last six weeks have gone by in a blur, and while we are more than ready to scratch our bad case of hitch itch, we wish we had more time to spend with Terry’s parents and sisters, who live here. There are still some folks whom we have not been able to get together with, and we’re sorry that we just ran out of time.

We had a few beautiful days last week, but yesterday dawned gray and wet, with temperatures fifteen or twenty degrees below what we had been enjoying. Here I was, thinking that winter was over, but apparently we just had a temporary reprieve.

Yesterday, our friends John and Karen Knoll stopped by to visit for a while, and to pick up a couple of bundles of newspapers to take to a Newmar fulltimers rally they will be going to, as well as to a couple of RV parks they will be visiting. We always appreciate it when folks help us spread the word about our work.

About 4 p.m. we went over to visit Terry’s parents, and took them out to dinner. By the time we left the restaurant it was pitch black and raining hard. Terry’s mom, Bess, was driving, and she was having a hard time seeing and dodging deep puddles in the road. We were all glad to get back to their place safely.

We only stayed a few minutes, because it was getting late, but by the time we left, it had stopped raining and the moon and a few stars were breaking through the clouds.  

If the weather cooperates today, we have several chores to do. I want to flush our black tank, rearrange some things in the back of our van, and we have to get things inside of the Winnebago packed and stored. Whenever we sit in one place for a while, we tend to leave things like books and small appliances out to make them more accessible, instead of putting them back each time we use them. So now we have to remember where everything goes, and put them there. We also have several orders to fill and get ready to send out tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow we have an 11:30 a.m. appointment to get new tires on the motorhome, and depending on what time that gets finished, we’ll head out toward Yuma. I doubt that we’ll make it all the way, so we’ll probably spend the night somewhere between here and there.  

We’ve had a nice visit to Apache Junction, but all good things must come to an end, and it’s time to get on down the road.

Thought For The Day – You’re getting old when your wife gives up sex for Lent, and you don’t know until the 4th of July.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

We’re on the road today, headed for Yuma to check out some things at the fairgrounds for our Gypsy Gathering rally in a few weeks. One of the buildings that we thought we would be able to use is not going to be available, but they have a couple of other ones we need to look at before we can decide which seminars will be in which locations, and where our vendors, registration, and evening events will be held.

We already have more RVs registered for the Yuma rally than we had at our Eastern rally in Ohio last fall, and every day more registrations are coming in. I think it’s going to be a big one, folks!

We have a good lineup of vendors, selling just about anything you could want to put in, on, or under your RV. Some of our latest vendor registrations include SMI Brake Controllers for towed cars, Magna Shade windshield sun screens, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Lightblasters LED lights, Phil and Ann’s RV Service, and classes to obtain a non-resident Utah concealed weapons permit, to name just a few.

We have also added several new seminars to the schedule, but I can’t put them on the website until we get back from Yuma, and know what buildings we’ll have available.

I did add a poster to our Rally Registration Page for the Michael Hargis concert Wednesday night right after our pizza party. Scroll down the page, and the poster is between the registration links and the schedule. We’re really looking forward to Michael’s show!

I’ve had a lot of folks offering to volunteer at the rally, and we appreciate it. We will need help with parking, registration, seminar room hosts, door prize runners, morning coffee and donuts, pizza party servers, and I’m sure some other stuff I’ve forgotten. We also need somebody who will be in Yuma a week or two before the rally who is willing to go out and solicit door prizes from local merchants. If you want to take on any of these chores, send me an e-mail and I’ll add you to the list.

One group we’ll really miss at this year’s rally are the Texas Trio; Richard King, Mark Didelot, and Manny Esparza, who have helped us with parking at the past two or three Arizona rallies. Those dogs are hanging out in Florida this winter, and I hope the mosquitoes bite the heck out of them! Not that I want to see them suffer, I’d just like to watch those little winged bloodsuckers try to fly a straight line after sucking down some of the 100 proof fluid those guys call blood!

Richard and Mark gave me a call from the Florida Keys yesterday, where they were dining at one of our favorite seafood restaurants on Marathon Key. They just wanted to rub it in that they were in paradise and I’m stuck in chilly Arizona, where we saw snow on the mountains, from Apache Junction yesterday!

Bad Nick was so hurt by the Texas Trio’s deserting us that he posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled So What Does Life Really Mean? Check it out and leave a comment. 

Thought For The Day – Why does a slight tax increase cost me $200, but a major tax  decrease save me thirty cents?

