In the eleven years that Terry and I have been on the road as fulltime RVers, I can probably count the number of times we have made reservations at an RV park on my fingers. We usually prefer to travel at our leisure, and stop wherever we find ourselves at the end of a day, without the pressure of having to get someplace.

However, we currently have not one, not two, but three reservations awaiting us! That’s quite a difference from our usual style of traveling. But each reservation has a specific purpose; I booked a week at the Pony Express RV Park in Salt Lake City, Utah starting Thursday so I can do some genealogy research; then we have a five night reservation at the River Dance RV Resort in Gypsum, Colorado, which was the closest place we could find to Vail, where we will be attending a family wedding on the 18th; and then, in September, we have a fourteen day reservation at the Hershey, Pennsylvania Thousand Trails, where we will be staying while we work the Pennsylvania RV and Camping Show.

We’ve stayed at the Hershey Thousand Trails before and know what to expect, but with the other two RV parks, location swayed our decision. There really were not many options in Colorado, and in Salt Lake City, there wasn’t a lot to choose from either.

Even with all of our time on the road, we’re still pretty green when it comes to selecting an RV park. Given a choice, we prefer Passport America campgrounds, Escapees RV parks, Elks and Moose lodges, fairgrounds, casinos, and the many free campgrounds around the country, but those are not always an option. Then we have to find a place.

We learned a long time ago that the ratings in most campground guides seem to be based more upon the size of the ad than the quality of the facilities.

Sometimes we get recommendations from friends, and if not, I start looking around online for reviews. I find it interesting reading reviews of RV parks online at Yahoo and the RV Park Reviews website. Some people will give a campground the highest rating, while others will slam it bad. How can two RVers stay at the same place, have two very different experiences, and come away with such different opinions?

Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, when you read comments like “Nothing for kids to do here” or “No planned activities.” I ignore those types of complaints, because we don’t travel with kids, and we don’t need to be entertained. I’m more concerned about comments about things like dogs running around unleashed, permanent residents with seedy looking trailers, or rowdy neighbors.

How about you? How to you choose an RV park to stay at, in an unfamiliar area? What’s your protocol for finding a place to stay for a few days?

Thought For The Day – Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist.’

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I spent yesterday just goofing off. I had to send a fax to an insurance company, so I went to our bank, only to learn that this is a service that they no longer offer to customers. In a small town, with  no office supply stores, it took a couple of misses before I found a printing shop with fax service.

From there I drove another ten miles up the mountain to Pinetop-Lakeside, where I stopped at my friend Lyle Worman’s Pinetop Sporting Goods store. Lyle and I go back at least a lifetime, and we’ve gotten into misadventures from the Mexican border to the Painted Desert in that time. We didn’t get to visit much though, because he had a steady steam of customers coming and going.

Lyle said business had been dead until I showed up. I suggested that maybe he put me on the payroll, but the best I could get out of him was a stale piece of Halloween candy that I swiped off his desk.

When  I left Lyle’s shop, I went to Pinetop Book Exchange, a great little used book store that another longtime friend, Jim Lewis, owns. Jim and I go back as far as Lyle and I do, and when I still lived here we were the Three Musketeers. In fact, at one time or another, both of them lived with me for a year or more.

Jimmy was pretty busy too, but we swapped a few lies, and decided that the older we get, the better we used to be. Among his many talents, Jim is also a massage therapist, and he has a massage table right there in his book store. So when I told him that I was having twinges in my back, he threw me down on the table, kneaded here and pushed there, gave me a twist or two, and when I got back upright I was all better again!

A while after I arrived, Jim’s pretty wife Shar came into the store, and we chatted until almost closing time. They have not seen our motorhome yet, and mentioned that they were looking forward to seeing the Winnebago. But Miss Terry was home working on some projects (hey, we can’t both goof off all day!), and I was sure she wouldn’t appreciate me bringing home unannounced guests, so I suggested they drop by another time. The great thing about longtime close friends is that you can say “not now” and they understand and don’t get offended.

When I got back to the Elks Campground in Show Low, Miss Terry had the washing machine going, the place was clean and freshly vacuumed, and she was just finishing putting up the other set of  Levolor blinds in our bedroom. I felt guilty because she had been working all day while I was out playing, but she assured me that things usually go quicker and easier if I’m not underfoot. Yeah guys, I trained that woman well!

But I’m not a total clod. When Terry got finished, I took her out to dinner instead of making her cook. (Can’t you just hear that old male chauvinist pig country song Put Another Log On The Fire playing in the background?)

