It was one year ago yesterday that we had the most frightening experience in our lives as fulltime RVers. Longtime readers may remember that it was on December 4, 2009 that we returned to our Winnebago, which was parked in the campground at an RV repair facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and came face to face with an armed burglar inside our motorhome.

By the time I realized what was happening, I was already out of our van and approaching the door of the RV, and he was pointing a gun at me. In the confrontation that followed, I managed to slam the RV’s door on his hand and disarmed the intruder. He got away, only to show up at a hospital three days later with seven broken bones in his wrist and hand.

As it turned out, he was a career criminal out on bail on other charges, and with outstanding warrants. He’s back in prison where he belongs, and will be for a long time, or until the next parole board believes his sob story about how he grew up poor and was victimized by life and the system.

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Besides some things that were missing, the intruder and whoever had been with him trashed the inside of our RV, throwing electronic components on the floor and stomping on them, slashing furniture, and ripping down window blinds.

A frustrating battle with our insurance company followed, but we finally prevailed, and were able to put our motorhome and our lives back together. Living well really is the best revenge.

What a difference a year makes! Back then, we spent the next week freezing our butts off in Indiana while repairs were made to our RV so we could leave. Now we’re in Florida, where a cold front is coming through, and temperatures are predicted to dip as low as 29 degrees in the next few days. So yes, we’ll be freezing our butts off again, but if that’s the worst that can happen, we can deal with it.

Our lives have gone on, and while we have put the burglary behind us, we still feel violated, and disgusted with a system that had let the creep out of prison early so he could prey on us and others. We don’t fear traveling in our RV, and we still dry camp frequently. Inside our motorhome, we feel secure, but Terry and I are both a little apprehensive when we return to our coach after dark, unless we’re parked in a campground we know.

We had a motion detector light installed at our door, and while we refuse to live in fear, we are not nearly as complacent as we had become. We realize that while what happened to us can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time, the odds against the average RVer ever having such an experience are very, very slim.  We still feel that this is the greatest lifestyle in the world, and every new day is an adventure, whether we’re camping in the desert of Arizona and listening to the coyotes singing us to sleep, or parked under a palm tree in Florida enjoying a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

Thought For The Day – If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics are all wrong.

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Yesterday we had hoped to sleep in a bit, to catch up on all of the sleep we had missed during the rally, but we were both awake by 9 a.m., which was still better than the early hours we had been getting up during rally week.

It would have been nice to just relax all day long after our hectic week, but while we are busy with a rally, life goes on, and so do our other responsibilities to our business. So we had a lot of work to catch up on. I spent some time answering e-mails that had backed up, and updated both the Small Town Festivals calendar and the RV Rally calendar on our RV website. Miss Terry spent most of the day resolving the books for the rally, so we can settle our bill with Elkhart Campground. Hopefully we’ll have enough left over to get out of town afterward

There is a tremendous amount of paperwork associated with any RV rally, and it was compounded this time around because some attendees made their reservations through us, while others paid the campground directly. So Terry and Gita have been trying to get everything sorted out so we know who paid who. There were also several people who made their reservations through us, but then decided to take a weekly or monthly rate at the campground, so Terry has to get that all straightened out and issue refunds to those who paid us and then the campground. If we ever hold a rally at a campground again, we’ll just collect the rally fee and have the attendees make their reservations directly with the campground, to avoid all of this confusion.

Greg White has had the bay doors off the passenger side of his American Eagle motorhome for the last week or so, because Michele Henry at Phoenix Commercial Paint was repairing damage from an unfortunate encounter with a boulder out west a while back. During the early afternoon, he picked them up from Michele, and I helped him reinstall them on his motorhome. My contribution to the project consisted of helping to hold the doors in place while Greg bolted them to their struts.

During the day, several people stopped in to say hello, to thank us for all of the fun they had at the rally, and to say goodbye because they were heading out.

Our mail arrived, as well as a UPS shipment of three boxes of my books from the printer, inventory for our vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show. Included in the mail was the contract for our Western Gypsy Gathering rally, which will be March 7-11 at the fairgrounds in Yuma, Arizona. Make your plans now to attend. I’ll be posting a rally registration page in a few weeks.

For those who really want to plan ahead, our next Eastern rally will be September 26-30 at the Mercer County Fairgrounds in Celina, Ohio.

About the time we finished going through the mail, Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour came over to say hello. Chris and Jim are going to spend the winter in Florida, and we made a tentative date to meet up with them at the Peace River NACO preserve for some kayaking while we’re in the area.

