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.

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With temperatures in the mid to upper 90s yesterday in Elklhart, and humidity over 50%, it wasn’t a day to get out and do much. Our MCI bus conversion is so well insulated that we seldom need our rooftop air conditioner to feel comfortable, but yesterday we turned it on early and stayed inside all day.

It was a good day for paperwork, and while I updated our mailing lists, Miss Terry began proofing a new book I hope to get out before our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally. There wasn’t much on TV that interested us, so we listened to music most of the day. I like days like that once in a while, and we get a lot accomplished, but after spending the entire weekend inside, I’ve got cabin fever and need a break. Hopefully today we do something different, even if it’s just going to the laundromat.

As a writer, I don’t know how I ever got by without the internet. I used to spend hours in libraries doing research, and I loved prowling the stacks looking for books on any and every topic under the sun. But with the internet, I can find just about anything I want in seconds, with just a few keystrokes and a mouse click or two.

Yesterday I came across an interesting website called Mental Floss, which has an amazing amount of trivia and little-known information, from 7 Civil War Stories You Didn’t Learn in School, to the Bizarre History of White House Pets, to 10 Bizarre Athlete Superstitions.

Of course, the Internet is also a great source of misinformation. It has changed the Urban Legend into worldwide phenomena. I am constantly amazed at all of the crapola that shows up in my e-mail inbox. And you know it has to be true, because it’s on the internet. I delete about 90% of the stuff that gets forwarded to me, because I don’t have the time or interest to read it, and because I’ve seen most of it many times before.

Some of these stories have some basis in fact, but are updated and morphed into fiction to take advantage of whatever is currently catching the public’s interest.

One that I have received a dozen or more times in the last few days is that while the media was falling all over itself covering the death of Michael Jackson, there was no mention of the death the same week of Ed “Too Tall” Freeman, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Landing Zone X-Ray, in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in 1965. Ed Freeman flew his unarmed helicopter into the overwhelmed landing zone under heavy enemy fire fourteen times on that day to bring out 30 wounded soldiers. When I was in the First Cavalry a few years later, Ed Freeman was a legend.

However, Ed Freeman did not die the same week as Michael Jackson! The war hero actually died August, 20, 2008 in Boise, Idaho. To use his name and accomplishments to foster an internet myth is objectionable to me. Whenever I get some story like this, if I look at it at all, I run it past Snopes to see if there is any validity to it.

Okay, enough with the internet, I need to get outside and experience real life today!

Thought For The Day – The labels we stick on ourselves define how we live. What do your labels say?

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RVers love blogging! These electronic newsletters provide us with a way to share our traveling adventures with our friends and families back home, and to keep in touch with other RVers we meet along the way.

Blogs allow us to remain a part of our children’s and grandchildren’s lives; they can log in and see pictures of Grandma and Grandpa fishing, sightseeing, or just relaxing under the awning. These visual reminders seem to make the miles separating us go away.

But can your RV blog also become a source of income? It’s a question I get asked a lot from RVers who have or want to launch a blog.

There are several ways to monetize a blog, though the simplest is by putting advertising in your blog. On the surface, it looks easy. You sign up for one of the many advertising affiliate programs, such as Google’s AdSense, paste in a simple code, wait for your readers to click the ad links, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. How cool is that?

There are literally thousands of books, e-books, special reports, and online courses you can buy or subscribe to that promise to help you make a fortune with affiliate advertising. Uh huh, and I have some swamp land in Florida I want to sell you.  

Yes, you can make money by placing advertising on your RV blog. But can you earn enough money to make it worth the effort? Probably not. The sad truth is that out of the millions and millions of blogs on every topic imaginable floating around in cyberspace, very few bloggers make more than $5 or $10 a month, if that.

To make any significant money in blogging, you have to have a lot of visitors to your blog every day. I average about 1,000 daily blog readers, and with my five blogs and websites all together, last month I averaged 2,206 page views, according to Google’s AdSense statistics. In June we averaged just over $13 a day in ad commissions.   

But, my RV blog runs at least 500 words daily, our Todays Hero Blog is several hundred words a day, and I have a couple hundred pages on my various websites. That’s a lot of work. I approach this as part of our income stream. Most RVers don’t want to invest that much time into their blogging efforts.

