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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Yesterday was a long short drive for us.

We pulled out of the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve about 11 a.m., me driving the motorhome and Miss Terry, the Explorer. We drove north 11 miles on U.S. Highway 27 to State Route 50, then took it west through Clermont, Groveland, and Masconte.

Traffic was light, and we moved right along. When I planned our route on Microsoft Streets & Trips, I thought that it said it was going to be a short drive of about 40 miles, but it sure seemed to take a long time!

We very seldom travel in separate vehicles, and I don’t like it very much. But since we don’t have the base plate on the Explorer yet, we didn’t have any choice. I like Miss Terry’s company a lot better than my own!

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I kept wondering when we’d get to Interstate 75, and since the GPS was in the Explorer, I didn’t have any point of reference. But eventually we reached to the interstate, and took it north eight miles, then took County Road 673 east a couple of miles to the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground. I don’t know how I figured the mileage wrong, but it was actually 55 miles from our campsite at the Thousand Trails to our site at Sumter Oaks. That sure was a long short drive!

We got the typical warm Escapees welcome, with hugs. Well, at least I got a hug. Miss Terry is fighting a nasty cold, and kept her distance so she wouldn’t make anybody else sick.  We were assigned site #11, a full hookup 50 amp campsite we’ve been in on previous visits here.

The campground is not full, but there are quite a few RVs here. Most of the sites have full hookups, but they also have a small boondocking area across from our site, where this nice Airstream trailer is dry camping.

Sumter Oaks is a nice campground, with lots of beautiful old live oak trees, draped with Spanish moss. There are usually some sand hill cranes wandering around, but we haven’t seen them so far. Once Terry gets to feeling better, we’ll have a better look around.

We’ll be here a week, then head back to the Orlando Thousand Trails. Under our membership, we can stay at any Thousand Trails preserve for up to fourteen days, and then we have to go to another campground, even another Thousand Trails/NACO preserve, for at least a week before we can return to the same campground.

Usually we don’t go back to the same campground that soon, but the nice folks at Camper Connection, just a couple of miles away, have ordered a Blue Ox base plate for us, and we have an appointment to have it installed December 1st.

Once that’s done, we want to head down to Fort Lauderdale for a visit with Jim and Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, and then get down to Key West for a week or so.

I have some nephews and a niece in the Saint Petersburg area that I have not seen in about 25 years that I want to visit with, and that’s only about 70 miles from here. So, depending on how Miss Terry is feeling, we may pop in on them while we’re here, or else we’ll wait until after we come back from Key West. I’m looking forward to reconnecting after such a long time.

Thought For The Day – A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.

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In yesterday’s blog, I wrote about a couple of bad experiences I had here in Morgan Hill, California. But those were petty little inconveniences in the overall scheme of things. Just remember that old saying  “I complained I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

Compared to what fellow Escapees Mel and Charlene Schwartz just went through, getting a bad meal or being hassled by an overzealous cop is nothing!

Mel wrote me that about 3 p.m. on June 29, they were driving east on U.S. Highway 50 just outside of Delta, Utah, doing about 55 miles per hour, just enjoying the scenery on the two lane highway, when this limb broke off a tree beside the highway, crashed into the hood of their Ford truck, and then through the windshield, showering them with glass.

Their guardian angel must have been riding with them that afternoon, because unbelievably, Mel and Charlene were not injured. It’s a wonder they weren’t killed! Look how the limb slammed through the driver’s side of the cab and out the window! Mel said that aside from being scared and shook up, they were unharmed.

Mel said their Excel fifth wheel was not damaged, but the truck is going to need extensive repairs. They are currently in an RV park in Delta, and the truck is in a local body shop, waiting for the insurance adjuster to show up. Mel said that once they were set up in the RV park, they spent an hour vacuuming bits of glass out of each other’s hair.

As a side note, Mel told me that the sheriff’s deputy that investigated the accident said that he had been notified of a tree limb that was about to fall, but hadn’t been able to get to it yet. As Mel said, timing is everything.

This is a perfect example of why I believe that while we can take every reasonable precaution in the book, sometimes things just happen, and when they do, all we can do is roll with the punches.

We never know when the car or truck coming toward us down the highway may cross the centerline and hit us head on; or when a tire on the eighteen wheeler passing us may blow and wipe out the side of our RV; or when some tiny speck of plaque in an artery will break loose and block the blood flow; or a million other things that probably will not happen, but can at any instant.

What quirk of fate determines who will dodge the bullet, and who won’t? Why did I have friends who survived Vietnam, only to come home and die in traffic accidents? What keeps that semi tire from blowing when the truck passes me and makes it blow when passing some other poor guy? As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, life is a crapshoot. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.

We can’t live our lives in fear of everything, so all we can do is cherish every moment we have, and thank whatever higher being we believe in when we have a close call and survive.

Thought For The Day – When life sends storms, remember to dance in the rain!

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Miss Terry set a new record getting all of the envelopes stuffed with the new issue of the paper, and by yesterday afternoon the majority of them were in the mail. We’ll drop the remainder off at the post office and UPS this morning.

The Gypsy Journal goes out to our subscribers several different ways, depending on their preference. The greatest majority are sent as Standard Rate mail, which used to be called Bulk Mail.

