My mother used to say that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I was reminded of that last week when we were at the Winnebago Customer Service facility in Forest City, Iowa.

Several of us who were having our coaches worked on were relaxing outside under the shade of a big old tree, solving all of the problems of the world, when  a couple pulled in with an attitude.

The way things work at Winnebago, if you do not have a scheduled service appointment, your name goes on a list and when you get to the top of that list, you’re the next one in the shop. Apparently that wasn’t good enough for these folks, because from halfway across the parking lot we could hear both of them reaming out the service writer because they were not going to be taken care of immediately, and to hell with everybody else who was patiently waiting their turn.

They didn’t have to wait all that long anyway, and when the service tech assigned to them came out to move their coach inside, we listened as they gave him a hard time, let him know just how important they thought they were, and what a hayseed he and anyone else in Iowa was. A couple of us listening in mentioned that we sure wouldn’t want to be talking that way to the fellow who was then going to drive away in our motorhomes and fix whatever we needed done.

That’s about like treating a waitress rudely in a restaurant. Come to think of it, I bet those two jerks have probably drank some coffee laced with spit in their time!

I was reminded of a fellow I ran into at the Verde Valley Thousand Trails Preserve in Camp Verde, Arizona one time, who obviously thought he walked on water, and Jesus walked one step behind him.

I was at the guard shack when he pulled up, blew his horn to get the attention of the young lady on duty, and then walked past several of us who were waiting in line to demand to be led to a 50 amp full hookup site and hooked up. She explained to him that they only had 30 amp sites, and that they don’t escort campers to their sites, to just go find one, and then come back and let her know where he was parked.

He was a rather large gentleman, who towered over the young lady, and he looked down at her and said “I don’t believe you heard me correctly, my dear. I am Mr. So And So, and I need a 50 amp site, and I need to be taken there now!”

Never being one who has ever been accused of shyness, I spoke up and said “Sir, why do you need 50 amps?”

He but his hands on his hips, leaned down toward me and said, “Because, my friend, I have a 50 amp coach!”

I replied “My bus is 50 amps too, but I just use a dog bone adaptor to plug into 30 amps. They have them here in the store if you don’t have one. You’ll get by just fine on 30 amps, it’s very comfortable weather here, so you won’t need any air conditioning or anything like that.”

He scowled at me and stood up in all his glory and said, “Why, thank you, my good man. Obviously I’m not as smart as I thought I was!”

Well, you just know that old Bad Nick had to get in on the fun, so I smiled right back and said “Maybe not, but you’re just as smart as I thought you were!” He stormed out, and all of us had a good chuckle at his expense.

Why do some folks have that need to put other people down? Does it really make them feel that much superior? Do they really think that they are that much superior?

I learned a long time ago that my mother was right, and that most people will bend over backward to accommodate you, if you just treat them with respect.

Fortunately, the RV lifestyle doesn’t have too many clods like that, but there are a few out there. I usually just ignore them, because I prefer to spend my time with all of the real people we meet who are busy enjoying life and accepting others as they are.

Thought For The Day – If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

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For the most part, fulltime RVers are pretty darned patriotic people. But a lot of us still dread the Independence Day holiday every year. Not because we don’t like small town parades and fireworks, but because we know that everybody with a tent, trailer, bus or motorhome will be filling up RV parks from coast to coast.

We learned during our first summer on the road that if we are not comfortably ensconced in an RV park by at least Wednesday of the weeks of the Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day holidays, chances are that we might not find a place to stay, and would be celebrating the holiday at Camp Wal-Mart.

So we’ve been comfortably parked at the Morgan Hill Thousand Trails preserve since Monday, and the place is really starting to fill up with holiday campers. In case you don’t know it yet, there is a difference between campers and RVers.

We spent most of yesterday just watching what I call the Holiday Hula. What? You’ve never heard of the Holiday Hula? That’s the dance weekend campers do as they drive through a campground looking for just the right campsite.

All day long there was an endless parade of RVs, mostly small travel trailers and fifth wheels, cruising up and down the campground’s roads, stopping here and there to scope out an RV site, and then driving on, searching for one just a little bit better.

Of course, here the sites are all basically about the same. You have two choices – in the trees or out in the open. And since it looks like all of the shaded sites have already been taken, that leaves just the sites out in the open, in the area where we are parked.

Still, we see one rig after another stopping while they check out a site, and then driving on. Sometimes they decide that what they have already seen is better than what they found next, for whatever reason, and they come back. If they’re lucky, somebody else hasn’t snatched the site already, and it’s still available.

But the fun isn’t over yet. If I had a camcorder, I could put together an entire segment of America’s Funniest Videos just filming people trying to park and hook up to the campground utilities. Oh, the things we have seen!

