Yesterday was the calm before the storm in a couple of ways. After a harried week of putting the new issue of the paper together and getting it over to the printer in Flagstaff, we had a day to do absolutely nothing. And that’s just about all we did!

Miss Terry is still dealing with a combination of a cold and allergies, and her energy level is below normal. So we slept in, and then puttered around the rest of the morning, checking e-mail, cruising the internet, and watching the boob tube.

In the afternoon, we drove the twelve miles into Show Low from Juniper Ridge RV Resort to do some banking, and then stopped by my daughter’s house for a visit. Three year old Destiny and I played with the Wii, while she showed me all of her birthday presents, and brought out her pet guinea pig for me to admire. When seven year old Hailey got home from school, Grandma Terry helped her with her homework. And, of course, there was a lot of hugging and cuddling with little girls to be done.

When we left Tiffany’s, we stopped at Pizza Hut for dinner. The local franchise has a special going on, and we had their Pepperoni Lovers, which was delicious. Then it was back to the motorhome, where we had a new reservation waiting for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

I sent out the rally confirmation, as well as confirmation for our vendor booth space at the Pennsylvania RV & Camping Show in Hershey, in September.  This will be our first time to be vendors at this mega show, and we’re looking forward to it.

The rest of the evening was just as quiet. I wrote my RV blog post, and Bad Nick posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled I’m Gonna Be Rich, we watched some TV and caught up on some reading.

That was the calm, and today the storm begins. We have to drive back to Flagstaff, pick up the new issue of the paper and return to Show Low. The next few days will be a whirlwind of stuffing envelopes and getting the papers ready to mail out to our subscribers. 

I said in the first paragraph of this blog that it was the calm before the storm in a couple of ways. While the weather has been pretty nice the last few days, starting today we have a cold front coming through northern Arizona, with wind, rain, and even snow at higher elevations. It should be fun driving to Flagstaff and back.

Thought For The Day -  Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.

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Yesterday morning Terry’s parents, Pete and Bess Weber, stopped by to visit on their way home from church. Pete had only seen our Winnebago once, a few evenings earlier, but it was after dark, and he couldn’t see much of the outside. So he spent some time walking around checking it out before coming inside, and I think he was impressed.

A few minutes after Pete and Bess arrived, Terry’s sister Lisa also stopped in to say hello. I really like Lisa and always enjoy visiting with her. She’s a lot of fun, has a good sense of humor, and is drop dead gorgeous too! What a combination!

As I wrote in Sunday’s blog, we got an engine bay fire suppression unit and refrigerator compartment fire extinguisher from Mac McCoy at Fire and Life Safety a while back, but we have not had the time and good weather to install them. Yesterday both came together, and we decided to get the job done, so once our visitors left, we got busy.

The refrigerator compartment fire extinguisher can be mounted either vertically or horizontally. The compartment is accessed from a cover on the outside of the motorhome, and it took a couple of attempts at placing it before Terry decided to mount the extinguisher standing upright at the rear of the compartment. Not sure about drilling holes into the side of the compartment, because we didn’t know what was on the other side of the wall, Terry instead took Mac’s advice and mounted the extinguisher with industrial strength Velcro.

The engine bay fire suppression unit mounted to the bulkhead on the top of the engine bay. This bulkhead is accessed from the floor of our bedroom closet, and once the removable floor panel is out, was held in place by four bolts. We drilled four holes for the mounting brackets, bolted the unit in place, and put everything back together. Again, we had to call Mac to be sure we were mounting the unit in the correct location.

Overall, just figuring out exactly how to mount the extinguishers, and unloading the closet to get to the floor and the bulkhead below, took longer than actually installing them. Both of the units are automatic, and are activated when the temperature inside the compartments reaches a certain level, so there was no wiring to connect.

We have seen a lot of pictures of RVs burning, and they really go up fast. We’ll travel and sleep a little easier now that we have these new safety devices installed.

With nasty weather predicted for this week, we will probably just take it easy, do a lot of reading and cruising the internet, and I’ll get some writing done. For the last month or so, we have had very spotty service on our Verizon air card, and the last few days it has really been frustrating.

From reading a couple of internet forums, it seems like a lot of RVers are experiencing slow service and dropped signals in different areas of the country. There have been several suggestions on how to remedy this, and I have tried them all, from updating the air card firmware to setting it to Broadband only so it won’t automatically switch to the slower National Access when both signals are available. Nothing has really worked. I suspect that as more and more people are getting cell phones and air cards, the situation will only get worse. Hopefully the techno geeks will come up with something to help get service back up to the reliability levels where it used to be.

While we were busy installing the fire extinguishers, Bad Nick was busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled My Mother, The Pedophile. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Being ‘over the hill’ is much better than being under it!

