We spent most of yesterday afternoon at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, while I attempted to find some information on my grandparents.

Operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the library is a vast storehouse of information on people from all over the world. Here you can find birth, death, and marriage records, census records, military and cemetery records, and so much more that I could never list it all here. If you are into genealogy, you have to make a trip here someday. You don’t have to be a Mormon to use the facilities, and there is no charge, except for any copies of records you make.

Actually, you can go to any LDS Family History Center to do genealogy research, and they can be found all over the country. They can also order information and records for you from Salt Lake City if you need them. But here, it’s all right there waiting for you.

The only problem was that a lot of the volunteers on duty to assist researchers, while very nice people, really didn’t seem all that well trained. I got a lot of “Well, I’m not sure” and “I’m new here, but maybe…” when I asked about where to look for the data I need.

Since  this was my first trip to the library, it was like having this massive vault, full of information, but nobody knew the combination to get inside. I’ll be going back to do some more research, because I know there is a lot of information about my ancestors there, if I can just find it!

We were hungry by the time left the library, late in the afternoon, so we went to what Terry and I agree is the very best buffet of any kind we have ever found in the country, Chuck-A-Rama. There are several of them here in Salt Lake City, and we will definitely go back. The selection was fantastic, everything was fresh and tasty, and nothing sits around getting stale or cold. This place is a winner!

As we were leaving the restaurant, we spotted this huge bird house in a small park nearby. Talk about a critter condo!

Back at Pony Express RV Resort, we found our old friend Dick Reed’s beautiful classic Eagle bus conversion parked next to us! Dick is in town for a couple of days, and when he checked in, he told the folks in the office that the wanted to be as close to us as he could get! Any closer, and Dick’s snoring would keep me awake!

We haven’t seen Dick in quite a while, so we had a lot of catching up to do, and we visited until after 11 p.m. Here is a picture that Miss Terry took of Dick and me. No, I didn’t get taller, I’m standing on the step of Dick’s bus in this picture!

We had another beautiful sunset, and Terry managed to catch this neat picture of a jet coming in for a landing at the airport, which is just a couple of miles away. Cool, huh?

Today I plan to go back to the Family History Library. Maybe they have a list of horse thieves and shady ladies where I can find some of my long lost relatives!

Thought For The Day – Too much of one thing is good for nothing.

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After reading yesterday’s blog, RVing’s Top 10, my friend Connie Bradish suggested maybe we needed a Bottom 10 list, and suggested, in no particular order:

1. A major dumping event, like the hose comes off and it’s all over.
2. A tire blowout, especially if it’s the right front tire.
3. Being sunk up to your rear axles in a designated camping spot.
4. Being sunk up to your axles in a non-camping spot.
5. Dragging the tow car behind the RV because it’s still in gear.
6. Driving a back road, and coming up to a bridge with a 10 foot maximum clearance, you need 13 feet and you have to stop, unhitch and turn the coach around, all while blocking traffic.
7. Driving a road you shouldn’t be on, like the southwest road around Lake Tahoe in you big RV and tow car.
8. Having a husband and wife disagreement while backing into a site, accompanied by funny hand signals from one partner to another.
9. Having a pet get out, and you can’t find them.
10. Hitting a low rock, post or cone, or an overhang of a building or a tree, damaging your coach.

Connie admitted that she and her husband Pete have scored 10 out of 10 on this list. I think we’ve missed just one, which is having a pet slip out the door, never to be found. When Miss Terry’s cat, Sasquatch was still with us, he was quite the escape artist, but he never went far.

But 9 out of 10 on the Rock Bottom list isn’t a bad (or in this case, good) record. Less than a week into our fulltming life, we were camped in a fairgrounds in Torrington, Wyoming, on our way to Life on Wheels in Moscow, Idaho. We had the place to ourselves, so I had nobody but myself to blame when I pulled out of our site and turned too soon, swinging the back end of our shiny new Pace Arrow motorhome into the concrete pedestal that held the water and electric hookups.   

I was just sick, and to Miss Terry’s credit, she didn’t shoot me, or even thump me with a rolling pin. Believe me, there was nothing she could have said to me that was worse than I was calling myself. I was still kicking myself three days later when we got to Moscow, where I met Dick Reed, founder of the RV Driving School. When I told him my sad tale of woe, Dick took my by the hand and led me to the back of the row where the instructors’ RVs were parked.

“Do you see the ding in that one,” Dick asked. “That belongs to Bill Farlow. Bill did that on a tree stump last year. This one here is Charlie Minshall’s rig. See that ding? Lord know what Charlie hit. And this one here, with the dented bumper belongs to…” By the time our tour was finished, I felt a lot better about my own mishap, and I had made a friend for life.

We’ve been stuck and we’ve been really stuck, and it’s never fun. This picture was taken at an RV park in Ohio a few years back. It had been raining for days, and we were nervous about pulling onto grass, but when we arrived, the park owner told us another bus had just left the same site. It must have been a Volkswagen bus, because our MCI promptly sunk up to its rear axle!

But anybody can get stuck in soft ground. In Bremerton, Washington, I proved that it is possible to drive a bus up a hill so steep that your front tires are on the pavement, and your rear bumper is digging into the pavement, but your drive tires are three inches in the air!