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

The bad weather that had been predicted rolled into central Arizona right on schedule, with cold, a gloomy sky, and rain. Monday was a gray day in more ways than one for me.

I got an e-mail first thing in the morning that one of my oldest and dearest childhood friends, Dan Connell, had passed away Friday in our old hometown of Toledo, Ohio. I’ve known Dan since I was thirteen, and could not begin to count all of the adventures and misadventures we had together. The news took me by surprise and really broke my heart. Dan went through a bout of colon cancer a few years ago, and seemed to come through it okay. But a few weeks ago his cancer came back, and he went fast.

Terry and I stopped to visit Dan and his special lady, Patty, while we were in Ohio for the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA) rally in Bowling Green, in July At that time he said the doctors had told him he was completely cancer free, and he felt great. We had a good time sitting on his back porch swapping stories of all the silliness we got into as youngsters, and reliving those carefree days from so long ago, when we were ten feet tall and bulletproof.

I’ve lost a lot of friends in my life, and it always hurts, but Dan’s passing has really hit me hard. When you lose friends that you meet as adults, you miss them, but you don’t have that long history of growing up together that you do with childhood friends. And it reminds you that you, too, have to make that final last journey someday. It also reaffirmed for me that life holds no guarantees, and if you love somebody, you should not allow one day to go by without telling them so. Don’t let petty spats, words said in anger, or just the everyday pace of life keep you from doing that. Tomorrow may be too late.

About mid-day yesterday, longtime readers John and Karen Knoll stopped by to visit, and to pay for their registration to our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma. John and Karen are spending the winter at Meridian RV Resort, and they keep telling us how nice it is. We’ll have to stop in and check it out one of these days.

All afternoon the sky got darker, and the temperature continued to drop. It sprinkled off and on, and during the evening it started to rain steadily. It looks like we’re in store for the same all week long. Like I said, a gray start to a gray week.

Thought For The Day – Do it now, there might not be a later.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Does anybody still believe in global warming? Except for Al Gore, did anybody ever believe in global warming? We had planned to spend a couple of months this winter in Florida, before our schedule got all messed up, but looking at the weather reports for the Sunshine State, I’m glad we didn’t. While it’s been unbelievably cold in Florida, it’s warm here in Arizona.

It was 74 degrees yesterday, which I was sure to rub in when I talked to my cousin Berni Frees, back in Muskegon, Michigan yesterday. Hey, why be warm and toasty, if you can’t flaunt it to your friends and relatives who are freezing their hinnies off someplace cold?

Yesterday we were as stiff and sore as we had expected to be, after spending Monday washing the outside of our motorhome. Terry’s sister Lisa stopped over to visit the other day, and Terry said that if we had known how much all the things we did as kids was going to come back to haunt us when we got older and were paying for it with aches and pains, maybe we’d have done things differently. I said that looking back on my misspent youth, where I did dumb things like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, riding motorcycles, even driving (and crashing) a race car one time, and a lot of other foolishness, I’d do every darned one of them again! It was sure fun at the time!

But alas, we’re older now, even if no wiser, and we do pay the price, so yesterday we took it easy. I spent a lot of time playing around on the Ancestry.com website, discovering that I come from a long line of misfits and ne’er-do-wells.

I’ve been fascinated with genealogy for a long time, and earlier this year Judy Bayless put on an excellent seminar called The RVing Genealogist at our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally. I was too busy with rally duties to attend the seminar, but a few days after the rally, Judy gave me a crash course on the topic and introduced me to the Ancestry.com website.

It amazes me how much information you can find online. I was able to pull up my grandfather’s draft card from World War I, along with census records from 1900 through 1930. It kind of gives you a tingle to see the original form, in the census taker’s handwriting, that they filled out while standing on my grandfathers’ front porch or sitting at my newlywed parents’ kitchen table.

While I was goofing off on the computer, Miss Terry was working on paperwork for the upcoming rally, and filling some orders that came in online. We took a break while she cut my hair and trimmed my beard, because the park here has a leash law, and I’m not sure my rabies vaccination is up to date. Then we went to the post office to mail out the orders, and afterward we stopped at Terry’s parents’ house to visit for a while.

Then it was back to the motorhome, where we were forced to leave the screen door open because it was so nice and warm. Ahhh, life in the desert is good this year!

Whiles I was goofing off, Bad Nick was busy yesterday, writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Way To Go, Sheriff Joe! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally