I have to be honest, even though we have belonged to Thousand Trails for several years, I was in no hurry to come to the preserve here in Clermont, Florida. But we’ve been here a week now, and I think it’s fast becoming one of my favorite Thousand Trails/NACO campgrounds. Our site is great, they have all kinds of nice amenities, and we have run into several people we know since we’ve been here.

John and Sharon Mostollers, Gypsy Journal subscribers from Trout Run, Pennsylvania are parked near us, and yesterday John came by to tell me about a neat little restaurant that he thought we would enjoy, and we had a nice visit. 

A little later on, we had a late lunch at Santa Fe steakhouse with Dave and Jean Damon, fulltiming friends we know from the RV rally vendor circuit. We had a good time visiting, solving most of the problems of the world, and the food was pretty good too!

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My new Sea Eagle tall back kayak seat arrived on Friday from Inflatable Boats 4 Less, and back at the campground, Terry and I decided to end the day with a late afternoon paddle. The campground has a dock and boat launch on Lake Hancock, which is known for excellent largemouth bass fishing. And yes, the 4550 acre lake is also home to alligators, but if you are going to be on any freshwater lake or river in Florida, they are a fact of life. (As opposed to the sharks and barracuda in the salt water.) Here is a Google Earth view of the lake and the Thousand Trails campground.

The new seat is much better! We spent over an hour on the lake, until the sun started to drop behind the trees,  and my back didn’t hurt at all. I need to install a couple of D rings to position it properly for me, but Tim from Inflatable Boats 4 Less sent a kit with some extras with the boat, and they are easy to install.

The PaddleSki gets a lot of attention. A few people were fishing on the dock when we set it up, and they all watched the process, and commented on what a neat idea an inflatable boat is for RVers.

Back at the motorhome, I worked for a while on the seminar schedule for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally. I still have a lot of open time slots to fill, but as of now, seminar titles include Why Use Water Filters?, Gypsy Journal FAQs, Craft & Hobby Show and Tell, Fire Safety, What Insurance Do I Really Need As An RVer?, Insiders Guide To Get The Most From Your RV Service Center, Tips & Tidbits – Why Didn’t I Think Of That?, Accessories For Better Air Card Internet Access, RV Insurance – What Affects Your Rates, Starting A Business On The Road, For Women Only Roundtable, Illness Or Injury While Traveling – What Would You Do?, Transporting Firearms In Your RV, Laugh Your Way Across The USA, Geocaching, Yes You Can Drive That RV (For Ladies Only), The RVing Genealogist, Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems, Getting The Most Out Of Your Digital Camera, Testing Air Brakes, RV Safety Improvements For Him And Her, RVing Alaska, Swedish Weaving, Finding Your Satellite Signal, RV Weight Safety, Pros & Cons Of RV Extended Warranties, RV Quick Shades, RV Driving Tips & Techniques, Windshields – Repair or Replace?, Why Use Water Filters?, RV Tire Safety, Internet Genealogy, Preparing To Drive To Alaska, Boondocking Tips Roundtable, Kayaks & RVs, Care & Operation Of RV Awnings, and Computer Safety And Security For RVers. That’s 35 seminars so far, and we’ll have about 60 by the time we’re through!

My friend Brenda Speidel sent me some information about the Holiday Mail for Heroes campaign yesterday. The American Red Cross and Pitney Bowes have teamed up for the fourth year in a row to help brighten the holidays for our brave men and women in uniform. From now until December 10th, you can send holiday cards to service members, their families, and veterans all over the world. Anyone can send a card, or as many as you would like, to: Holiday Mail for Heroes, PO Box 5456, Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456 and they will be delivered to military members. I still remember my first Christmas away from home, a young soldier in a very bad place, and the Christmas cards I got from an elderly lady in a nursing home, and a little girl from Oklahoma, sent out under a similar program. When you’re a kid far from home, it means a lot.

Speaking of the holidays, quite a few readers have taken advantage of our Holiday Subscription Special Offer. If you subscribe or renew your existing Gypsy Journal subscription for two years, we’ll also send a one year gift subscription ($20 value) to whoever you choose, with a note that it’s a gift from you. This applies to both printed subscriptions to U.S. addresses by Standard Rate mail, and digital subscriptions. Click the link above, and save money today!

