Hindsight is always 20/20, and more than once in my life, I’ve found myself repeating that old saying “I sure wish I knew then what I know now.” Looking back over my life, from today’s perspective, I can see a lot of things I would change, if I had it to do over. 

For example, going back to my high school days, I wish I had spent more time paying attention in typing class, and less time staring at that pretty girl with the long blonde hair who sat across the aisle from me. I’ve forgotten who she was long ago, but as a writer, knowing how to type with more than two fingers would really come in handy. Somebody gave me a touch typing instructional CD a couple of years back, but the habit of a lifetime are hard to overcome.

Speaking of bad habits, anybody who saw the pictures of my daughter in the last two blogs knows that she is the one in our family with the willpower. Tiffany was able to break her unhealthy habits at a relatively young age, while mine are so ingrained that I will probably never lose that kind of weight.

More than once I have wished I had made a career out of the Army. I made rank fast, and I enjoyed military life. It would be nice to have that military retirement to fall back on at this point in my life, and as a fulltime RVer, I’d sure love to be able to take advantage of the Fam Camps on military bases across the country.

Of course, like every RVer, I have my “shoulda, coulda, wouldas,” as my friend Joe Kieva calls them. If I had it to do over again, I’d have done more homework before we started out, and bought a diesel pusher motorhome to begin with.

I would not have invested so much money in an expensive campground membership in our first month on the road. But back then, we had never heard of resale memberships and the bargains they offer.

One thing I would have invested in was an automatic rooftop satellite TV dish. After over ten years of fumbling around with a tripod mounted dish, it sure is nice to just push a button and sit on the couch waiting until the dish locks onto a signal.

I could go on and on – there are roads we should have traveled, and those we should have avoided. There are campgrounds where we should have stopped, and others where we should have just kept right on driving. And there are several dead end streets we never should have turned down! But we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

As a fulltime RVer, there is no doubt that the one thing I would do differently is to have started out years earlier. We were in our mid-40s when we hit the road, and we regret the years and adventures we missed, while we were stuck in our workaholic ruts. I’ve never heard a fulltimer say that they wish they had worked longer, or that they had not started out so soon.

Of course, Miss Terry always reminds me that who we are today is the result of all of the things we have experienced in the past, good or bad. And some of those missteps do lead to good stories to tell around the campfire.  Yes, you really can back up a motorhome with a tow car attached if the street is narrow enough and the neighborhood shady enough to prevent you from wasting time unhooking. You shouldn’t, but you can!

So what about you? What would you do over, if you had it to do again?

Thought For The Day – Sometimes life gives you a second chance.

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Back when I was in the military, I spent some time teaching firearms and close quarters combat at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. One of the things that we tried to stress to the Army’s future leaders was that you can plan and strategize all you want to, and you may know exactly how an operation is supposed to go. But once you put boots on the ground, everything can go to hell real quick, and then it’s time to improvise. Yesterday proved to me that the things I learned way back when, still apply today.

This is a brand new fairgrounds for us, and it’s laid out differently than any other where we have held our rallies. Instead of just one or two big open fields to park RVs in, like most fairgrounds, this one has one relatively small field on the south side, a large field on the north side, and dozens of little nooks and crannies with electrical hookups where we can sneak in a single rig or two.

I thought we had our parking plan laid out pretty well. I thought I had conveyed that plan to our hardworking volunteers who man the parking crew. And I thought that the folks who were coming in as early bird arrivals would have read the instructions I sent them about the parking crew meeting them when they arrived at the fairgrounds. It sure sounded like a good plan to me. And then everything went to hell!

My first suspicion that we were going to have problems was when the weather, which has been nice here for the last two weeks, suddenly turned ugly. Yuma is supposed to average about five inches of rain a year. I think we got that much yesterday! I would have measured it to tell you for sure, but the wind, hail, and lighting distracted me. We had standing water and mud everywhere!

Then early yesterday morning one of our most seasoned parking volunteers, whom I had planned to be the leader, called with a family medical emergency and could not make it.

We had planned to stage everybody in the big parking lot in front of the fairgrounds, but a lot of RVs just breezed merrily past the parking crew as they tried to wave them down and stop them, and soon we had a bottleneck at the gates and inside the fairgrounds, while the folks who were arriving and following the parking crew’s directions to move into the staging area began to pile up out front.

The Good Sam rally was ending yesterday morning, and we had hoped they would all be gone by noon, as expected. But there were several who just sat in the middle of our parking areas, waiting for the rain to let up. I can’t blame them for not wanting to travel in such bad weather, but some of them didn’t even want to go outside to unplug their rigs so we could move them out of our parking area and into a large lot on the other side of the fairgrounds, where they could wait out the storm.

In a rally situation, the only way to safely park RVs is one after the other in line. If you have somebody already in the middle of that line, you run into all kinds of problems, because you are trying to sandwich RVs in between the parked coaches, they have slides out that you have to avoid, and electric cords out that you don’t want to run over. It makes what should be a relatively easy job very difficult and time consuming.