I also proved that while you can drive into that situation, you cannot drive back out of it! Getting out requires a very large tow truck, the police department to stop traffic, the fire department’s haz-mat crew to clean up the 36 gallons of radiator coolant that spills when the the tow truck cable snags a hose, and the local news crew. Did I mention I was going the wrong way up a one way street at the time?

When all was said and done, I asked the police officer in charge of the scene how big a ticket I was getting, and he replied “What with the tow bill, the radiator coolant you need to buy, the hose you need to replace, and the roses you’ll need to buy your wife to make up for this, I couldn’t in good faith give you a ticket. I’m a married man too!”

I also remember driving out of one of our first RV parks, and how everybody waved at us as we drove past. I commented to Terry about how nice everybody was, and wave right back. It wasn’t until I got to the street and glanced in my rear view mirrors that I noticed that I had left all of our window awnings out. Of course, at that point there was no way I was going to stop and get out, so I just drove away, while poor MIs Terry hung out the windows unhooking the awnings as we went!

So yeah, I could easily do a Rock Bottom 10 – been there, done that, and a few more. How about you? What were some of your worst RVing goofs?

Thought For The Day – Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

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It seems like every time I turn around, we get news of the passing of someone else we know. I guess that’s what happens as we get older.

Unfortunately, we lost another dear friend yesterday, when Lue Reed passed away in California. We first met Lue over ten years ago in our first month on the road, when we attended Life on Wheels in Moscow, Idaho as students. Lue’s husband Dick Reed, is the founder of the RV Driving School, and we just seemed to click with both of them. Even then Lue was fighting a battle with Alzheimer’s, and though she didn’t always remember our names, she always knew Miss Terry by her pretty long hair.  

Lue was one of those sweet people who never had a bad word to say about anybody, and even if you had never met before, the first time she laid eyes on you, you were friends. I will always remember her gentleness and the smile that never left her face. Rest in peace, dear friend.

For a guy who makes his living with words, I never seem to know the right thing to say to someone at times like this, but Dick, there are a lot of us out here who care about you and share your loss. I hope you can feel all of our arms around you, surrounding you with love.

I spent yesterday doing the same thing I’ll be doing today and tomorrow, working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal to get it ready to take to the printer next week. I think the months are getting shorter, because it seems like I was doing this just a couple of weeks ago.

I may escape from the computer for an hour or two and drive out to Shipshewana to go to a gun show today, and Dennis and Carol Hill, who bought the RV Driving School from Dick Reed a couple of years ago, are due in sometime tomorrow too. They spent most of the summer in Alaska, and Dennis e-mailed me to say they had a hot grill and a big piece of halibut with my name on it, so Sunday I’ll have to drag myself away from my desk again for a cookout. Yeah, I know, it sucks to be me.

Thought For The Day – Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

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In yesterday’s blog, I offered a free sample of our test electronic edition, and by the time I turned on my computer in the morning I had 55 people asking for a sample! Another 25 or so e-mailed during the day asking for one too, so I spent a lot of time answering e-mails.

The response has been very positive overall. Almost everybody said it opened very quickly and they liked the format. A couple of people complained that the type was too small to read easily, but if you open it as a PDF file with Adobe Reader, which almost every computer has these days, you can click on the magnifying glass icon to zoom in.

More than half of the folks who got a sample said they would prefer it over the printed version of the Gypsy Journal. One person out of the 75 or so I sent a sample to said there is so much stuff that can be found free online that she could not see the value, but that is okay, we can’t please everybody.

I did find it interesting that she is one of the blog readers who has written several times to say that she would subscribe to an online version, but not a printed one, because of the mailing costs. Like I said, we can’t please everybody, and we don’t expect to. And nobody has to subscribe to either version. I still welcome you as a blog reader and look forward to being able to entertain and maybe even educate you a little bit from time to time. We still have some technical issues to address, but I think we’ll give this a try once those are remedied. Once I’m sure we can make this work on a long term basis, I’ll make a formal announcement here in the blog. Again, this is NOT a replacement for the printed version of the Gypsy Journal. That will continue as always. This is an option for those who, for whatever reason, don’t want a printed edition mailed to them. Okay, moving right along, my friend Dick Reed sent me an e-mail yesterday saying he was really upset when he called his insurance company (Good Sam) for a quote on a car, and discovered that he was talking to someone in the Philippines. Dick wondered why, with all of the unemployed people in this country, Good Sam felt the need to outsource their call center offshore.

Dick said he asked for a supervisor, who told him it was to make sure their customers had someone available 24/7 to answer their calls. Huh? I know a lot of Americans who would be happy for a job, even if it were on the second or third shift! Dick said that when his insurance comes up for renewal, he’ll be doing some shopping. I can’t say as I blame him.

I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that Ken Wiseman has been very helpful in working out a lot of the details of the digital edition of the Gypsy Journal. What I forgot to mention is that Ken and his wife Martha are the driving force behind the RV Navigator website, and for several years they have been providing audio reports, called podcasts, on a monthly basis, covering the RV lifestyle from an on the road perspective. I logged on and spent some time listening, and they are very good. But don’t take my word for it, check it out  for yourself at http://rvnavigator.com/RV_Navigator/RV_Navigator_Home.html.

Thought For The Day – If you can’t fix it with a hammer, you’ve got an electrical problem.

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