One guy took six or seven tries to get his trailer into a pull-through site, another tried to back in, rather than going around to pull through, and ended up almost sideways in the camp site. Where is Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School when we need him?

I walked down to the trash dumpster, and along the way I saw one travel trailer that had a spare tire under the hitch instead of a jack or stabilizer; another fellow was hooking up a green garden hose to the water bib; and another was on his roof,  with a tripod mounted portable TV dish anchored down by bungee cords, trying to find a satellite. I was tempted to ask him why he didn’t just put it on the ground like everybody else, but I was afraid he’d try to explain it to me.

And what’s a holiday at a campground without kids? LOTS of kids! Kids of every size. Small kids, big kids, loud kids, and louder kids. And even some pretty nice kids too. Or a least I thought so when a couple of boys were playing ball and stopped as I walked past, until I heard one tell the other “Hold on so you don’t hit that old guy.” Smart alec kids!

At least we shouldn’t have any smoky campfires to contend with, due the the area’s high fire danger.

But what the heck, it’s a holiday weekend. Campers have to have fun too. And by Monday night most of them will be gone, and life can return to normal.

Bad Nick wants nothing to do with the holiday crowds, so he stayed inside yesterday, writing a new Bad Nick Blog titled Justice Isn’t Just Blind, She’s Stupid Too! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If we quit voting, will they go away?

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In yesterday’s blog, I reported that my daughter Tiffany had lost over 85 pounds. Miss Terry informed me that the actual figure is 100 pounds. I stand corrected! Wow, what an achievement! Tiffany lost a whole person!

Tiffany wanted me to thank everybody for their birthday greetings and kind words in yesterday’s blog comments. You all really made her feel special.

The last few days, I’ve been chained to my desk getting the new issue of the Gypsy Journal ready to take to the printer on Monday, but yesterday we took a break for a while to run into town and take Tiffany and her family to dinner to celebrate her special day.

The dining options here are rather limited; we have a few fast food joints, some mediocre medium priced restaurants, some mediocre higher priced restaurants, and a handful of good places to eat. One of our favorite restaurants here has always been El Rancho in Pinetop.  No trip back to our old hometown is complete without at least one dinner at El Rancho, so when I asked Tiffany where she wanted to go, that was her first choice, and I was only too happy to agree. As always, the service was great and everything we ordered was delicious.

When we went to dinner last night, Tiffany made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anybody at the restaurant that it was her birthday, because if they find out, they plop a big sombrero on your head, sing to you, take your picture, and bring you a dessert of fried ice cream. Her dad may be a ham, but Tiffany prefers to keep a low profile.

I was very good and never said a word, but then just about the time we were finishing our dinner, three year old Destiny told our waitress “It’s my Mommy’s birthday!” Here is Tiffany sporting her new headgear! Pretty stylish, huh?

When I reported in Saturday’s blog that we had opened registration for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally, I said that we had 80 50 amp full hookup RV sites available. It looks like that may have been an error. Bob Patel at Elkhart Campground informed me that a few (I don’t know exactly how many)  of those sites will be rented to other campers during the rally.

Considering the fact that we have taken reservations for 31 of those 50 amp full hookup sites in just six days, if you absolutely have to have one, I wouldn’t want to delay too long in registering.  We also have a lot of 30 amp full hookup sites available for the rally, as well as 50 and 30 amp water and electric sites, so we’ll be able to accommodate almost any need.

I have been searching for campgrounds near Vail, Colorado, without much success. Miss Terry’s son, Casey, is getting married in Vail in mid-July, and so far, the closest parking option we have found is the Elks lodge in Silverthorne, about 30 miles away, which has a couple of 20 amp electric outlets. If anybody has spent any time in that area, we’re open to suggestions.

Bad Nick has been pretty quiet the last few days, but he pushed me away from the computer long enough to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled Cotton For Brains. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.

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Over the years I’ve had dozens, if not hundreds, of new and wannabe RVers ask me about personal safety on the road, and in spite of our own encounter with a burglar last December, I always tell them that they have a lot more to worry about from the fool hurtling down the highway toward them riding three tons of steel, than they do from a criminal.

Our own experience aside, violent crime falls way, way low on the list of threats we RVers face every day. Pure ignorance, carelessness, and neglect on the part of others present much more danger.

For example, check out the tires on an RV that my friend Dennis Hill has on his blog post for March 21st. Can you imagine what could happen if one of the tires on this RV were to blow while he was passing or coming at you on the highway? Pretty scary, huh? But consider what might happen to any bystander if one of those tires explodes while sitting still. The shrapnel from a tire explosion can be deadly. That’s why you will see tire safety cages in many big truck shops. 