Thought For The Day - An argument is like a country road, you never know where it is going to lead.

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We’ve been Geeked! A couple of days before we left Elkhart Campground, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour interviewed us for one of their Gabbing With The Geeks podcasts. We talked about the Gypsy Journal and how computer technology makes it possible for us to live and run our business on the road.

Jim and Chris are a success story when it comes to operating a business as they travel fulltime in their RV. They give seminars on all kinds of technical topics at RV rallies and RV parks, they have several websites and blogs, and they teach RVers how to get the most out of their computers and digital cameras, both in their seminars and online. Their website is sort of like an online college for anybody who wants to know just about anything about computers and how they fit into the RV lifestyle.

Speaking of all things geek, my Ipad had started to malfunction recently. When I hit the Home button to exit a program or application, it wouldn’t work, and I would have to reboot the Ipad to get back to the home page. So yesterday I took it to the Apple Store at the Park City Center mall in Lancaster, about 20 miles from the Hershey Thousand Trails campground.

Driving to Lancaster, we just drank in all of the beautiful scenery. We passed fields of corn, and farm fields that had recently been harvested, with just the stubble of cornstalks sticking up like a rural five o’clock shadow. 

Around there, the old houses, barns, and commercial buildings crowd close to the roads.

In Manheim, one of the most picturesque old towns we have ever visited, the streets are pretty narrow, and I sure wouldn’t have wanted to drive a big motorhome through town!

Terry and I are history nuts, and we love the architecture of this area. Manheim was laid out  in 1762, and formally incorporated in 1838. There are so many buildings dating back to Colonial days that we were like two kids in a candy store, rubbernecking in every direction. If these old buildings could only talk, the stories they could tell!

When we got to the Apple Store, the nice tech who waited on us (they call them Geniuses at Apple) checked the Ipad out, verified that the button had malfunctioned, and handed me a brand new 64 gig 3G Ipad, just like I had! No questions, no hassles, and he even switched my AT&T sim card from the old unit to the new one for me so I could get online with no problems. I appreciate customer service like that!

While we were in the mall, we stopped by the Verizon kiosk, because I want to upgrade from my Blackberry Storm to a Droid Incredible. The Blackberry has not lived up to my expectations, and it seems like every time they do a software upgrade (or sometimes just because it feels like it), it wipes out all of my apps and I have to fight to get them back on it again.

I was all set to go with the Droid, but then the clerk started hammering me to also buy an “accessory bundle” that included a car charger, case, and a Bluetooth headset. I told him I didn’t need or want any of that, and he insisted that I just “had’ to have them to get the most out of the Droid and that “everybody” needs a Bluetooth. Guess what, mister? I’m not “everybody” and I don’t “have” to have anything! I’m sure I’ll still upgrade pretty soon, but I’ll deal with somebody who is more concerned with what I need, not what he wants to sell me.

We can never pass up a bookstore, so when we left the mall, we browsed through a nearby Border’s, where Miss Terry found a couple of cookbooks that she has been looking for.

Then we had dinner at a Five Guys restaurant. Five Guys makes excellent cheeseburgers, and their fries are delicious. Unfortunately, there was no ice, so my soda and Terry’s tea were room temperature. I told the manager there was no ice, and he said the machine was broken. I had to wonder why nobody was fixing it, or at least buying ice somewhere to put in the drinks. I like Five Guys, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to that particular restaurant again.

After dinner we stopped at Home Depot, where Miss Terry got a new toy, a Dremel Trio multi-tool, as a late birthday present. Some guys buy their wives flowers or jewelry for special occasions, but my lady likes books and power tools!

We’ve just finished our Eastern Rally, and we’re already working on Arizona for next year!  I have added a Rally Registration Page to the blog, since I have had people asking when they could register for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally, which will be held in Yuma, March 7-11, 2011. To register online, click the link below, or the Arizona Gypsy Gathering tab on the top right of this page, above the blog header.

