I wrote in yesterday’s blog that a cold front was going to bring high winds to northern Arizona, and that our trip to Flagstaff to get the new issue of the Gypsy Journal was going to be interesting.

The wind started blowing hard about three a.m., and all night long it slammed into our Winnebago. At 9 a.m. it was looking pretty grim, and I had a bad feeling about the trip to Flagstaff. Experience has taught me that sometimes I need to listen to that inner voice that warns me of things, and I told Miss Terry that we were going to sit tight for a while and see how things went. There was no sense in endangering ourselves, or getting caught on Interstate 40 if the Highway Patrol closed it.

Throughout the morning, we had rain, sleet, hail, and wind gusts up to 55 miles per hour.  I called the newspaper in Flagstaff that does our printing, and the pressroom foreman said it was just as nasty there. Sure enough, just after noon, they closed Interstate 40 due to blowing dust and high winds, and the highway became a big parking lot the rest of the day. I’m sure glad we decided to wait it out!

About 4 p.m. the wind finally eased up, the sky started to clear a little bit, and I managed to take this picture of a rainbow over Juniper Ridge RV Resort.

A few minutes later and we had mostly blue sky and patchy clouds overhead.

The delay in picking up the paper won’t affect getting the new issue into the mail. We were supposed to stuff the envelopes and get them back to the mail service in Flagstaff Monday morning, and we can still meet that deadline. We’ll just have to push a little harder to get it done.

With our day’s travel plans changed, we just stayed home and relaxed. It was too cold and nasty to go anywhere anyway.  I worked on my family tree on Ancestry.com, adding some newspaper birth and death notices that I found searching Google.

I also spent some time reading online reviews and news stories about the new Apple iPad. I wasn’t too impressed with this new gadget when I first heard about it, wondering what it could do that my laptop computer can’t. But after playing with a couple of them in stores, my thinking has changed 180 degrees. The iPad isn’t a computer, and it isn’t an iPhone or an iPod Touch. It’s an entirely different creation, incorporating some of the features of all of the above, and I can see dozens of uses for it, from cruising the internet to reading e-books and online newspapers, as well as using it for a GPS, and on and on.

The first generation models are WiFi only, but the new 3G units will be in stores the end of the month, and I am going to take a long, hard look at one when they become available. Have any of you blog readers acquired an iPad yet? I’d be interested in hearing your impressions of it.

While I was goofing off, Miss Terry caught up on her paperwork for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally and ran a couple loads of laundry, then started a new crochet project. All in all, it was a quiet day inside our motorhome, while the storm raged outside.

Today, if the weather cooperates, we’re headed to Flagstaff.

Thought For The Day – Okay, who stopped the payment on my reality check?

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We’ve enjoyed watching the new Who Do You Think You Are? series on NBC, in which experts help celebrities trace their families’ history. Isn’t it amazing what a person can accomplish with the knowledge, experience, and the right tools?

I have been researching my family tree on Ancestry.com for a few months now, and while I have been able to trace my maternal grandfather’s line back to the 10th century in England, I have run intro a stone wall on my dad’s side. With both of my parents and all of my siblings gone, as well as all of my uncles and aunts, I had very little to go on. Basically, everything stopped with my paternal grandfather.

I asked my friend Judy Bayless, who presented two excellent seminars on genealogy at our Yuma rally, for advice, and she volunteered to look into it, since she happened to be in Salt Lake City, which has the largest genealogical research facilities in the world at the LDS Family History Center. Their extensive records are not just limited to Mormon histories, and anybody can go there to conduct research.

Within 24 hours Judy sent me my grandparents’ wedding certificate, and information she found out about them from census records and city directories dating back to 1892! Wow! Thanks for all of your hard work,  Judy.  You helped me make a big step forward.

Judy also discovered a possible connection between my paternal grandmother’s family and her own husband Walt’s! How cool is that! I always liked “Cousin” Walt!

Genealogy is a hobby that fits perfectly with the RV lifestyle, because besides doing online research, we can go back to the places where our ancestors lived and research local records, find their graves, and even walk on the land where they worked and lived.

It can also put you in touch with long lost family members. Over the years, I had lost track of my older brother’s family, and though I have tried to find them many times, I never got anywhere. Recently, while doing some research on Ancestry.com, I came across his name in someone else’s family tree. I sent a message to that person, who turned out to be my brother’s granddaughter. As it turns out, my brother’s sons and daughter had also been searching for me, and we plan on visiting them all when we get down to Florida later this year. Hmmm…. I wonder if I can convince one of my nephews to install a full hookup RV site in his yard for his old Uncle Nick? Wouldn’t that be nice!

Thought For The Day – If you shake your family tree hard enough, some nuts are bound to fall out!

We are fast running out of time here in Apache Junction, and we still have a lot to get done before we head to Yuma for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in March. We still need to replace the tires on or motorhome, replace the house batteries, I’m working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and once it is printed, we need to get it mailed out. And, of course, there are still a few dozen rally details and chores that need completed too.

Aside from work related tasks, we still have some folks who want to get together for lunch or dinner, I want to get down to Tucson to visit my cousin Beverly, and I’d like to spend a few hours at the Family History Center of the LDS Church in Mesa. I’m not a Mormon, but their genealogy research facilities are open to anyone, and I’m running into a brick wall on my father’s side of my family tree.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Miss Terry a new Bernina Bernette sewing machine, and while I was working on the new issue of the paper yesterday, she went to a class at Quilter’s Ranch in Tempe to learn about all of the new machine’s bells and whistles. What, you say? A class to learn how to operate a sewing machine? No, Terry has been sewing since she was a youngster, this class was just to learn all about the features of her new machine and its many capabilities.