About the time Chris left, our pals Mike and Elaine Loscher arrived to take us out to dinner. These two are such great friends and supporters of our work that we should have been the ones buying them dinner, but they insisted.

Back at Elkhart Campground, I was getting really droopy, so I took a nap on the couch. Later in the evening Stu and Donna (Froggi) McNichol came over for a visit. We really enjoy these two, and never get enough time with them. They left about 10:30, and a couple of minutes later, Elkhart Campground owner Gita Patel called and said she wanted to stop in and give Miss Terry some delicious soup and rice cakes, a traditional Indian dish she wanted to share. We visited with Gita for a while, and when she left, I wrote the blog and got it ready to post. By the time that was done, we were both tired and ready to call an end to our day of “rest.”

Thought For The Day – One father teaches more than a hundred schoolmasters.

Somebody please note for future reference that I was up and outside of our motorhome before the sun was up Monday morning. While that may not be quite as momentous an occasion as when man first walked on the moon, in the little universe that revolves around me, it’s pretty darned close!

Miss Terry and I got the registration building opened up, and Mike and Elaine Loscher were right behind us, ready to help get everybody signed in for the rally. Mike and Elaine are such great friends and loyal supporters, we don’t know what we’d do without them.

Here is Mike, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to greet the day! I never completely understand anybody who can smile that early in the morning. There has to be something terribly wrong in his mind!

Before long the folks started filing in to pick up their name badges and door prize drawing tickets. We saw a lot of friends who have been at previous Gypsy Journal rallies, and also quite a few new faces who are joining us for the first time.

Here are Connie Anderson and Elaine Loscher, manning the registration table. It’s okay, Connie, I have that same lost and confused expression on my face a lot of the time!

And what’s a Gypsy Journal rally without a lot of fun and laughter. I’m not sure I even want to know what set Dave Damon and Connie Anderson off in this picture, but knowing these two, it couldn’t have been pretty!

In the vendor room, things were starting to get busy, as folks shopped for all kinds of RV goodies and gadgets. Bill and Janet Adams from Internet Anywhere took advantage of a quiet moment between customers to catch their breath. From automatic rooftop satellite dishes to wireless routers, Bill and Janet have just what you need to get connected on the road.

Gayle Longwell was busy manning the Passport America booth. Passport America is the nation’s largest discount camping club, and we have belonged since before we hit the road fulltime, over twelve years ago.

Jean Damon sells 303 products to help protect your RV and to keep it looking like new, and she is also an excellent masseuse. After our rally in Ohio last year, Jean gave me a massage, and I was so relaxed that I could hardly walk back to our Winnebago afterward!

Russ and Debbie Davis are a fun couple who sell all kinds of personalized items, including these great insulated tote bags. They donated some of them as door prizes at the rally.

We met Gay Miller from Coyote Sales at our very first RV rally, years ago, and have been friends ever since. Gay and her husband Ben sell Pressure Pro tire monitoring systems, Wilson trucker antennas and amplifiers for cell phones, routers, and a lot of other great high tech goodies.

At 3 p.m. we had our Welcome get together, followed by an introduction to all of our vendors. Then, after a short break, Dennis Hill, Denny Orr, Frank Hinman, Mac McCoy, and Daryl Lawrence sat in on our Ask the Experts panel, in which the crowd could ask questions about every aspect of RVing, and take advantage of a couple of lifetimes worth of accumulated knowledge.

At 7 p.m. we drew names for door prizes. Greg White spent over two weeks collecting door prizes from local merchants, mostly restaurants, and we passed most of them out, to give people time to use them before the rally ends. We have a lot more door prizes left to go!

By the time the door prizes were over, Terry and I were both really dragging. We grabbed a quick dinner, then spent what was left of the evening writing the blog, printing some of our RV guides and booklets, and were in bed much earlier than usual.

Today we’ll finish registering any late arrivals, start our seminars, and this evening will be our Hoosier Honey Beauty Contest. I guarantee that will be a hoot!

Thought For The Day – Marriage is a relationship where one person is always right, and the other is the husband.

Please be careful where you walk, because my butt’s dragging and I don’t want you to step on it! And our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally doesn’t even officially start until today!

Yesterday was the early vendor set-up day, and my friend Mike Loscher and myself were over in the big building a little after 9 a.m., getting a couple of final details wrapped up, before we opened the doors and let the vendors in to start getting their booths ready for the rally.

It’s great to see so many of our vendor friends here for the rally. We’ve worked alongside many of them for years while operating our own vendor booth at RV rallies coast to coast, so we understand what vendors need, and try very hard to provide it for them at our events.

