I can only spend so many days in a row stuck at my desk, and then I have to escape for at least a little while. I reached that point yesterday, so I took a break from working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and Greg White and I drove out to Shipshewana to check out the goodies at the gun show.

I think we may have cause to be concerned, when we see the Amish stocking up on guns and ammo! At the Shipshewana gun show last year, I saw several Amish men looking over the hunting rifles and shotguns, but yesterday the exhibit hall was full of them. And I swear, one was buying a 9mm handgun!

Sometimes I forget that not everybody gets my sense of humor. While Greg was looking at something else, I found a nice toy on a display table, and was talking to the man who had it for sale, when Greg walked up. Being the typical wise guy that I am, I said to the fellow at the table, “Well, before I can buy anything, I have to ask my wife here if it’s okay.” The guy looked at his friend, back at me, and suddenly he wasn’t nearly as friendly as he had been just a few minutes earlier. “You’re not those kind of people, are you?” he asked.

Miss Terry and Greg’s wife, Jan, were off having a girl day, and when we left the gun show, we met them for a late lunch/early dinner at El Maguey, one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. Terry, Jan, and I had the shrimp enchiladas, and they were delicious. Greg had a chicken plate, and was just as pleased with his choice.

Back at Elkhart Campground, longtime Gypsy Journal subscriber George Bartley stopped by to say hello, and drop off his two year renewal check. Soon afterward, somebody else came by who is staying at the campground all month, and wanted to register to attend our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

Terry and Jan dropped off some stuff at the motorhome from their trip to the farmers’ market, then took off again for a WalMart run, Greg went off to do whatever it is he does, and I started back in on the paper. That didn’t last long, because somebody else stopped by to chat, and about the time I excused myself and said I really needed to get back to work, a series of telephone calls started coming in. I was finishing up the last of them when Terry and Jan got back home.

I worked the rest of the afternoon, and past midnight local time, except for a break to go to Dairy Queen with Terry, Greg, and Jan about 7 p.m. After our late lunch, nobody was very hungry, but there’s always room for dessert!

If I get an early start, and really, really work hard, I can get most of the new issue done today, making up for the time I spent goofing off yesterday. But it was worth it, I needed the break.

Thought For The Day – One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

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I try to be upbeat in this blog, but anybody who knows me knows that I don’t pull any punches either, and I give you the good with the bad. Not to be a downer, but today I have a couple of the bad to share.

Even though I am married to the best cook in the world, I enjoy dining out, and we do it a lot. It just seems to be a basic part of the RV lifestyle. Put the fulltiming occupants of any two or more RVs together for the first time in a campground, and once they discuss where they just came from and where they are headed next, the very next question is “Where are we going for dinner?’

When we are in a new area, I frequently refer to the Yelp website for reviews of local restaurants. Overall, I have found that if you disregard the obvious cranks with an ax to grind, and the guys who sign in to pump up their own or a friend’s place, when you average the rest of the reviews out, you get a pretty accurate idea of what to expect.

We have been wanting to find a good Chinese buffet ever since we left Apache Junction, Arizona, and the Yelp review showed a place called Best Empire Buffet in Gilroy, about ten miles away. So once we got settled in at the Thousand Trails campground in Morgan Hill on Monday, we drove back to Gilroy to try it out. The reviews were very positive, but as it turned out, they were wrong in this case. We’re still looking for a good Chinese buffet.

At this restaurant, I accomplished two “firsts.” I had the very worst Chinese buffet meal of my life (and we eat at a LOT of Chinese buffets coast to coast), and I paid the most I ever have at a Chinese buffet. The selection was huge, but everything was cold, and a lot of it was stale. I complained to a young lady monitoring the service line, and she just nodded and stood there.

If it wasn’t late in the day, and if we had not been tired and very hungry, we would have left. Once we got our bill, we wished we had. For two people, with me having a Coke and Terry having tea, the tab was $32.91. When Terry told the girl at the cash register that we were unhappy with the meal, she just said “Okay, thank you for coming!”  Hey, life is a crapshoot, right? Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.

Then yesterday, I had another unpleasant experience. Terry needed to make a WalMart run to stock up on some things, so while she did her shopping, I sat out in the van cruising the internet on my iPad. It was in the upper 80s, and Terry’s shopping took longer then expected, so when it got too hot in the van, I started the engine to let the air conditioning cool things down.

So there I am, reading the Escapees RV forum, when somebody knocks on my window. I look out and there stands a pissed off policeman. Did you know it is illegal to let a car idle in California? I sure didn’t, until he explained it to me in great and forceful detail. Apparently it’s a crime that ranks right up there with armed robbery and peeing in public.

He sternly told me that I was wasting precious fuel and adding to the state’s pollution level, among other things. Did you know that if all of the millions of drivers in California did the same thing, nobody could breathe? I didn’t, but I do now. I’m not sure, but I may also be responsible for the current budget crisis, and for the fact that French poodles are such ugly dogs, too.

Okay, I get it. I was wrong. I was wasting fuel, and I was properly chastised. But that wasn’t enough, he ran my license plates and drivers license, apparently to see if I was recently featured on America’s Most Wanted, or in any way affiliated with terrorist cells Then he told me I was very, very lucky he didn’t give me a ticket, or arrest me.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am a strong supporter of law enforcement. The men and woman who take on that job deserve all of our respect for everything they do to keep us all safe. And again, yes, I was wrong. I should have gone inside the store to cool off. But gee, a simple “turn the engine off” would have worked just fine.