What the heck, when I got my Blackberry Storm last summer, Verizon had a free class to learn to use it! Of course, I still can’t do much more than make a call or answer e-mails on it.

Yesterday, my friend Sharon Del Rosario sent me an e-mail to tell me about a great country singer and yodeler named David Bradley that she and hubby Don met in Quartzsite, and she suggested that I contact David and talk to him about performing at our Yuma rally. Since I value Sharon’s opinion, I called David and we worked out an arrangement for him to come to the rally and perform a concert on Monday evening.

David is the son of world champion yodeler Gene Bradley, and has been performing since he was five years old. He performed with the famous Sons of the Pioneers for five years, and was a featured solo artist at the popular Country Tonite Theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he won the Featured Entertainer of the Year award. You can hear some sound bites of David’s music on his Born To Yodel website. Check it out, and make plans now to attend his concert at the rally. Between David and the Michael Hargis’ concert, we’ll have plenty of reasons to tap our toes at the rally, won’t we?

Besides great entertainment and a full line of seminars at the rally, you will also have the opportunity to take advantage of some extra activities, including getting your RV weighed by Rick and Joyce Lang from RVSEF; taking behind the wheel RV driving classes from the RV School, and taking a class to obtain a non-resident Utah or Florida concealed weapons permit from Traveling CCW.

There is a separate fee for any of these valuable extras, and you should make arrangements before the rally if you can, because they all fill up fast. For RV weighing, contact Rick Lang at ricklang46@hotmail.com; for the RV School, contact Dennis Hill at rvschool@wizwire.com; and for the CCW classes, visit the Traveling CCW website.

News out of Elkhart, Indiana is that Heartland Recreational Vehicles LLC., builders of what I consider some of the finest fifth wheel trailers on the market, has purchased the rights to the brand names Prowler, Mallard, Pioneer, Wilderness, and other Fleetwood towable products, and will begin to build their own line of trailer models under those names. A company press release says they plan to begin manufacturing RVs under the acquired names in the next year. Given my personal opinion of Fleetwood products, I’m not sure this is a move I would have made, but if anyone can build something worthwhile under those brand names, I think it would be Heartland.

As busy as we are, Bad Nick still found time to write a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Dying With Dignity. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.

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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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Terry and I love this area around Traverse City, Michigan. It is absolutely gorgeous is the spring, summer, and fall, though we like to be long gone before the first snowflake falls. Having spent part of a winter here years ago while Miss Terry was being treated for cancer, I can tell you it’s no place to be in an RV!

Grand Traverse Bay, with its amazingly blue water, is a playground for swimmers, boaters, and fishermen. The hills are covered in lush forests, and I think we have seen more wild turkeys here than anyplace in the country. The shops in the charming downtown area offer some neat shopping opportunities. If you like to tempt Lady Luck, there are three nearby Indian Casinos operated by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

We return here ever year for Terry’s annual visit with her oncologist, and also to visit with my cousin Terry Cook and his family. When Miss Terry was so sick, we squatted in their driveway for a couple of months while she was undergoing chemo and radiation, and they treated us just wonderfully. Before then I had not seen my cousin Terry in close to 20 years. We had planned on only a quick visit before Miss Terry got sick, but they made us feel right at home and were a major source of support for both of us during the cancer ordeal. For that we will be forever grateful.

When we first came here, so many years ago, my cousin’s kids, Michelle and Patrick, were teenagers, and now Michelle is a grown woman and Patrick is almost finished with college. That makes us feel old sometimes!

For us, one of the great things about the fulltime RV lifestyle has been the opportunity to connect with family members we had not seen in many years. My cousin Berni Frees and her husband Rocky, whom many of you know from this blog and the Gypsy Journal, have become much more than family, they are two of our best friends in the world.

Berni is about ten years younger than me, and the last time I had seen her she was a little girl when the family came to see me off to Vietnam. We had had no contact in a lifetime, until she somehow learned we were fulltime RVers. She and Rocky were interested in the RV lifestyle, so she made contact and a friendship grew from there. They tried fulltiming for a year or so, and decided it wasn’t the right time in their lives for it, but we still see them a couple of times a year at their home in Muskegon, Michigan.

RVing has also given us the chance to get to know Berni’s sister Vanessa and her hubby Mickey and their kids in Ohio, and allowed us to spend time with my cousin Beverly in Tucson.

Terry was also able to hook up with a cousin she had not seen in years, Carolyn Henley. Carolyn and her husband Mel were also interested in fulltiming, and now they just started on their grand adventure a week or two ago. In Idaho we were able to visit an uncle that Terry had not seen in a long time.

There are many facets to the fulltiming RV lifestyle, and as you can see, the chance to get to know your extended family can be one of them. With relatives scattered from coast to coast and border to border in our modern society, many of us don’t have the close family ties that our parents and grandparents had. RVing can help us renew those relationships.

And of course, the great thing is that if we happen to find a few fruits and nuts on the family tree, we have wheels under our house, and we can drive away!  

Thought For The Day – Faith is a journey, not a guilt trip

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