Terry and I are still feeling crappy. I suspect that what we thought was a cold may be the flu. Whatever it is, it sucks.  We had better get well soon, because we’re about out of meds, and we both have cabin fever.

I’d like to say that I’m taking advantage of the downtime to get a lot of work done, but the truth is that my head has just been too foggy to get much accomplished. I tried writing a couple of stories over the last two days, but when I went back to read them, even I could not make any sense of what I was trying to say.

I also spent some time working on the schedule for our upcoming Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma in March. Unfortunately, a couple of our regular seminar presenters won’t be there, due to scheduling conflicts. Mac McCoy has to be in Perry, Georgia for the FMCA convention the next week, and that doesn’t allow him any traveling time, so I’m afraid we won’t have his Fire Safety seminar. This will be the first time Mac has missed one of our rallies, but we understand the logistics that will keep him away.

I’m always looking for new seminar topics, so if you have an idea for a seminar you’d like to see, or if you have one you would like to present, send me an e-mail and tell me about it.

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For years I have done a seminar on working the road, based upon my book Work Your Way Across The USA.  But now I’m trying to put together a seminar on small businesses that RVers can operate as they travel. There are a lot of things out there that can be done from an RV, from flea market vending, to internet based businesses, RV repair, and more. If you operate a business from the road, and would care to share an idea or two, please e-mail me at editor@gypsyjournal.net.

While we’re on the subject of RV related businesses, a while back a fellow named Gary Smith, who operates an RV awning repair business in Oregon, contacted me and asked me to review a new fourteen set DVD course that teaches people how to start their own RV awning repair business. I must say that I was very impressed with Gary’s program, and if I were a handy person looking for a small RV related business to start, this is one I’d really consider.

The DVDs explain the basics of the business, including how to get started,  proven advertising techniques that have served Gary for over 20 years, and in depth explanations on how to do everything from replacing window awnings, to RV awning hardware repair, replacing awning fabric, screen rooms, and more. After watching Gary’s careful explanations and demonstrations, I think even I could swap out an awning if I had to!

Gary says that besides the DVD course, buyers can contact him anytime they run into a problem with an awning repair or installation for his expert advice on how to get the job done.

How impressed was I with Gary’s program? Enough that when we get back to Arizona, I’m going to talk to my son-in-law about the possibility of him setting up his own awning repair business!

To learn more about Gary’s RV Awning Repair Course, click the link and check it out. If you decide this might be a good business idea for you, call Gary at (541) 247-0185 and tell him I sent you, and he’ll give you a discount off the regular price of the course. Give it a look, this might be a good match for you!

While I was moaning and groaning yesterday, Bad Nick took the time to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled And Now, Your Honor. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Friends are the sailors who guide your rickety boat safely across the dangerous waters of life.

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It’s Black Friday, let the madness begin! For the next month, I will do everything in my power to avoid any WalMart, Sam’s Club, Best Buy, or any of the other big box stores. I just can’t handle the crowds and all of the “happy” holiday shoppers pushing, shoving, and scrabbling to save a buck on something, or to find that perfect Christmas gift for somebody on their shopping list. Bah humbug!

I’m not against Christmas, but we have gotten so far away from the reason for the holiday that these days, it is all about the almighty dollar. It wears me out very fast.

Miss Terry says she’s feeling somewhat better today, and I think I’m on the upswing too. I spent most of yesterday doing the same thing I did the day before, sleeping a lot and sniveling even more.

Our friends Joe and Marcia Jones came by to say hello, and we visited for a little bit before they went over to the activity center for the big Thanksgiving dinner. We stayed home, because neither of us felt like being in a crowd of people, and because we didn’t want to make everybody else sick too.

We watched some movies on the Hallmark channel, and Terry made us a delicious anchovy aioli pasta dinner, with homemade Italian bread. Who says you have to have turkey on Thanksgiving anyway? Do I look like a pilgrim to you?

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In the evening, my daughter called from Show Low, Arizona, and while I was talking to her, Terry’s mom called from Apache Junction. We miss our families during the holidays, but I have to be honest and admit that I really do like having a quiet day at home too.

We’re only going to be here at the Escapees campground a couple more days, because we are scheduled to go back to the Orlando Thousand Trails on Sunday, so we can get the Blue Ox base plate installed on the Explorer next week at Camper Connection. I’m hoping that we’ll get to feeling well enough to hit some of the local RV parks around here and drop off sample bundles of the Gypsy Journal before we leave.

Somebody wrote to ask me if I wasn’t worried about not having our whole winter booked up here in Florida, and if we were going to be able to find a campground to get into, once all of the snowbirds start flocking in during the next few weeks.

We’re really not concerned, we purposely have not booked any long term stays anywhere, because we want to be able to bounce around and do whatever we feel like doing, wherever we feel like doing it, while we’re here. Between Thousand Trails preserves, Escapee campgrounds, Passport America, Elk and Moose lodges, and VFW posts that welcome traveling members, we figure we can always find somewhere to park.

