I’m sure glad we moved into the Indoor Vendor area, because it was still raining when we went to bed last night! At least we are parked on the road. Almost everybody else here at Escapade is parked on grass, or what was grass before spinning tires churned it into mud. The local tow trucks are making a fortune pulling people out.

Of course, part of the problem is that people tend to panic when it gets wet. If they would just sit tight until things dry out (and the weatherman promises they will be drier by Friday when the rally ends), everybody would be better off. But people want to move early to avoid getting stuck, and in the process they create a giant mud hole and then everybody gets stuck!

The big majority of the people here are fulltimers, so it’s not like most of them have to rush off someplace. The rally ends on Friday. They could stay here in beautiful Sedalia and enjoy the town for a day or two and leave after the weekend and have no problems getting out.

Sedalia has a lot to offer, and we love the charming old downtown section, which looks like a time capsule from 50 years ago. If it were not for the modern automobiles parked on the streets, it would be easy to imagine that you had been transported back in time to a typical small town America Main Street.

I often mention the many vendors who help make up our extended family of RV gypsies, so I thought for this blog I would include a few pictures to put faces with the names.

This first couple needs no introduction to most RVers. While they are not vendors, they are icons in the fulltime RV world, Kay and Joe Peterson, founders of the Escapees RV Club.

And here is my good buddy Mac McCoy, from Fire and Life Safety, and a familiar name to blog readers. Mac and I go way back, and he’s been a good friend for many years.

This pretty lady is Carol Hill, co-owner of the RV Driving School, along with her husband Dennis. Carol loves dancing, and gives line dancing lessons at many RV events.

Next up is another familiar name to blog readers, my dear friend Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, talking with Jim Beletti, head honcho of the Heartland Owners RV Club.

John and Lexa Comstock own Big Rig RV Accessories, and sell all kinds of top quality products to keep your RV looking good as new, when Lexa is not busy doing acrobatics and back flips from lawn chairs.

We just met Joe and Susan Briggs from Uniquely RV, vendors for neat portable solar lampposts for your favorite campsite.

Ken and Marilyn Murphy from Coil N Wrap have been vending at RV rallies for a long time and have a loyal following of customers.

Patsy Collins was holding down the SMI Braking Systems booth while husband Reggie was off gallivanting somewhere.

While not vendors, we have known and loved Sami and Earl Aeverman for years. They were so generous as to offer us the use of their lot in Aransas Pass, Texas for the five weeks we were there this past winter.

And last in the photo show, but always first in my heart is my own dear Miss Terry, pictured visiting with another longtime friend, Oz Oszman in our booth.

Thought For The Day – I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

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I have to admit that I am very pleasantly surprised at the reaction to our new Digital Edition of the Gypsy Journal. In the first 24 hours after I wrote in yesterday’s blog that subscriptions were available, we received 30 orders. I can see my pal Chris Guld over at Geeks on Tour just simpering and saying “I told you so!” I just hate it when she’s right.

Overall, the feedback we’ve received has been great, but we can’t please everybody. If you read yesterday’s blog comments, you will see that a couple of readers don’t see the value, and that’s just fine. As I’ve said before, nobody has to spend a penny with us to be able to read the blog and our regular website.

But I did find it interesting that one person seems to think that not only what we do is worthless, but that we seem to be rolling in money. This same person has asked for a discounted subscription price several times in the past, because he’s on a fixed income. I wish somebody would fix my income, because the darned thing is broken! It never seems to stretch far enough!

Folks, I know that some of you have heard me say this before, but I’m going to say it again. Yes, we make a profit. No, I don’t apologize for that. We are a business. We do not have a retirement income or investments we live off of. Everything we earn is from the products and services we create and from my speaking gigs. We’re not getting rich, but we’re paying the bills and having a lot of fun in the process.

I write and publish nonfiction information. There are only a certain number of free campgrounds, or dump stations, or whatever in the country. There is going to be duplication in the information that we, or the folks who produce Day’s End, or Don Wright from Cottage Publications sell. Yes, you can find a lot of the same info we produce online, if you put in enough time to research it. Or, you could be out RVing instead!

Okay, enough of that nonsense, let’s move on.

We’re leaving Show Low, Arizona today headed east. We’ll take Interstate 40 across northern Arizona and New Mexico, and we’ll probably stop for the night at one of the casinos near Albuquerque. The Route 66 Casino at mile marker 140 has a pretty good buffet, and is usually our first choice when we’re traveling in that part of New Mexico.  

Goodbyes are always hard, and it’s going to be very hard to say goodbye to my daughter Tiffany, as it always is. I have to admit that I feel guilty when I see the pain in my little girl’s eyes when we leave, and I always have a lump in my throat for the first few hundred miles, and I want to turn this big old bus around and go back for one more long hug.