A campground is about the safest place you can be, in terms of crime. But that doesn’t mean you are insulated from danger.  We have seen campers start fires and then walk away from them, or go inside to bed without putting them out, even on breezy or downright windy days. We have watched many big rig owners driving down campground roads at rates of speed that I wouldn’t even drive my van in such close quarters. We have also seen frayed extension cords stretched out on wet ground to reach electrical pedestals.

At an RV rally in California years ago, we met an elderly couple that made me want to stay off the highway until I knew that they were at least a hundred miles away. The husband could barely see and was legally blind, so his wife, who did not know how to drive, sat close beside him in a folding chair and helped him stay in the correct lane while serving as his eyes!

At the same rally, we met another couple who pulled a huge fifth wheel with a 3/4 ton pickup truck. The husband had injured his ankle and was getting around on crutches, so I was helping him get the rig ready to travel after the rally. Once we had his fifth wheel connected and secured, I could not find a place to connect the trailer’s electrical cable to the truck. I asked the gentleman where to plug it in, and he told me he never had used it. I told him that without the cable, his trailer brakes wouldn’t work, and he replied “Oh, it takes a long time to stop this thing!”

This couple had purchased the trailer in the Portland, Oregon area, did not have a truck capable of towing (or stopping) it, had no trailer brakes, and had been driving all over the western United States for five or six months! How they managed not to kill themselves or someone else to that point amazed me!

Now, you can say that it was reprehensible for an RV salesman to sell somebody a trailer that size and tell them that their truck was capable of pulling it, and for not making sure that they knew how to set it up for towing. But the RVing community has to take some responsibility for themselves, too. Anybody who buys an RV and takes off down the highway without educating themselves about their rig and how to safely operate it has no business on the road. But there are a lot of them out there!

People don’t pose the only threats. We have encountered pit bulls running loose in an RV park, and even had a raccoon with distemper wander into our campsite once. And on and on.

So does that mean that RVing is not safe? Well, yeah, but then again, life isn’t safe! None of us are going to get out of it alive. But overall, I’d rather live the RV lifestyle than spend my days any other way. I just try to keep my eyes open to the hazards around me, no matter where I am.

Thought For The Day – Dream big, and dare to fail.

We spent part of yesterday visiting with Smokey and Pam Ridgely at Mark Twain Landing, which has an RV park and a huge water park. Smokey and Pam are workamping there this summer, and we wanted to see them before we left the area.

Bob and Molly Pinner had moved to Mark Twain Landing from the Corps of Engineers campground, and we ran into them at the RV park’s restaurant, where we joined them for lunch.

Paul, the restaurant’s cook, really knows how to turn out some great food, and our waitress, Tracy Grove, was an absolute delight. She is pretty, funny, and kept us laughing during our meal.

After lunch, Smokey gave us a behind the scenes tour of the water park. It has several pools, including a 500,000 gallon wave pool that uses huge fans to create waves that would be great for body surfing. There are also water slides, a “river” for floating on tubes, and wading pools for the little ones. Not to mention a lot of very pretty young ladies in bikinis. I’m not sure how much they are paying Smokey to hang out at the pool all day, but I suspect he’d actually pay the park instead, based upon some of the “scenery” around the pool.

Driving back to our campground, I realized that I had I goofed. When we arrived at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground we paid for a week, and for some reason I had it in my mind that we were due to leave today. It was not until I happened to glance at the tag hanging on the rear view mirror of our van that I realized that we were actually supposed to leave on Friday! Oops! A classic example of cranial-rectal inversion on my part.

Checkout time is 4 p.m., and it was about 3 p.m. when I realized my mistake, so we stopped at the ranger station and asked if we could pay for an extra night. The volunteer on duty said no problem, we were in a non-reservable site, so nobody was waiting for us to leave so they could come in.

Later in the afternoon we drove to the campground at Mark Twain Lake to visit with Ron and Brenda Speidel, who are camp hosting there for the month of June. They had a steady stream of campers coming in to register, and others stopping by to buy firewood.

Ron and Brenda enjoy volunteering at state parks, and it’s a pretty good gig. The work is easy, the hours are flexible, and they get a full hookup site in exchange for their work. So they get a month’s free camping in exchange for a few hours of light work every week registering campers. They don’t clean the restrooms or mow any grass, just check campers in, sell firewood, and answer questions. They said the park is busy on the weekends, but Monday through Thursday, they pretty much have the place to themselves.

With budgets cuts everywhere, state parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and other facilities nationwide are always in need of help. If you are interested in learning more about volunteering, Ron and Brenda will be presenting an excellent seminar on it at our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally in Celina, Ohio September 28 – October 2. Make your plans to attend.

Thought For The Day – Having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.

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