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After two long days of driving from Indiana to North Carolina, then two busy days playing tourist around Mount Airy, followed by the drive to Kinston, Miss Terry and I needed a day to just relax and recharge our batteries. So yesterday we slept in, and then spent most of the morning just cuddling in bed and talking. I cherish these quiet times with the love of my life, and I believe they are one of the reasons why, after being together twelve years, we still feel like we’re on our first date. 

When we finally got up and in gear, we didn’t go very far for most of the day. Instead, we stayed inside catching up on e-mail, cruising the internet, and catching up on some of the RV blogs we read on a regular basis.

I see on our friends Jan and Greg White’s Our RV Adventures blog that they are hanging out in southern Indiana visiting family, though I secretly suspect that Greg is just hiding out in case I need anything else fixed. Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour have been kayaking and diving in Florida, and are getting ready to visit Google’s headquarters in California.

According to their Gypsy and the Mariner’s RV Adventures, our pals Don and Sharon Del Rosario are back on their lot in Benson, Arizona; and also in Benson, Jerry and Suzi LeRoy report in their Our Life On Wheels blog that they are having computer woes.

In Texas, Mike McFall wrote in his Mike and Pat’s Travels blog that his lovely wife Pat had a surprise birthday this week. I love reading blogs, because they help us keep up with our RVing friends.

If you’re not a fulltimer, you can get a good insight into the lifestyle by reading some of these and the many other RV blogs out there. As you can see, sometimes we have days filled with adventure, and other days are pretty routine, just like folks living in sticks and bricks homes.

Eventually I wandered outside, where I took a few pictures of the campground at Neuseway Nature Park. Our RV site backs up to some trees, and I wasn’t sure our rooftop automatic television dish would be able to pick up a signal, but after a couple of false starts, it managed to lock onto a weak signal. If we were parked across the road, facing our present site, we’d have had no problem, but since those sites back up to the Neuseway River, they are in demand and were all taken when we arrived.

One thing that mystified me was why the campground electrical hookups were mounted on tall poles that my stubby little legs barely allowed me to reach. When our friend Patti Ivey came by to visit, I mentioned the strange electrical hookups, and she explained that they are that way to keep them above the high water level when the river floods. I made a mental note to myself not to be anywhere near here if the water starts rising!

We spent the evening with Patti and her two sons, having a fun dinner at Pizza Hut, and then going back to her townhouse to visit for a couple of hours before we returned to the campground.

Not a very busy or exciting day, but one that will give us pleasant memories of a quiet day in the life we enjoy so much.

Thought For The Day – A true friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out

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Thanks to everyone who posted comments to the blog or sent e-mails with suggestions of replacement laptop computers for Terry. And thanks especially to our pal Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour. I was on the phone several times with Jim yesterday trying to resolve the issues with Terry’s Compaq, and then again as we shopped for a replacement.

Following Jim’s directions, we actually got the Compaq running for a short time. He told us to remove the battery and unplug the AC power, and then to hold the power button down for about 10 seconds, and then plug the computer back in. I did all of that, and the darned thing booted right up! I thought our problems were over. A message popped up on the screen saying the NVIDIA software had been updated and the computer was going to reboot automatically. It shut itself down and no matter what we did after that, it just would not work. It was dead.

I had decided we should buy Terry a Dell laptop to replace her Compaq, but several readers wrote to suggest a Toshiba instead. We drove over to Best Buy in Mishawaka, a few miles west of Elkhart, and looked at the Dells, and also the comparable Toshiba. Terry liked the Toshiba much better, so I was back on the phone again with Jim Guld, asking his opinion. After I read him the specs on both units, Jim gave his blessing on the Toshiba, and that’s what we bought.

These days computers are a very important part of many RVers’ lives, ours included. Not only do we keep in touch with our friends and family by e-mail, as well as cruising the internet, we also use them daily in our business. Just as a good mechanic needs quality tools, we need computers we can rely on.

Yesterday, new friends Dan and Martha Widmeyer, from Short Hills, New Jersey stopped by to say hello. I met them Friday when I stopped into the office here at Elkhart Campground to pick up our mail, and they were there checking in. They had a couple of questions about local RV factory tours, and I suggested they check out the Heartland factory, since they are one of our favorite RV manufacturers.

We had a nice conversation, I gave them a sample copy of the Gypsy Journal, and they said they were looking forward to reading it. Once they did, they said they knew they had to subscribe, and to meet Miss Terry as well. What a nice couple! We look forward to crossing their path again in our travels. You meet the nicest people in an RV!

If you are traveling in eastern Ohio or Western Pennsylvania, I want to give you a lead on a neat place to visit that reader Levi Patton suggested. Noah’s Lost Ark in Berlin Center is a non-profit rescue sanctuary for abused and neglected exotic animals. After I spent some time exploring their website, it’s very high on our travel plans. Check it out, I think you’ll be impressed. We were!

Thought For The Day – Never be afraid to say what you feel. You can only die once.

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