I don’t think I like California.

Thought For The Day – Life is not always fair – get used to it!

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I spent most of yesterday busily doing nothing, and managed to get most of it done.

Don Bingham, a faithful blog reader and newly retired Apple employee, contacted me to congratulate me on my new iPad and to tell me that he wanted to present me with three great apps; Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, which are word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, respectively. These will really help me get the most out of my new iPad, and I appreciate your generosity, Don.

The only problem was, for some reason, when I tried to download the programs directly to my iPad from the online Apple Store, I kept getting an error message. Eventually I downloaded them to my desktop computer, and then transferred them to the iPad, along with Scrabble, the iPad version of the popular board game. I also downloaded my iPod music library to the iPad.

Well, why have a new game if you don’t play it, right? So there went most of the afternoon. As it turns out, for a wordsmith, I really suck at Scrabble. The computer knows words I never heard of. I managed to beat the game a few times, but it pretty much cleaned my clock every time.

I did tear myself away from my new toy long enough to go up to the office to pay for two more days to extend our stay here at Happy Days. Or at least I tried to. As it turns out, the office is closed on the weekends, so I left them a message that we will be leaving Monday, and will catch them before we take off.

I also called Camping World in Mesa to complain that ever since we got our new tires installed, the end of February, I have been having problems with both inside duals. They are losing air, and giving false readings on my PressurePro tire monitor. The consensus of Mike McFall from PressurePro, and other experienced tire people, is that when they installed the valve stems, they either screwed the extenders down too tight and collapsed the small washers inside of them, or that the valve extenders themselves are bad. After some discussion with the service manager at Camping World, he acknowledged that they have had problems with their valve extenders in the last few weeks. So we have an appointment with them first thing Monday morning to hopefully remedy the problem.

I may have been a couch potato most of the day, but not Miss Terry. That lady is always busy doing something. Her sister Lisa had invited us to dinner, so Terry made up a big batch of refried beans to go with the tacos Lisa was preparing, and while they were cooking, she installed the new Levolor wooden blinds in the bathroom, in place of the original metal mini blinds. We are replacing all of our window coverings with the Levolors, and this was the first one so far. I think they look very nice, don’t you?

We went to Lisa’s at 4 p.m., and she and husband Jim made us feel welcome, then stuffed us with delicious food as we had a fun evening together. We don’t get to see enough of Jim and Lisa, because they have very busy schedules, so it is always a treat to get together with them when we are in town.

Back at the motorhome, I parked myself back on the couch and attacked the Scrabble game again, because I’m nothing if not persistent, and lazy. The game beat me three rounds out of four, so I finally gave up and did something productive instead, moving to the far end of the couch and giving Miss Terry her nightly foot rub. I have to do something around here to earn my keep!

Thought For The Day -A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

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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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I spend a lot of hours every day working at my computer, and a lot of that time is spent online, either answering e-mails from our readers, updating my blogs and websites, or researching new places we want to visit to see what kinds of stories I can find there for the Gypsy Journal.

But you know what they say about all work and no play, so occasionally I take a break from whatever I’m working at to check out interesting, fun, or even goofy websites. But why should I have all the fun? So I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

1. People of Walmart.com – I guarantee that if you spend a few minutes browsing this collection of candid photos of the denizens who hang out at your local WalMart store, you’ll be amazed, appalled, and get a chuckle or two. I also bet you’ll double check your RV’s door locks the next time you spend the night at Camp WalMart!

2. Mental Floss – Mental Floss magazine, and its sister website, bills itself as “Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix.” Here you will finds all kinds of interesting trivia, from The Weird & Scary History of Winter Olympic Mascots, to People Born on the (Exact) Same Day You Were, to 9 Tasty Foods Named After People, and a lot of other information that would come in really handy if you ever land a spot as a contestant on Jeopardy or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

3. My Parents Were Awesome – Long before they were introduced to dirty diapers and 2 a.m. feedings, our parents were hip youngsters who had the world by the tail. Contributors to this website send in photos of their parents that you’ll find interesting and even funny at times. My only concern, when looking at these photographs, is that sometimes I suspect it is our kids sending in pictures of us when we were kids!

4. Today’s Front Pages – After a career in the small town newspaper business, I’m a born newshound. I pick up newspapers wherever we are traveling just to get a feel for the community. At Today’s Front Pages you can view the current front pages of newspapers around the country.

5. Newspapers, USA And Worldwide – Just one part of the great refdesk.com website, which is a wealth of information, their links to small town and big city newspapers worldwide is another favorite site for news junkies like me.

6. Thinkexist.com – This is another one of those neat websites where you can get lost for hours. With more than 300,000 quotations by over 20,000 authors, you’ll be able to find just the right words for any occasion here.

7. Find A Grave – Whether you’re searching for your great uncle Harry’s final resting place, or the graves of the rich and famous, you’ll probably find it here. It’s a great resource for genealogists.

8.  Speedtest – Do you ever wonder how your current internet connection compares to the average for that server, or to your last location? You can check it quickly at Speedtest.

9. Snopes.com – Before you blindly forward the next wild story that shows up in your e-mail inbox, check out its validity at Snopes.com.

10. Post Secret - PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on a postcard. The voyeur in all of us will find it interesting.

Thought For The Day – If at first you don’t succeed, give up, there’s no use being a fool.

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