Here is our pal Daryl Lawrence from Lawrence RV Accessories. Daryl has a brand new item, the Tire Traker Tire Pressure Monitoring System, as well as the excellent Progressive Industries Electrical Management Systems, which we have used for years, both in our MCI bus conversion, and now in our Winnebago diesel pusher.

You can see all kinds of goodies at an RV rally, from safety items like the automatic engine bay fire suppression systems that my pal Mac McCoy sells, to camping chairs and other goodies to make your RV travels more fun and more comfortable.

Flags Galore is offering every kind of flag you could ever want to find, in every size imaginable.

Dwane and Janet Trannum from Almost Heaven Micro Fibre spent most of the day hauling their inventory in and stocking their booth. I sure hope they sell a lot, because I don’t want to have to help them carry it back out to their van!

John and Karen Knoll stopped by the RVSEF weighing site here at Elkhart Campground to have Rick Lang weigh their truck and fifth wheel before they parked on their assigned RV site for the rally.

By the end of the day, everybody had worked hard, and most of the vendors were set up and ready to go. I locked the building up about 5 p.m., and then Dennis Haddix from Makarios RV and his pretty wife (whose name escapes me, I’m afraid) pulled in. They had the bed of their Itasca motorhome covered with inventory for their booth, so I opened the building back up long enough for them to unload enough that they could get through the night. Dennis is also the founder of ChatRV.com, a relatively new online forum for the RV community.

Of course, no RV rally has officially started until Red and Beth from Too Crazy Ladies have their booth set up and open for business!

Today is the official registration day, and Miss Terry and her crew of hardworking volunteers will be busy getting everybody checked in, passing out name badges, and answering questions.

One nice thing about having the rally at a campground instead of a fairgrounds is that we don’t have to have a parking crew. The folks just stop at the RV park office and check in, and Bob and Gita send them to their RV site.

When we were visiting with campground owners Bob and Gita Patel late yesterday afternoon, I think they were feeling a bit overwhelmed, but also delighted. They said that this rally will be the first time in all of the years that they have owned Elkhart Campground that they will be completely full! That should help their bottom line a little bit!

Thought For The Day – Count your life by smiles, not tears. Count your age by friends, not years.

I spent quite a bit of time over the weekend finalizing things for our upcoming Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally in Elkhart, Indiana. Can you believe that it’s less than a month away? It seems like we were just wrapping up our Western rally in Yuma, and here we are halfway across the country getting ready to do it all over again!

Yesterday, I e-mailed info letters out to all of the rally participants whom I have e-mail addresses for. We had several that bounced, even though we checked their addresses against their original reservations. So if you have registered for the rally and didn’t get a letter, it’s either because we have a bad e-mail address for you, or none at all. Please send me a quick e-mail and I’ll get a letter off to you.

Of course, no project is perfect, especially if I have anything to do with it. I had the wrong starting dates for the rally on the first letter I sent out. The rally starts on Monday, August 30 and ends on Friday, September 3rd. If your letter has an incorrect date, my apologies.

I talked to Gita Patel at Elkhart Campground yesterday. They have been busy upgrading a lot of their RV sites to 50 amp full hookups, but they are not sure the job will be completely done before the rally. So at this time, all we have left for sites that we can guarantee, are 30 amp water and electric, and a handful of 20 amp water and electric. If you register and more full hookup sites become available, we can upgrade you once you arrive at the rally, if you wish. But again, there is no guarantee.

Camping for the rally is for four nights, from Monday, August 30 to Thursday, September 2. You can arrive early or stay later if you wish, but those arrangements have to be made directly with Elkhart Campground at (574) 264-2914.  They will not take your reservation for the rally dates, that is handled through us. But for before or after the rally, they will be happy to reserve a site for you.

I also arranged for our entertainment for Wednesday night after the pizza party. Whitt and Judy McKinney, who perform as the McKinney Washtub Two, come highly recommended by several people we know, including Larry and Melissa Beahm of One More Time music, who have performed at our last two Eastern rallies. I think it’s going to be a fun show. Check out the Music Page on their website for sound clips of some of their original songs.

I talked to my buddy Greg White, who pulled into Elkhart Campground yesterday. Greg said the place is really busy, and quite a few folks are already there just waiting for the rally to begin. We’re really looking forward to seeing Greg and his pretty wife Jan again, because like I said, Jan is really pretty, and because I have a lot of projects for Greg to work on.

We also spent a couple of hours last night filling orders that came in with our last mail delivery, or from our website. I’ll be making a post office run this morning to get them in the mail.

It’s been a busy weekend, and it’s only going to get busier as we get closer to the rally dates!

Thought For The Day – Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?

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