We were talking to a couple who are considering extended RV travel, and one of their concerns was safety. They have heard urban legends about RVers being attacked while they spend the night at places like Wal-Mart, small town parks, and rest areas.

We assured them that those kind of things almost never happen and not to spend a lot of time worrying about them. As I told them, they are in more danger from a traffic accident then they ever will be from a criminal, as long as they use common sense, keep their doors locked, and don’t spend any nights parked in an inner city ghetto. We have spent many, many nights dry camping in every corner of this country, in truck stops, highway rest areas, commercial parking lots, even in wide pullouts on back roads miles from nowhere. We have never felt threatened.

However, that does not mean that any of us are ever completely safe. You never know what that idiot coming down the road at you, riding a ton of steel might do, You can be as vigilant as is humanly possible and still become a victim in an instant, as these pictures show.

One of our subscribers sent me the photo on the left the other day. She was driving down a city street when a car driven by a seventeen year old girl who was text messaging somebody on her cell phone crossed the center line and hit her head on. Fortunately her airbag deployed and she was not injured.

Of the four girls in the other car, the front seat passenger had some cuts and bruises, but that was all, fortunately. Our friend said what really ticked her off was that the girl driving the other car never apologized, and never showed any concern for her own passenger. She was too busy being freaked out because her cell phone got broken in the accident! And there are airheads like that driving on every street and highway in America!

I took the photo to the right after a near miss I was involved in a few years ago in Tucson. I was driving down the street when the light gray car in the foreground roared passed me, driving halfway on the sidewalk. Two blocks down the street he ran a red light and slammed into the white car, which burst into flames. Fortunately, the older couple in the white car escaped uninjured. As the story turned out, the driver of the gray car had stolen it and was making his getaway. He jumped out and fled the scene on foot.  

No, I sleep just fine at night, wherever we are parked. It’s driving down the highway that sometimes scares the hell out of me!

Thought For The Day – You’re getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster.

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Boy, can I draw a crowd! As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, when we arrived at the Elks campground Wednesday we had it all to ourselves except for a sailboat on a trailer. Then shortly after we got parked a motorhome pulled in. Yesterday morning three big motorhomes came in together. The place is filling up, and with yesterdays temperature in Phoenix topping out at 104 degrees, I’m sure more folks are headed for the high country.

RVers are facing a new challenge from the state of Maine, which has slipped a bill in under the radar that makes it illegal to park overnight in any commercial parking lot anywhere in the state! Not in a WalMart, not even in a truck stop. As the law is written, even if your son owns a business and gives you permission to stay in his parking lot overnight, you are subject to a $100 fine! Here is a link to more information on the Escapee website.

We all need to send e-mails and letters to the state of Maine to let them know that we disagree with this nonsense and will take our tourist dollars elsewhere if they insist on making us feel unwelcome.

We often stay in commercial parking lots overnight and have dinner in a nearby restaurant on our way to a destination, where we then spend our money with a local campground. But I don’t want to pay some campground owner $20 or more a night (usually a lot more in places like Maine) just to sleep in my own self-contained RV.

Folks, I need your help. In the last two weeks I have received e-mails from a number of subscribers who spent the winter traveling away from home, and did not send us their winter address, which resulted in them not getting their Gypsy Journal. We try to accommodate our readers by sending out replacement copies if we still have them available, even though this adds up to quite a bit of additional expense to us over the course of a year.

For example, just this week we have sent out several envelopes with two back issues each in them, at a cost of $2.19 each. When you consider that a subscription is $20 a year, and that this time of year we usually have anywhere from 50 to 100 subscribers who contact us asking for the back issues they missed because they did not send us a change of address, it adds up.

Since we run our business from the road, storage is a problem and many times we just don’t have the missing issues to send them. Then people get mad at us because they didn’t get their paper.

Please, please, please send us the temporary address if you are doing the snowbird routine! The post office will not forward the Gypsy Journal unless you upgrade to First Class, which is an extra $5/year. Just send us a quick note or e-mail when you head for your snowbird destination, or back home in the spring. It will really help us a lot.

Thought For The Day – Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

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