I have found that commissions from ad clicks on my different websites can vary widely. My biggest single commission comes from ad clicks on my Publishing4Profit website. Many of those clicks are over $1.50 each. My Motorcycle Travel Online website generates the next highest individual commissions per ad click, at about 75 cents each. By contrast, ad clicks on the Todays Hero Blog and Honor A Veteran websites earn an average of five cents each. I don’t publish these two websites for the money as much as for the love of honoring people who deserve it.

My RV blog and Gypsy Journal website ad commissions average about twenty cents each, with some exceptions. Some of the ads on pages like Use That Generator and RV Tech Training Offered Online pay a dollar or so each.

Experienced blog publishers have found that Google is constantly tweaking and adjusting the formula they use to determine AdSense commissions, and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to how they do so. A few months ago my commissions were higher, and then they suddenly dropped like a rock. The same type of ads are appearing, the number of visitors and ad clicks have remained stable, but the commission are much less. This is a cycle that I have seen come around every so often in the three years or so I have been blogging.

I also have Amazon ads on my websites, which has proven to be a total waste of time. In over a year, I have earned just over $100 from the Amazon program. I also tried the Commission Junction advertising affiliate program, with no results at all.

So, can you make money with an RV Blog? Yes, if you work hard enough at it and put out a lot of information on a consistent basis, but I sure would not want to try to live off my commissions. I love blogging and website publishing, and would be doing this even if I did not have ad links on the blog and my websites. And the ads do help buy a tank or two of fuel now and then.

My advice to you, if you are considering putting ads on your RV blog, is to go for it and see what happens. It doesn’t cost a thing to enroll in the AdSense program, so all you have to lose is a little bit of your time. But blog because you enjoy it, not because you expect to make any real money at it.

Thought For The Day – Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars in the universe, and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint, and he has to touch it.

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It has been raining so hard here at the fairgrounds in Sedalia, Missouri that some RVs are either going to have to be towed out, or else sit in the same spot until it eventually dries out.

We started out vending outside, which is usually our preference, but the rain was making it impossible to do business. Even under our canopy, our books were getting ruined and nobody was going to stop and stand in the rain to visit. To make matters worse, as I was doing my nightly ritual of painting Miss Terry’s toenails as she soaked in a bath of warm milk and eucalyptus oil, I noticed that she was beginning to grow webs between her toes.

Something had to be done, and my good buddies Jack and Doreen Ingle from PoliSeek Insurance (formerly AON) sprang to the rescue. They had reserved two indoor vending spaces, and only needed one, so yesterday morning Jack arranged for us to move inside next to them. Thanks Jack and Doreen, we really appreciate your generosity.

There are a lot of great vendors at Escapade. My friend Orv Hazelton told me that he and Nancy had discovered a crack on the cover to their seven year old Fantastic Vent on the way to the Escapade. Orv mentioned this to Jim Wood, the vendor for Fantastic Fans, here in the Indoor Market, and Jim said that he’d take a look at the unit yesterday. Orv said when he and Nancy got back to their coach after being out wandering around, they discovered that Jim had installed a new vent motor, cover, and fan blade! This clearly wasn’t a warranty issue, just superb customer service from Fantastic Fan and Jim Wood. 

Even though we have four bars of EVDO service on our Verizon cell phones here at the fairgrounds, we are experiencing very slow internet service until late at night. I guess the cell towers are swamped with so many RVers here, until everybody goes to bed.

Speaking of Verizon cell phones, my contract allows me to get a new phone every two years, and I am about due. I really like the looks of the Blackberry Storm, and the idea of getting my e-mail even when I’m away from my computer appeals to me. The other Blackberry models don’t have the touch screen, and my fat little fingers have a problem with the tiny buttons on them. Do any of you readers have a Blackberry Storm? If so, I’d like to hear your feedback on it.

I played with somebody’s iPhone yesterday and really liked it, but they are not available on the Verizon network and won’t be for a year or so, if then.

Okay, I guess the score is Bureaucrats 1, Common Sense 0. A year or so ago I wrote about Ray & Kathleen Robinson, who have built a railroad on their 40 acres in Oregon as a hobby, and how the local bean counters were trying to force them to close it down. According to a blog post titled Last Chance At A Railroad, Dan Chance writes that after a prolonged battle, the Robinson’s have had to concede defeat. Read all about this miscarriage of justice on Dan’s blog. Did I ever mention how much I dislike bureaucrats?

Thought For The Day – You’re getting old when getting lucky means you can find your car in the WalMart parking lot.

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