Whatever else you do today, please take a moment to remember all of those who perished nine years ago today during the terrorist attacks. We can move on with our lives, but as a nation, we must never forget.

Thought For The Day - Consciousness - that annoying time between naps.

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When our friend Cindy DuBois told me about the Ethel M. Chocolate Company factory in nearby Henderson, Nevada, taking a tour went to the very top of my bucket list! After all, chocolate is the fourth major food group, right?

Mere minutes after I told my pal Greg White about the factory tour, there was a great screeching of tires in the road outside our motorhome as Greg slid sideways to a stop, yelled “Hurry up! Get in!”, and we tore out of the Thousand Trails campground like we were on our way to a fire.

Located just a short drive from the Las Vegas Strip, the Ethel M factory offers free self-guided tours, where you can look through a glass wall and watch workers making all sorts of delicious confections. I hope their janitorial crew had a good supply of Windex in stock, because Greg and I left a lot of drool on that glass wall!

And what’s a candy company factory tour without a free sample at the end? This is Joanne, and if polygamy had been legal in Nevada, I think Miss Terry might have had a sister wife! Anytime a pretty lady wants to give me free candy, I’m in love!

Of course, while there may be free samples, there are no free lunches, or free desserts either. But don’t despair, because once we finished the tour and got our free candy sample, the gift shop was just steps away, where they had all kinds of goodie on sale. Here’s Greg deciding how much candy his budget and blood sugar level will allow. Doesn’t he look happy? Wouldn’t you be happy too, with all of that candy around you?

The Ethel M factory also has an impressive cactus garden, where you can walk off some of the calories you just purchased inside. The garden has cacti from all over the United States, and even rare species from South America!

We spent some time strolling the paths through the garden, and of course, the battery in my digital camera died about then. But never fear, Miss Terry’s camera is never out of reach, and she is a much better photographer than I am.

They call this a Teddy Bear Cholla, but don’t be in a big hurry to hug it, or you’ll find out that this Teddy Bear has claws!

This barrel cactus is another plant that is just loaded with thorns. I lived in the desert for many yeas, and learned to give the native plants a wide berth.

Of course, not everything in the desert has thorns or looks forbidding.  There is a lot of beauty here too. This is a Fairy Brush, and Terry did a great job of zooming in for a close-up shot, didn’t she?

Here’s another close-up photo, and Terry’s favorite of all of the ones she took yesterday.

It’s pretty, but I think I prefer this one. To each his own.

Greg and Jan love Chinese buffets as much as we do, and we’ve been on a quest to find a good one here in Las Vegas. We’ve tried two so far, and we’re still looking for a good one.

After an early dinner, we returned to the Thousand Trails, and as we pulled up in front of our Winnebago, longtime reader Ron King was knocking on our door. Ron has an interesting blog called Chicken Fried RV, and we had a nice chat with Ron and a friend who was with him, and I got to get my puppy fix with Bubba, a friendly Schnauzer who was inside Ron’s pickup, just squirming with eagerness to get some loving.

Free candy, pretty plants, good friends, and I got to scratch a friendly dog’s ears. All in all, that’s a good day in my life!

Bad Nick doesn’t have time to play though, that boy is all work! Yesterday while I was out having fun, he was home writing a new Bad Nick Blog titled Do Something, Even If It’s Wrong! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. – Helen Keller 

We were so tired Saturday night that we were in bed by 9:30 p.m. and I waited until Sunday morning to post the blog. We had a rainy night, and were wide awake before 7 a.m. Sunday, and on the road before 8 a.m., which was a new record for us.

We passed through Montgomery with only a few cars and trucks to keep us company, and pulled into the Flying J truck stop a few miles south of town to take on fuel, and decided to try their breakfast buffet, which was surprisingly good.

Back on the road, we had an easy run to the Escapees Plantation RV Park in Summerdale. We checked in at the office, where we got a warm welcome, and then were assigned to a site. As we were unhooking the van, Jack Mayer came by to say hello. The battery in our van is getting weak and didn’t want to turn over, so we got out our battery charger and Jack helped us put some juice into the battery to get the van started.

