Of all of the places I don’t want to be, anywhere it is cold and snowing is at the very top of my list. Stuck in a traffic jam? Mere child’s play. Sitting in a dentist’s chair getting a root canal? I can handle it. Dinner with my ex-mother-in-law? Bring it on and give me a heaping helping of seconds.

But snow and cold just do not fit into my life plan. And we are getting it here in Elkhart, Indiana! I don’t want to be an Eskimo! I belong on a beach somewhere, soaking up sunshine, listening to Jimmy Buffett, and watching the pretty girls strolling by in their skimpy bikinis. This is just wrong!

In spite of the hassle and discomfort caused by our break in, I just cannot say enough good about the folks here at Duncan RV Repair. Owners Jim and Kristy Deavers, and their entire staff, have treated us just like family. When we came in Monday morning each and every employee stopped to shake our hands, even hug us, and tell us how sorry they were for what happened, and how glad they were that we were not injured in the confrontation with the burglar.

Jim Deavers told me that he was making getting us back on the road his top priority, and their crew swarmed over our motorhome, fixing the bent door where I slammed it on the bad guy’s hand, replacing the screen on the door, measuring the door window to get replacement glass ordered, and a dozen other tasks. They replaced both of our DVD players, my netbook computer, our TV, and even ordered a replacement for my Silverleaf engine monitoring cable.

Jim even had a lady come in to clean the inside of the motorhome, wiping down any surface the burglar might have touched, vacuuming the carpet, and making our home feel “clean” again! I’m sure my lady blog readers know how much that meant to Miss Terry.

Everybody here has gone far above and beyond what was required or expected, and we appreciate it more than we can ever say. They have made a terrible time in our lives a lot easier to deal with. We don’t feel like customers experiencing some misfortune, but rather family members with a problem that the whole clan has come together to help and support.

Somebody sent me an e-mail saying that they would never come to any place to get service or repairs done where something like this could have happened. That’s nonsense. This could have happened anywhere in the country. Crime is not isolated to the big cities or the bad neighborhoods anymore. It’s everywhere.

The once charming, peaceful small Arizona mountain town where we lived for so many years before hitting the road, is now overrun with meth dealers and crime. My daughter lives within sight of the police department, and a couple of years ago one of her neighbors was busted for making meth in his apartment! She worked at a Sears store, and came out to find her brand new car stolen, and when it was later recovered, it had been vandalized. When I owned the newspaper there, we seldom had reports of robberies and burglaries. Now two of my good friends have had their businesses broken into, and the bank was just robbed this past Friday!

It is not the fault of Duncan RV that some scumbag picked our motorhome to break into while it was parked on their lot. It would have been easy for them to tell us “There’s the telephone, call your insurance company, and when they give us the okay, we’ll make an appointment to start in on your repairs.” I have met more than a few shop owners who would have done just that. But Jim and Kristy Deavers are honest, decent, hard working, wonderful people who feel a sense of responsibility to their customers, and they want to make things right. We feel very fortunate that if this had to happen to us, at least it happened here, with people who care.  We would come back here for service anytime.

Thought For The Day – An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of wit.

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I talked to the owner of the RV shop where our burglary and vandalism took place over the weekend, and he told us to be there when they opened this morning, and he and his crew would do whatever needs to be done to get us back on the road in time to get to my medical appointment at the VA hospital in Lexington, Kentucky Wednesday morning.

Now that we have the mess cleaned up, things look a lot better inside our motorhome. If they can get the glass for the side door and get it installed today, we could leave tomorrow and get to Lexington in time. The day/night blinds also should not take too long to replace, assuming they have or can get them today.

Since Elkhart is the RV Capital of the World, at least we’re in a good place to get the parts needed fast. The slashed seat is another matter; I don’t see how that can be repaired that quickly, so we’ll see what happens with that.

There are things about this crime that just do not make sense to us. For example, they took my netbook computer and the attached cable to our Silverleaf engine monitoring system, which entailed crawling under the Winnebago’s dashboard and cutting the straps that held it in place, and reaching an almost inaccessible plug under the driver’s footrest to unplug it. It would have been much easier to just unplug the cable from the USB port of the computer, or to cut it. My iPod was lying next to the netbook computer and they ignored it. In the bedroom, they took a cheap DVD player, but left a shotgun and expensive camera. They left one rather expensive handgun in a dresser drawer, and took a cheaper Glock that was laying under it. Why? They carried away a 19 inch LCD TV, but left other smaller, more expensive, more portable items where they tossed them. We can’t understand their thinking, but being scumbag thieves, they probably are not Rhodes scholars anyway.

You just knew that Bad Nick had to wade in on this one, and he did with today’s Bad Nick Blog, titled Sometimes You Just Want To Kill Something. Check it out and leave a comment.

The date for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally is coming up fast, and new reservations are coming in every day. Terry and I have been forced to reevaluate and change our position on rally vendors.

When we started holding rallies, we had a policy of only one vendor per each type of product, to give our vendors the maximum opportunity to make a profit. That became a problem because rally attendees wanted more shopping opportunities, and then we were threatened with legal action for “restraining trade” because we would not allow one vendor to come because someone had already registered selling a similar product. We may have prevailed in court, but I don’t need the expense or the hassle.