We had a few people who got upset because they had to wait quite a while to get parked, while we sorted things out, and they let us know in no uncertain terms that we had really dropped the ball. No, I dropped the ball. I’m the guy in charge, and it all falls on me. I’m sorry. I don’t have any excuses, just the above explanation of what went wrong, and hopefully the lessons learned will make things better the next time around. I also apologize to anybody whom I snapped at or was short with while this was all happening. I was overwhelmed, and I’m sorry.

I have to say that most people were very patient and understanding, and we very much appreciate that. I also very much appreciate the parking crew, who stood outside in the pouring rain and mud, getting yelled at by upset people, and got the job done. I have no idea why they all didn’t walk off the job, but I’m sure glad they didn’t! We also had several people who had not officially volunteered to help with parking, but who saw we were in trouble, and just jumped in to lend a hand. Thank you all very much!

We had expected to park 135 RVs yesterday, all early birds who had registered to come in Sunday, and we had 52 indoor vendor booths reserved. By the end of the day, Miss Terry had registered 183 RVs, and 55 vendor booths! And there were still others who didn’t want to stand in line, and said that they were going to wait until this morning to come in to register! There were a lot of people who didn’t register early, or at all, they just showed up!  

To add to yesterday’s fun and games, when I tried to move our Winnebago motorhome from the back corner of the fairgrounds to the front so we’d have it accessible for rally items stored inside, the living room slide refused to come in, hanging up about halfway out, and the HWH leveling jacks hung up. RV tech Phil Botnick came to the rescue and fixed it, and also checked out the gas side of our water heater, which stopped working again. I have no idea what the problem was with any of this stuff, because I never had a chance to talk with Phil about it. All I know is he got everything working again, and I need to hunt him down and give him large sums of  money. Thanks for always being there for us, Phil!  

Then, later on, I was guiding an RV back into a parking space, and managed to trip and fall into a drainage ditch full of cold, muddy, water. I was so busy that I never got the chance to change clothes or dry off until I took my shower about 11 p.m. Can you say chilled to the bone?

The weather report is for sunshine today, and we sure need it! Hopefully we’ll have a better handle on things and parking will be at least a little easier today!

Thought For The Day – No matter how much you hope for the best, you should always plan for the worst.

Longtime Gypsy Journal and blog readers probably already know that I am fascinated by those small world encounters that we have or hear about all the time.

You know what I mean, those chance conversations with a new friend in a campground, where you suddenly realize that you both worked at the same company 20 years and 3,000 miles ago. Or discovering that the longtime acquaintance you have always nodded to at RV rallies when you cross paths is your second cousin’s brother-in-law. Or pulling into an RV park and finding that the folks in the next site are people you shared a volunteer project with last summer. I call it small world syndrome, and we have had it happen to us more times than I can count.

Among my past publishing endeavors, years ago I put out a racing newspaper. I was standing in the press box of a small town dirt track once and got to talking to a gentleman who was visiting from out of state, looking for a race track to buy, which would be the fulfillment of his longtime dream. He said that now that he was retired from being a school administrator, he finally could get his racetrack. Can you imagine the surprise we both got when we talked a bit more, and discovered that he had been the incoming principal of my high school back in Toledo, Ohio the year I graduated early to join the Army?

Just last summer, Terry and I were helping our buddy Al Hesselbart by playing tour guides to a group from the Heartland Owners Club at the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana. One custom built RV on display at the museum has emblems from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York incorporated into the design.

One of the men taking the tour pointed the emblems out to his wife and said that they reminded him of his old days in the Army. I spent a couple of my Army years teaching firearms and close combat at West Point, and after hearing his comment, we got to talking. It turns out that he left the Academy a few years before I arrived, and I had taken over his old job!

It has happened to us more times than I can count. We have pulled up to an intersection and looked over and seen friends sitting in their RV across the street; been filling our motorhome’s fuel tank and had other RVing friends pull in to the fuel island next to us; and stopped in roadside rest areas for a stretch and potty break, and met up with fulltimers we have crossed paths with all over the country. None of these unplanned meetings were expected, they just happened.

We had another small world encounter yesterday. We drove 100 miles north to Cordes Junction, Arizona to meet Bill Smith, head pressman for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper in Flagstaff. Because there is so much snow on the ground up north, and we don’t have snow tires on our van, Bill had volunteered to drive 100 miles south to meet us halfway and deliver the new issue of the Gypsy Journal to us.

I have known Bill close to 20 years, ever since my newspaper days here in Arizona, and Terry has known him over ten years. Yesterday we were telling Bill about our travels, and he asked if we ever got up to Maine. We told him we had, and about visiting Saint Johns, the old grade school Terry had attended in Bangor.

Bill said he had grown up in Bangor, and then shocked us by telling us that he had gone to the same school! Of course, Bill is so old he has moss growing on his back, and Terry is only a few years out of puberty, so they weren’t there at the same time, but it was still fun listening to them reminisce.

Bill asked Terry what part of Bangor she had grown up in, and she told him that her father was stationed at Dow Air Force Base there, and they had lived in post housing. Bill blew us away again, when he said that when he joined the Air Force, he had been stationed right there in his hometown, at Dow!

I know our experiences are not unique. How many small world encounters have you had?