But Tiffany knows her old man is an unconventional guy with a bad case of hitch itch that needs to be scratched. (She actually suggested that maybe if I put cream or ointment on it, it might get better!) And I thank her for allowing me to fulfill this wanderlust that I was born with, and not putting me on a guilt trip every time we depart.

The good news is that the road runs both ways, and we can (and will) always come back again.  

Thought For The Day – In a lunatic world, the mad are better equipped than the sane.

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This is our last day here in Show Low, Arizona, so today we’ll be taking care of some last minute details like filling the gas tank for our generator, saying goodbye to our friends here, and mailing out some orders that just came in.

We have really enjoyed our time here in our old hometown, and we know there will be a lot of tears all around when we say goodbye to my daughter Tiffany and her family. Leaving the people we love is always the hardest part of the fulltime RV lifestyle. I know Tiffany would love to have us stay here forever, but she understands how much we love our life on the road, and how much we long to be on the move again.

We have found over the years that sitting still is always expensive for us. Not just in terms of camping costs, but also in terms of lost revenue. When we are moving around the country, vending at RV rallies, and dropping off bundles of sample issues of the Gypsy Journal at RV parks, we see a steady flow of orders coming in for new subscriptions, books, CDs, etc. But when we stay in any one place for a while, that drops off significantly.

We’ve been in Arizona since January, pretty much in three places all of that time, and while our subscription renewals are steady, orders for new subscriptions and our other products have suffered.

Speaking of subscriptions, here is the announcement many of you have been waiting for. We are now offering the Gypsy Journal online, as many of you have requested.

As you know, we have been experimenting with several different options to make this work, and thanks to my pal Chris Guld (who from this day forward shall be known as Mama Geek) of Geeks on Tour, we finally have a solution that will work.

The full paper, in PDF format, will be available online, and you can either read it online or download it to your computer for later reading at your convenience. Readers who subscribe to the online edition will be e-mailed a user name and password when a new issue is uploaded, and a link to the new issue. Readers can search for keywords, and zoom in and out to read a page easily. I’m excited about this new option for our readers, and I know many of you will be, too.

If you are already a Gypsy Journal subscriber, and would like to convert your subscription to the digital edition, just send me an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net and I’ll make the necessary changes in our records. If you are not already a subscriber and would like to subscribe to the digital edition, you can click this link Digital Subscription. A one year subscription is $20, and a two year subscription is $35. New subscriptions to the digital edition will begin with the next issue of the Gypsy Journal.

Someone asked how we can control readers who would share their user name and password with others to cheat us out of subscription costs. We can’t, but I believe that most people are basically honest, and I have too many real things to worry about in life to lose much sleep over the few bad apples that may exist.

To see how the new digital edition will look, go to the top right side of this page and you will see a tab that says Digital Edition. Click it and follow the instructions provided.

And for our readers who do not want to go digital, don’t worry, this WILL NOT replace our normal printed edition of the Gypsy Journal. For you, everything will remain the same.

Thought For The Day – Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway!

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I’ve always been a dinosaur. I like being a dinosaur. It’s comfortable. It’s easy. It makes life much less complicated. I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t do text messages, and I don’t speak geek.

But lately I’ve noticed a certain amount of geekness slipping into my life. I blame a lot of it on Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour. She’s a carrier, sort of the Typhoid Mary of Geekdom.

It’s an insidious thing, this geekness. You start out just dipping a toe into the waters of technology to see what it feels like, and the next thing you know, you’re in over your head.

I was perfectly happy running my little travel rag, and then someone convinced me that I needed a website to help promote the Gypsy Journal. That took a while to get a handle on, but it worked out okay and over time our website has become very popular. But just like rabbits, one website begets two, and two begets three, and before I knew it, I had four websites.

When the blogging thing came along, I thought it was nonsense. Who in the world would waste their time reading something like that? Well, you know what happened there. I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now.

Enter Chris Guld, who hounded me into converting my blog to the WordPress format by giving me a hundred reasons why it would be easier to produce and format, would reach a higher readership, and allow the readers to post responses, creating a dialogue.

The next thing I knew, Chris was telling me that a lot of our readers would like an online edition of the Gypsy Journal. We’ll never stop publishing a printed version, but I finally caved in and uploaded an electronic edition of the current issue to a company who handles digital publications. It looks pretty good, and yesterday I sent out a link to it to several of our readers to get their feedback. I’d like to let you all take a look, but since this is just a test run, the company hosting it will only allow a limited number of views.

Here’s where I am with this so far: The cost is extremely expensive, and we’d need at least 500 subscribers to the electronic edition to make it financially viable. The feedback I have received so far is mixed. Some people liked it, some said they would not be bothered, and some said they would read it, but it would take some getting used to.