My attorney advised us to drop that restriction, so we decided that we would allow vendors who sold similar products made by different companies. That opened an entire new can of worms. These days there are a lot of vendors selling three, four, five or more different products, and if they can’t display and sell all of their products, they won’t come. Everybody wants to sell everything, and nobody wants any competition. I tell you, it’s like herding cats trying to keep up with all of them. How can we win?

We have also had several vendors assure us in the past that they plan to attend, and then cancel at the last minute. Meanwhile, we have turned other potential vendors away who sell similar products. In our mail this week we received a registration for a Passport America vendor who had told us in August he wanted to come to the rally, but did not pay a deposit. Meanwhile, weeks later, another Passport America vendor registered and paid. Now the first guy is upset because he feels we sold his space out from under him.

So the new policy, after the Arizona rally, is that any vendor can come to future rallies, no matter what he or she is selling. No matter what we do, we can’t please everybody, and I’m tired of pulling out what little hair I have left trying to do so.

Before I end this blog, I hope you will take a few moments to remember that today is Pearl Harbor Day, and to remember those who lost their lives on that terrible day in 1941. That seems like a lifetime ago for many of us, but to them and their families, it was the end of their lifetime.

Thought For The Day – It is never too late to mend a broken friendship.

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For the most part the RV lifestyle is extremely safe, especially in terms of personal safety. I have always told new RVers that they have more to fear from an RV fire, or the idiot coming at them at 60 miles an hour riding three tons of steel, than they do from a criminal. An incident last night has proven to me just how wrong I have been.

We have been parked at an RV repair facility in Elkhart, Indiana having some repairs and upgrades done to our motorhome. Yesterday afternoon we picked up the fellow who flew in from California to buy our bus, and a friend who came to help him drive it back, at the airport in South Bend.

By the time we drove back to Elkhart, showed them the bus, got them checked into a hotel, and took them to dinner, it was almost 9 p.m. when we drove back to the repair shop, where our motorhome was parked in their small camping area. It’s a pretty dark place, and ours was the only occupied RV there. As we arrived, Terry said “Someone broke into our rig!” Sure enough, there was a softball sized hole in the door window. As I got out of the van and went up to the RV, Terry yelled “He’s still inside!” and I found myself face to face with a husky young black man coming out the door.

Now, I have been in the military, saw combat, I was a firearms instructor, have owned and carried a handgun most of my adult life, and have concealed weapons permits from two different states. But this lifestyle has made me complacent, and I seldom carry on a regular basis. And, when going to an airport, that is a big No No. So I wasn’t armed.

Our burglar, on the other hand, was armed with one of my own handguns, and as I yelled at him to show me his hands, he raised one of my Glock 9mm pistols toward us. The smart thing to do when we first spotted the broken window was to back off and call the police, but this all happened in a matter of seconds.

When I saw the gun in his hand, my only thought was to keep him from using it, so I slammed the door shut on his hand, with him inside the RV and me outside, and then slammed it a second (and maybe third time), shattering the rest of the glass in the door. He dropped the gun, then ran past me to get away as I recovered the weapon. My first thought was to shoot him as he fled, but I’m not going to kill anybody for a few material possessions, and the threat to us was over.

Meanwhile, Terry was in the van and on the phone talking to the 911 operator, and I stayed outside, because I didn’t know if there was anybody else inside the RV, and I have other firearms on board. Terry handed the phone out the window to me because the operator wanted to talk to me, and about then I saw the same guy poking his head around the corner of the building. Not knowing if he was armed, I pointed my pistol at him and told him if he took one step toward us I was going to kill him. Fortunately for both of us, he backed off and ran away.

The police used a dog to track him from the RV around the building to where he came back, and then off to a service road, where the scent disappeared. He must have had an accomplice who fled when we pulled into the parking lot, because he appeared empty handed when he ran, but we are missing a flat screen LCD TV, netbook computer, my Seiko wristwatch, the cable for my Silverleaf engine monitor (which was plugged into the computer), and we won’t know what else until we take a total inventory.

Inside, the motorhome, there was a big pile of things in the entryway, including a couple of handguns, our Wii, DVD player, digital SLR camera and other stuff he had ready to take when we interrupted him.

He, or they, also trashed our RV. There is broken glass everywhere, they cut a big triangle into the driver’s seat and pulled out part of the stuffing, ripped down the day/night shades in the bedroom, and threw stuff everywhere as they ransacked the place. The police dusted for fingerprints, and left a mess of stubborn black powder that is almost impossible to clean up.

But at least nobody got hurt. We are shaken, we feel totally violated, and I’m pissed off, both at the thief or thieves, and at myself. If they had to steal something because they are too damned lazy to work, okay, do it. But why vandalize our home in the process?

As for myself, I have become complacent in this lifestyle, and I let my guard down. Getting ripped off is one thing; almost getting shot with my own gun is unacceptable. You can bet that the next time I leave my motorhome, I’ll have more than my empty hand to point at whomever might be waiting for me when I come back home!

With the window busted out and temperatures down in the 20s overnight, there was no way we could stay there, and we were not about to anyway, in case they came back. I called our friend Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint and explained our plight, and even though it was late at night, Michele came back to the shop and opened it up so we could pull the motorhome inside and stay out of the worst of the weather until we can start dealing with things Monday morning. In the meantime, we are safe, and just coming down off the adrenalin high the incident gave us.

Thought For The Day – Count not what is lost, but what is left.

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