While we were out making new memories, Bad Nick was home writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled I Like Arizona! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Many of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. Sing your songs now.

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Yesterday our friends Tim and Ann Moran played tour guide, showing us around Merritt Island and Cocoa Beach, Florida. Usually when we are visiting a new area, Terry or I are driving, so it was a real treat to just sit back and watch the scenery and not have to worry about traffic.

We saw some beautiful homes along the Indian River that must easily cost a king’s ransom, and while they were certainly impressive, I didn’t see one that I’d trade our Winnebago motorhome for. I did see several whose garages probably had more square footage than our diesel pusher has.

We then drove through Port Canaveral, where two huge Carnival cruise ships were docked. Terry and I love traveling in our RV, but one of these days we would like to take a cruise, just for the experience. The old section of Cocoa Beach is much different from most of the glitzy tourist traps we’ve seen elsewhere in Florida. It reminded me of a time when people came to Florida to experience the ocean and palm trees, not giant mice and plastic attractions. 

 Longtime Gypsy Journal subscriber David Spain has invited us to stop and visit his Comfort Inn in Cocoa Beach several times, so since we were in town, we stopped to introduce ourselves and say hello. David is an RVer stuck in the working world, and said that he gets to live vicariously through our writing. It was nice to get to know him, and if we ever find ourselves in this part of Florida and in need of a place to stay away from our motorhome, it would be David’s hotel.

Tim retired from the Navy, and one benefit of his service that he and Ann enjoyed was staying at Fam Camps, which are RV parks on military bases nationwide. They drove us to Patrick Air Force Base, just south of Cocoa Beach, to show us the Fam Camp there, and we were impressed!

Located on the Banana River, the Fam Camp has 137 RV sites, many of which back up to the water’s edge, and a huge overflow area for dry camping. The Army was just as happy to see me go after one enlistment as I was to say goodbye, but many times I have wished I stayed in and made it a career. I told Miss Terry that after seeing the Patrick Fam Camp, I might just reenlist and do another sixteen years! She seemed to think that the Army probably wants me even less now than it did back in the day..

We saw several impressive Blackhawk helicopters parked on the flight apron at Patrick, and they sure are different from the old Huey’s I knew during my time in the Army. I’d love to fly in one of those babies!

Across from the main gate at Patrick is a beautiful beach that the locals call Surf Beach. Though it is on Air Force property, the beach is open to the public and we stopped to check it out.

There were quite a few surfers out in the water waiting to catch a wave, and I managed to get a couple of pictures of them in action. It looks like a lot of fun, but I know it’s not for me. I have enough trouble standing upright on solid ground!

Thought For The Day – Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.

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This is our last day vending at the FMCA rally, and though sales have not been what we had hoped for, they are about what we expected them to be. We have covered our expenses, and we have introduced a lot of people to the Gypsy Journal. Hopefully when they get back home or wherever they’re headed from here, they will have a chance to read it and then we’ll see a few more subscriptions come in.

As I said before, the FMCA crowd just isn’t our customer base. It seems like a lot of them spend their time in fancy RV resorts and would never think of boondocking or spending a night in a free campground in a city park, so they have no interest in the guidebooks we sell listing places like that.

I was really disappointed that last night’s scheduled entertainment, a concert by country music singer Lorrie Morgan, was cancelled due to rain. I’ve always been a big fan of that beautiful lady’s music and would have loved to see her in person.

Even if we don’t make any money at this rally, it has been worth it to see so many of our vendor friends, meet some of our readers, and make some new friends too. And I have enjoyed the opportunity to visit my old hometown.

Tuesday evening we looked up another of my childhood buddies, Gary Chandler, and his wife Karen. I had not seen them in 32 years. I managed to find their address with a Google search, but no telephone number, so we took a chance that it was the same people and drove back up to Toledo.

I would never have recognized my old friend, and he didn’t recognize me either, but once I told him who I was it was like old home week, with lots of hugs and laughter all around.

I don’t have any siblings left, so it was good to touch base with some of the people I knew way back in the day. Miss Terry never got to meet my parents, so it was nice for her to get the opportunity to see them through the eyes of my old friends. It made my heart feel good to hear them tell how much they still loved my Mom and Dad, and how they loved listening to Dad play his guitar and tell his stories from his days down on the border. My Mom wasn’t just a mother to her own children; she was Mom to all of our friends as we were growing up, too.

One person whom I would still like to find is the man who was the editor of the Toledo Blade newspaper back when I got out of the Army. I applied for a reporter’s position with the paper, and I can still see his sneer as he told me “Boy, neither you nor I will ever live long enough to see your name in print.” I don’t even know his name, but I’d love to see him someday just to say “Oh yeah? How do you like me now?”

Just as we did at the Escapade in Sedalia, Missouri, we are experiencing very poor cell phone and air card service here in Bowling Green, even though we have full bars of high speed EVDO signal. There are just too many people overloading the circuits, and it doesn’t matter if you have Verizon, AT&T or Sprint, everybody is having problems. Such is life at an RV rally.

Thought For The Day – I get enough exercise just pushing my luck.

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