By the time I had backed the motorhome into our RV site and finished hooking up our utilities, several people had come by to say hello and welcome us back, and to commiserate over our recent misfortune. We had pretty much a steady stream of visitors until we went to the Activity Center a little after 5 p.m. for their Chocolate Decadence event, in which for $3 each we had our choice of dozens of chocolate goodies, everything from brownies and cookies, to fudge, and even chocolate covered chicken wings. I passed on the wings, but sure tried to sample as much of the rest as I could. 

Following that, they had the Sunday evening Ice Cream Social. And everybody managed to save enough room for ice cream too. RVers love to eat! It was nice to see so many folks we know, and to be made so welcome. And it is wonderful to be warm again! It was 72 degrees when we arrived at Summerdale!

After I reported in yesterday’s blog that we were spending the night parked behind the Moose lodge in Prattville, Alabama, I got three or four e-mails from people asking if we were not afraid of being victimized again.

We have dry camped all over this country without a problem for years, and though we will exercise more caution in the future and not allow ourselves to become complacent again, the reality is that we could spend another 20 years on the road (which we hope to do), and never have a problem again. Of course, we also realize it could happen again tonight. But, we refuse to live in fear, or to give up our freedom because of what “might” happen.

Keep in mind, too, that our crime did not happen while we were dry camping in some out of the way place. It happened at an established RV repair shop’s camping area, which had 24 hour surveillance cameras, which large signs plainly announced. Crime can and does happen at any time, anywhere. The luck of the draw was that we just happened to be the victims this time around.

Now that we are finally out of the deep freeze up north and getting the inside of our Winnebago back to normal, we are still discovering some other things missing, including the handheld Garmin GPS we use for geocaching, a digital photo frame with pictures of our granddaughters, and Leatherman pocket tool. On the flip side, we found a small digital camera we thought was gone, so that’s a good thing. Life goes on.     

Thought For The Day – Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.

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We’ll be celebrating a major milestone with the next issue of the Gypsy Journal, which will mark ten years of fulltiming and publishing the world’s only nationwide RV publication produced and distributed entirely on the road. We’re pretty darned proud of that.

Looking back, I can still remember the moment the Gypsy Journal was born in my mind. We were sitting at our kitchen table, back home in Show Low, Arizona, brainstorming ideas to make a living in this new mobile lifestyle that we wanted to become a part of.

We discussed several options, when a light suddenly went off in my head, and I told Miss Terry “We’re going to publish an RV newspaper, and it’s not going to be like any other RV publication out there. No slick pages full of ads, no columns written by outsiders, just a folksy little rag about the things we see on the back roads, and the folks we meet along the way. We’ll call it the Gypsy Journal!”

And that was that! A few weeks later we had produced our very first issue and hit the road. You can read about how this all came about on our website at the page titled And So We Hit the Road.

We’ve seen a lot of changes in ten years. When we started out, digital cameras were in their infancy. We mostly used 35mm film cameras, and if we shot a roll of film for a story, we might be hundreds of miles away before we got it developed. If those photos turned out bad, we were really in a bind! Now we use digital cameras, and can see the pictures instantly to know if we have the shot we want.

For the first four years, we produced the Gypsy Journal the old fashioned way, printing things off on a laser printer, laying every page out manually on large grid sheets, affixing the photos and stories to the grid sheets with hot wax, and using a portable drafting table and a T-square to make sure everything was straight. Then we took those grid sheets to a newspaper printer to be photographed and have the plates made to run the job. These days we lay the entire edition out on a computer screen, save it to a CD, and send that to the printer. As frustrating as computers and their programs can be, they have made our work much easier.

We’ve been very blessed. That flash of inspiration all those years ago has turned into a successful little business that has allowed us to live this wonderful lifestyle for years, and even though we’ll never get rich from it, if you measure riches in terms of money in the bank, we wouldn’t trade what we have for a million bucks.

And we know that we could never have done it without your support, in subscribing to the Gypsy Journal, buying the books and RVing guides we produce, clicking those little ads on our websites, and coming to our rallies. Thank you for helping make our dream come true.

Thought For The Day - There is only one success – to be able to live your life in your own way.

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