We’ve had to be someplace at some certain time for so much of the last few years that we are really enjoying the freedom of not having a schedule. The only place we have to be is Yuma in early March, for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally.  Hey, if worse comes to worse, there is always Camp WalMart! Wherever we end up, we’ll be together, and that’s all that matters, right?

Thought For The Day – When you’re willing to be seen as someone who makes mistakes and has flaws, you’re essentially telling yourself being human isn’t something to be ashamed of.

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Yesterday we drove 75 miles south to Pinellas Park, located just north of Saint Petersburg, to look at different racks for our hard shell kayaks. I love my Sea Eagle PaddleSki 435 inflatable kayak and won’t give it up, but Miss Terry is happy with her hard shell Manta Ray. We wanted to check out the Thule Hullavator rooftop kayak racks. We knew that they are expensive, but they are supposed to make loading heavy kayaks much easier.

The Tackle Shack in Pinellas Park is a Thule dealer, and we had a very strange experience there. Owner Andy Levine told us that he would be very happy to take our money, but that he didn’t think the Hullavators would serve us well, and that he could show us a way to load the two Manta Ray kayaks on the roof of our Ford Explorer that even we could do, with our short little legs and my bad back.

Putting a cover over the back of the Explorer to protect the paint, Andy showed us how to lay the kayak on the ground behind the SUV, push it up onto its nose, and over onto the rack on the roof of the Explorer. It looked like an intimidating task, and we weren’t too sure we could do it, but once Andy demonstrated the process, Terry and I tried it, and it worked!

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Then Andy installed a set of the Hullavator racks on the Explorer, and demonstrated to us that due to the height of the Explorer, we would have to lift a kayak well above waist high to get it onto the rack, and then, due to our short legs, it was still a bit of a chore to get the boat up onto the top of the car. Getting it back down again would also require us to stand on a stool to reach the rack easily. We decided that we’d go with the method Andy showed us, and save a lot of money.

How many small business owners do you know that will talk you out of a $1200 sale, and instead spend almost three hours on a hot parking lot showing you how you can do the job without spending all that money? You can bet that if I need anything related to kayaking, or any other water sports, I’ll be picking up the phone to call Andy at the Tackle Shack!

Terry said yesterday that she’s beginning to think that a Sea Eagle Fast Track inflatable kayak from Inflatable Boats 4 Less might be the answer for her down the road too.  That would sure make life easier!

I was born late in my parents’ lives, and all of my siblings passed away quite a while ago. Over time, I lost contact with most of my family, and it had been over 25 years since I had seen any of my older brother Jack’s children. Earlier this year, while doing genealogy research on Ancestry.com, I was able to make contact with them, and we have exchanged e-mails and touched base on Facebook. When I told them we’d be in Florida this winter, they all invited us to come by for a visit.

My nephew Steve lives in Pinellas Park, just a couple of miles from the Tackle Shack, so once we were done there, we stopped by to get reacquainted. Steve called his brother Harold and sister Cheryl, and they came over and we had a very nice little reunion.

We spent about three hours catching up on our lives in the past quarter century (boy, does that sound like a long time!), and had a wonderful time. All too soon it was time to hit the road, because we had a long drive back to the Escapees campground in Bushnell. But after our trip down to Key West in a couple of weeks, we’re going to get together again with Steve, Harold, and Cheryl, and two more of their brothers, as well as some other family members, for a real family reunion. I’m looking forward to it!

Thought For The Day – It took me so long to find what I was looking for that I forgot why I wanted it in the first place!

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Miss Terry was still feeling pretty yucky yesterday, so we stayed home and didn’t do a whole lot of anything. I wrote a couple of articles for the next issue of the Gypsy Journal, answered a few e-mails, and called a subscriber who also wants to tow a Ford Explorer behind his motorhome, and was having the same problem locating a neutral tow switch. Since his part number is the same as the one for our Explorer, I think he can do the same bypass with an LED light, and make it work.

Sunday, after we got to Bushnell, I noticed that one of the kayak rack mounts we had attached to the roof rack of the Explorer had shifted. So yesterday I tightened all four of them up as much as possible. These racks are not going to be a permanent solution, and we’d like to replace them with Thule Hullavator kayak racks. The Thule racks are pretty spendy, but they will make the job of loading the kayaks much easier.

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The folks who live next to the Escapees campground have several donkeys, and the RVers who stay here like to feed them carrots and apples. Anytime someone walks up to the fence, the critters come running up looking for goodies.

They are friendly animals that seem to love attention. We spent quite a bit of time petting them.

This little guy was a bit shy, and mama kept him from getting up close to the fence.

We also saw this turtle crawling along, and took its picture. The donkeys were curious about this strange animal, but they all seemed to coexist pretty well.

A while back this feral hog wandered onto the property and has settled in with the donkeys. Feral hogs are a growing problem throughout the south, and all the way to south Texas.