Do we have 500 readers out there who want to spend $20 a year for an electronic edition of the Gypsy Journal? A lot of you keep asking for it, even demanding. I guess it’s time to put up or shut up. If you’d step up to the plate and subscribe, send me an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net and let me know, and we’ll see what the response is.

As for you readers who don’t want to give up your printed paper, no worries. If we do go with an electronic edition, it will only be an alternative way to subscribe, and the printed version will still remain just as it is.

Okay, you’d think that now that Chris has me blogging and looking at online publishing, she’d be happy. Guess again! At the Affinity rally in Albuquerque last week, she told me that if I didn’t Twitter, I was one step above Cro-Magnon man. I’d heard of Twitter, and like blogging, I wasn’t impressed at first (or second) glance. Twitter is a bunch of geeks sending each other short messages telling each other what they are doing now. Huh? Who cares if I’m going into McDonald’s for lunch? And it’s nobody’s business if I have a magazine in hand and am headed for the bathroom. Who cares?

Apparently, a lot of people do! Some people have thousands of followers on Twitter. Chris and her hubby Jim explained to me that while, yes, there is a lot of nonsense on Twitter, it can also be a good marketing tool and a way to stay in touch with our friends and readers, and to update them on what we’re up to. If I post a new blog, or start a new project, or whatever, I can post with a “Tweet” on Twitter and get immediate responses. So now you can follow us on Twitter under the user name GypsyJournal (no spaces). But don’t expect me to tell you where I’m having lunch (unless you’re buying, of course). And when I head back to the library, just leave me alone, okay? That’s my time!

So there it is. I went to bed a dinosaur one night, and woke up the next day and had websites, blogs, an iPod, a GPS that talks to me, a Kindle e-book reader, and now I’m Tweeting on Twitter.

But if I were honest, I’d admit that it’s really not Chris Guld’s fault. I have nobody to blame but myself, when it comes right down to it. I’ve seen all of those Just Say No commercials, and I knew better. But those darned geeks have such neat toys! Who can resist? I need to find a meeting where I can stand up and get it off my chest.

“Hello, my name is Nick, and I’m a geek.”

Thought For The Day – Some folks wear their halos much too tight.

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The elk are on the move here in the White Mountains of Arizona. Yesterday while Miss Terry was stuffing envelopes with the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, I ran some errands and saw a herd of five or six elk in a field just off State Highway 260 in Lakeside. When I pulled back into Show Low Lake Campground, two more large cow elk were standing in the driveway. Elk are huge animals, and every year unfortunate motorists have collisions with at least one or two of them as they migrate from lower elevations to higher mountain meadows as the weather warms up.

The White Mountains, our former home, is a forest wonderland that contains the world’s largest stand of Ponderosa pine trees, and is dotted with lakes teeming with trout and other freshwater game fish. In fact, the state record walleye was caught right here at Show Low Lake, where we are camping. The lake routinely rewards anglers who know how to catch them with walleye over ten pounds. And you thought Arizona was all deserts and rattlesnakes!

It is always nice to come back to our old hometown, but poor Miss Terry pays a price for it. Her allergies have really kicked up, and she is miserable with itchy eyes and sneezing. A lot of people who never had allergies come to Arizona and find that they do indeed have them. From the deserts to the high country, the folks who sell Zyrtec and other allergy medications do a booming business this time of year.

After I returned to the bus yesterday afternoon, I spent some time working on my websites while Terry made a huge dent in the number of envelopes to be filled. Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour has designed a neat graphic link to my new Honor A Veteran website, and I added it to my Gypsy Journal, Motorcycle Travel Online, and Publishing 4 Profit websites, along with the Todays Hero Blog.

When that was done, I answered several e-mails from readers, and reluctantly had to turn away two vendors who wanted to come to our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally, because we already have folks signed up with the same products. Both were disappointed, but understanding when I explained that our rallies are small and we want our vendors to have a good show, so we do not allow duplication of products among our vendors. We’ve already got a lot of registrations in for the rally, so be sure you get yours in too!

In the evening we took a break and went to my daughter Tiffany’s house, where son-in-law Jim grilled hamburgers and we had a good time playing with our two granddaughters. Those little ones sure do have a lot of energy! They can wear a fat old grandpa out in no time at all!

We’ll spend the rest of the weekend getting the new issue ready to mail out Monday. A cold front is bringing more wind to the area, and we’re hoping that it will pass on through before we have to drive back to the mail service in Flagstaff Monday morning.  

Once the mailing is finished, we’ll have some time to relax and play before we have to hit the road in mid-May, headed for the Escapees Escapade rally in Sedalia, Missouri.

Thought For The Day – Life not only begins at forty, it also begins to show.

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