We use different commercial mail houses around the country, depending where we happen to be when we publish a new issue. We send the mail service our address list and they print the names onto envelopes. Then we pick the envelopes up, stuff them with papers, and return them to the mail service, which uses its mail permit to send them out. Because a mailing permit is specific to one post office, and we travel all over the country, we don’t have our own permit, which would require us to return to the same post office for mailing every time. Standard Rate is the least expensive way to subscribe, but it is also the slowest delivery method. If subscribers are traveling, the post office will not forward Standard Rate mail.

The second option is First Class mail, which costs more, but moves faster through the postal system. First Class is also supposed to be forwarded, but it has been our experience that no matter what the rules say, the good folks at the post office do (or don’t do) whatever they feel like. We use Stamps.com to print our own First Class postage, and we can mail items anywhere.

We also have a lot of subscribers who use mail forwarding services such as Escapees, FMCA, and Alternative Resources. We have so many subscribers who use these three mailing services that they all allow us to put the envelopes with the papers for their clients into boxes, and ship them to them by UPS. This saves us a few dollars in postage, and gets the papers into subscribers’ mail boxes a little quicker than Standard Rate.     

Last year we also made digital subscriptions available, and we have had a lot of subscribers switch to that option. When a new issue is uploaded, we send them a link to its location on the internet, where they can either read it online, or download it to their computers. The digital subscription is the quickest way to get each new issue of the paper, because subscribers can be reading it minutes after I upload it.

Now that the new issue is making its way to subscribers in every corner of the country, we can relax a little bit, and we can even try to squeeze in a little bit of fun. Today we plan to drive down to Tucson and visit my cousin Beverly, who is one of my favorite people in the whole world. For the last three or four  years, we have spent a couple of weeks in Tucson visiting Beverly, but this year our schedule is so crowded that we’re not sure if we can get down for a stay or not. But we at least want to make a day trip to the Old Pueblo and spend some time with her before we head to Yuma for our Gypsy Gathering rally.

While Terry and I were busy dealing with mailing chores, Bad Nick was busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled 10 Things That Piss Me Off. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – New survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world’s population.

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After spending the night at the Flying J in Midway, Florida, we had an easy run west to the Alabama state line, and pulled into the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale about noon yesterday.

I have always said that coming into an Escapees park is like a homecoming, because there is always somebody we know from our extended family of RVers on hand to greet us. This time was no exception. The fellow in the Newmar Mountainair motorhome parked next to us, whose name unfortunately slips my mind, is a longtime blog reader.

Soon after we got settled in and hooked up, Darrell and Judy Patterson came by to say hello. They have a lot here, and when they learned that we were coming, they e-mailed and invited us to dinner, but we had to decline because we are already booked solid. We have a lot of friends at Rainbow Plantation, and more at other RV parks in the area, and when they heard that we were headed this way, we were flooded with invitations for dinner or a visit. It feels good to be so loved.

I went for a walk around the park and ran into even more folks, including Jack Mayer. Jack and I have only met once before, but we have exchanged e-mails and comments on the Escapees Forum for years. Howard and Linda Payne from RVDreams.com are also here. We met Howard and Linda at Life on Wheels several years ago, and have kept track of them through their blog ever since.

At the 4 p.m. social hour at the park’s Activity Center, we ran into even more people that we know, including Norm and Linda Payne. (Yes, there are two Linda Paynes here, and they’re both from Louisville!) They have the excellent See Ya Down The Road website, and after ten years of fulltime RVing, they have built a house here at Rainbow Plantation. Linda said that while they have a house now, they still have a lot of wanderlust left, and they keep their RV ready to hit the road at a moment’s notice.

There were lots of other folks who made us feel welcome, but these old gray cells aren’t what they used to be, and if I don’t write something down, I forget it pretty quick.

We have been living in our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage about three months now, and people keep asking how we like it, compared to our MCI bus conversion. The old bus was a great rig, and as strong as a tank, and there have been some tradeoffs we have had to adjust to.

Miss Terry misses her Avanti gas range and oven, her Whirlpool washer and dryer, and the full size Maytag house style refrigerator in the bus. But she is getting the hang of using the convection oven, the RV refrigerator, and the Splendide washer/dryer combo in the Winnebago. They are not as efficient as what we had in the bus, but the tradeoffs in space the Winnebago’s two slideouts give us, along with some nice creature comforts like cruise control and the automatic rooftop TV dish, make it worthwhile.  

I love the power the 350 Cummins diesel gives us. Yesterday, rolling across Interstate 10, we started up a hill and I swung into the left lane, zipped past a couple of slow moving semis, and back into the right lane. Miss Terry said “You like doing that, don’t you?” You bet, baby. After years of life in the slow lane, staring at the back doors of the big trucks, it’s payback time!

We have traveled 2100 miles since we left Elkhart, Indiana November 1, across the mountains of West Virginia, out to the coast of North Carolina, down to Titusville, Florida, and then across the top of Florida on I-10 to Summerdale.

The 2003 ¾ ton extended length Ford cargo van we tow, which carries two kayaks, two bicycles, bundles of the Gypsy Journal, and a lot of other stuff, weighs just at 7,000 pounds.

The Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitoring system keeps very accurate mileage data. Most of our driving has been on Interstate highways, at an average speed of 63 miles per hour. According to the Silverleaf, we have averaged 7.5 miles per gallon for the overall trip. On relatively flat terrain, at 55 miles per hour, I get an average of a shade over 8 miles per gallon. Of course, the faster I drive, the lower my miles per gallon. But sometimes a guy just has to sacrifice a little fuel economy in the name of horsepower.

Speaking of horsepower, Bad Nick burned some fuel writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Protecting Jobs Or Playing Bully?.  Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

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