The donkeys don’t seem to mind the squatter amid their  presence, and they pretty much ignore him. The hog, on the other hand, must be lonely, because he was looking for love in all the wrong places. Several times while we were standing at the fence, he tried to mount one or another of the donkeys, without much success. I don’t know, maybe he should have found a barnyard with Shetland ponies in it instead. Who knew we could find live piggy porn right here at the Escapees RV park!

At 4 p.m. I went over to Social Hour at the activity center, and said hello to some folks. Terry still wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home and worked on proofing a new book I want to get in print soon. As I was walking to the activity center, I spotted a converted Prevost bus that looked familiar, so I knocked on the door. Sure enough, it was Ron Walker, a fellow we knew from our bus nut days that we have not seen in several years. That’s one of the neat things about the fulltime RV lifestyle – we never know when or where we are going to run into somebody we met someplace else at another time in our travels!

If Terry is feeling any better today, we may go shopping for different kayak racks. Or, we may just stay put so she can rest up some more.  I’ll know what we decided by this time tomorrow.

Bad Nick took advantage of the day to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled How About Some Common Sense? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – You cannot be lonely if you like the person you are alone with.

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We had hoped to get the work done on our coach early enough yesterday to be able to get on the road and put some miles behind us by dark. True to their word, the folks at Camping World in Robertsdale were finished by noon, and true to their record thus far, the folks at National Interstate insurance dropped the ball again.

They had promised to overnight a check to us at Rainbow Plantation RV Park to cover the costs of the repairs, and the staff at the campground told us they would call us as soon as it arrived. So we left early enough to be at Camping World for our 8 a.m. appointment, and they pulled the Winnebago right in. When the work was done, we still had not heard from the campground. I called our contact at National Interstate trying to get a tracking number for FedEx, and got his voice mail.

An hour went by, I called back, and he was out to lunch, so I left another voice mail. And then another. Finally, sometime around 3 p.m., I got a call from FedEx, asking just where the heck we were. It seems that instead of sending the check to us, care of the Escapees campground at 14301 County Road 28, Summerdale, Alabama, as I had instructed, and as the insurance company rep repeated to me twice, instead they addressed it to 14301 County Road 2828, Sommerville, Alabama! Big surprise, right?

So, by the time we got the check, it was too late to hit the road. We switched to Plan B. Camping World has a half dozen or so pull through RV sites with 30 amp electric and water, free for customer use, so we decided to spend the night there and take off today. This isn’t a campground by any means, but it sure beats the heck out of dry camping, or driving ten miles back to Rainbow Plantation, only to retrace the same route today as we leave town.

I’m pleased with the job the RV tech at Camping World did, installing a new Winegard Traveler automatic TV dish to replace the older Winegard unit we had on our roof. During the burglary and vandalism, they trashed our Dish Network receiver and the control box for the Winegard. Since they don’t make that unit any more, it was not possible to just replace the control box, the entire unit needed to be replaced.

Here is a picture of it mounted on our rig. It’s bigger and heavier than the older dish was, and it seems to take about twice as long to lock onto the satellites. But with triple LNBs, it gets all three Dish satellites, 110, 119, and 129, at the same time, without having to reposition itself when we change channels, like our single LNB dish did.

We had visitors while we were at Camping World! Our friends Paul and Sally Wagner, who are our neighbors at Elkhart Campground in the summer, are staying at Coastal Haven RV Park in nearby Fairhope, and when they read in the blog that we were leaving the area, they came over to say goodbye. We always enjoy visiting with Paul and Sally, I just wish we had more time this trip to do so.

Joe and Marcia Jones are good friends who have the Chasing The Seventies RV blog. We have crossed paths with them many times in our travels, and they arrived at Rainbow Plantation yesterday afternoon, hoping to catch up with us. When they realized we had already left, they came up to Camping World to say hello. We always enjoy these two, and though our visit was brief, we appreciated them taking the time to come all the way back up from the campground to see us.

Terry and I love seafood, and since we are going to be leaving the coastal area today, once we had settled our bill with Camping World and our company had left, we went back to Big Daddy’s Grill for our last fresh seafood dinner. It was just as delicious as last time, and this is one restaurant we’ll be coming back to anytime we’re in the area.

From the weather reports, we may run into some stormy weather as we travel toward Texas, but we’ll just head out and see what happens. If it gets ugly we’ll pull off the road and wait it out. Our goal for today is Lake Charles, Louisiana, a distance of 350 miles.

We had planned to spend the night boondocking at the Isle of Capri Casino, where we’ve stayed before, but Gypsy Journal reader Mark Didelot called last night to tell us about a parish park where he and his wife Sue are parked in Lake Charles, which is just a couple of miles off Interstate 10. The cost is just $12 a night for 50 amp electric, water, and a dump station, with parking on concrete pads. If you have a Golden Age or Golden Access pass, which is now called the National Access pass, the cost is only $6/night. So we will shoot for that instead. Here’s hoping for a good travel day!    

Bad Nick wanted you to have something to do while we’re traveling, so he wrote another Bad Nick Blog post titled Cheaper To Keep Her. Check it out and leave a comment. 

Thought For The Day – Drive like your life depends on it, because it does!

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