Whenever people ask Terry why she puts up with me, she always says it’s because I make her laugh and I let her cry. I got a chuckle out of her at dinner, when our waitress asked if I wanted a refill on my Coke. I asked her for half a glass, and when she brought it back, I said “I’m sorry, miss, I guess I forgot to tell you that I wanted the top half of the glass filled, not the bottom.” The young lady started to apologize, but then she realized what I had said, and we all had a giggle.

After dinner we made a quick stop at Safeway for a few things, and on our way out, Terry noticed that the Customer Service counter had a sign saying that they had fax service available. Go figure.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the State Lines app for the iPhone. As it turns out, State Lines creators Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard are also fulltime RVers, and they developed this valuable tool with folks just like us in mind. I downloaded the app to my iPad, and I’m very impressed. They put a lot of effort into developing a first class resource that all travelers will appreciate. Cherie and Chris told me that a full size version of the app to better fit the larger iPad screen is in the final stages, and that an eBook version for those without iPhones or iPads is also in the works.

Another great iPhone/iPad app lists all Escapees RV parks nationwide, with information including location, address, number of RV sites and amenities, contact information, and much more. It’s a free app that you can download at this link. 

While I was goofing off all day, Bad Nick was hard at work pounding out a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Bitten By The Boycott. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – My wild oats have turned into prunes and All Bran.

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The rain stopped long enough yesterday for us to enjoy mostly blue sky, but the temperature dropped quite a bit, and the next week or so is supposed to be much cooler. I won’t complain about that, it’s still better than we had in Indiana. Now I wish it would just dry out!

I have been furiously pounding away at the keyboard, working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, except for an hour or two we spent yesterday meeting with an insurance adjuster, and then going into town to make more copies of forms for the insurance company, getting them notarized, and mailed off to National Interstate.

I love small town folks. Somebody here at the Escapees campground said that there was a notary public at City Hall in Foley, but when I stopped in she was out of the office, so they sent me next door to the library. The lady who usually does notary work there was also out, so they sent me upstairs to Library Director Steve Horn’s office. Steve is a very nice man, and after he notarized my papers, we must have talked for a half hour or so about small town life, and our fulltime RV lifestyle. Try getting that kind of one-on-one friendliness in the big city!

Back at the campground, I worked some more on the new issue, and then we stopped long enough to go to the 4 p.m. Social Hour, which actually took about 35 minutes. I always like attending Social Hour at Escapees RV parks. It gives us an opportunity to visit with folks, meet the people who recently arrived, and just relax.

Soon after we returned to the motorhome, Greg and Judy Bahnmiller came by to pick up a bundle of Gypsy Journals to pass out at an RV rally they will be attending, and at other RV parks they will be visiting in their travels. Many of our readers help us spread the word about the paper this way, introducing it to people in parts of the country where we don’t have an opportunity to get to, and it really helps us a lot. We always print a couple thousand extra copies of each issue just for this purpose. So if we cross paths and you have room in your rig for a bundle or two of newspapers to distribute wherever you’re headed, we’d be happy and grateful to make you an honorary “paper boy” (or girl).

Longtime subscribers and Gypsy Gathering rally attendees Jim and Mary Gallivan are here at the campground, and they have been inviting us to dinner for years, but we never seemed to have the time when we met up with them. So yesterday evening we all went to an excellent local restaurant called Big Daddy’s Grill.

Tucked away at the end of a small road on the bank of the Fish River, the restaurant may not be fancy by New York City standards, but who wants to go to New York City anyway? But if you want excellent food, especially seafood, it should be on your list of places to go. Jim and Mary introduced Miss Terry to fried pickle slices, which she said were delicious. I was glad they all liked them so much, because it left more of the fried crab claws for me. And those were just the appetizers! I had the shrimp and oyster combo basket, Terry had a shrimp quesadilla, Mary had a grilled shrimp salad, and Jim ordered a huge cheeseburger with sweet potato fries. We all loved our selections, and Big Daddy’s is now on our list of places we can’t wait to get back to.

As good as the food was, having time to sit and visit with Jim and Mary was even better. We share an interest in genealogy, though I have barely gotten my toes wet, while they have been poking the limbs on their respective family trees for decades.

By coincidence, Mary mentioned that she used to write a column for the Lapeer County Press newspaper in Michigan, which has been considered one of the best small town newspapers in the country for as long as I can remember. Back when I was still a wet behind the ears kid starting my own first newspaper, I met the publisher of the Lapeer newspaper at a newspaper convention, and he gave me tons of valuable advice to help me get my publication off the ground. A lot of the things he taught me, I continued to use throughout my newspaper career and it came in far more useful than anything I ever learned in a college journalism classroom.

The weather reports say that yesterday’s break was going to be fleeting, and we have another inch of rain predicted today and tonight. I think my “love handles” are going to turn into giant gills if this keeps up!

Thought For The Day – People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which “overnight success” is achieved.

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