After reading yesterday’s Bad Nick Blog, titled Armed Citizens Fight Back, several readers e-mailed me to ask if I have a concealed weapon carry (CCW) permit, and how fulltime RVers can get a permit to carry a handgun.

I actually have two CCW permits, a non-resident from Arizona, and a permit from South Dakota, our state of domicile. Between the two of them, those permits are honored in a total of 36 states that have reciprocity agreements with the states that issued my permits. On the map below, the states in blue all honor one or both of my permits.

Getting a concealed carry permit depends on your home state. Some states require you to pass a concealed carry course and demonstrate proficiency with your weapon before you can qualify for a permit. Others simply issue a permit to people who meet the necessary requirements.

In South Dakota, it’s as simple as filling out a form and submitting it to the Sheriff in your home county. After a background check, you go to the Sheriff’s office, pay a small fee (under $20 as I recall), and your permit is issued. Check with the Sheriff in your county for specific information.

The other two states most popular with fulltime RVers also issue concealed weapons permits to their residents. For Florida residents, this link to the Florida concealed carry permit requirements will help you determine what is required. Texas residents can click this link to Texas CCW information.

Arizona, Texas, and Utah all issue concealed carry permits to non-residents who meet their requirements to obtain such a permit. Check each individual state’s website for information on non-resident permits.

At our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma, Byron Hibshman will be giving a seminar on Transporting Firearms In Your RV. Byron will also be doing an evening class to qualify for a Utah non-resident CCW permit. You can contact Byron at his Traveling CCW website for class information and fees.

A good guide to traveling with firearms is the book The Traveler’s Guide to the Gun Laws of the 50 States, which has detailed info on every state, and what is legal and not legal in that state. Another good reference is the website Handgunlaw.us. But please be aware that things can change on a daily basis, so if you have a question or concern, check with local authorities before you go.

Making the decision to own and carry a firearm is not one to be made lightly. It brings with it a very heavy responsibility to yourself, to your family, and to society. I always tell people that if they are going to have a gun, please, please, please take a firearms safety course, as well as a course on firearms use in a tactical situation. You must not only know how to shoot, you need to know when to shoot, and when not to.

And then practice regularly with your firearm. It’s one thing to punch holes in paper at a range, but in a real life situation, when the adrenalin is pumping and you’re scared to death, even trained police officers and combat veterans miss a lot more than they ever hit their targets.

Face it, most of us will never need a weapon to defend ourselves, especially in the RV lifestyle. However, the flip side of that coin is that any of us can find ourselves in a desperate situation at any minute. After all, we don’t spend all of our lives in safe, secure RV parks. We all drive down the road, eat in restaurants, and shop in stores. And we never know what the guy behind us in traffic or in the checkout line, or at the next table, will do. Having faced off with armed opponents both with and without a gun in my hand in the past, trust me, it’s much better with the gun!

Thought For The Day – Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is thick hair and a thin body. Please don’t mix them up like you did last year.

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News flash! As it turns out, you can watch TV in an RV after all! Who knew?

You may remember that I reported in a blog last week titled You Can’t Watch TV In An RV that Dish Network was supposed to bring us a new high definition DVR receiver, but on the morning of the appointment, the Dish installer told me that “you can’t watch TV in an RV,” and no matter how much I argued with him, or with the folks at Dish Network’s customer service center, the company position was that it just couldn’t be done. Never mind that we have had Dish Network all along in our RV, just like tens of thousands of other RVers, it just can’t be done.

After that happened, the owner of a local independent Dish installation company, ADO Electronics (321) 231-0355, called Dish for us, and knew who to talk to and what to say. Dish agreed to send somebody back out yesterday. He told us that if the second Dish installer wouldn’t do the job, to let him know.

Sure enough, yesterday morning a second Dish installer arrived, and within an hour or two he had our new receiver installed and hooked up to both our front and rear TVs, and we were good to go. We’re watching TV in an RV! Who would have thought that was possible?

Since he had to pull the old original equipment TV out of the cabinet in our bedroom to hook it up, we took the opportunity to dispose of that TV and replaced it with a 20 inch LCD Vizio we’ve been carrying around for that purpose ever since we got our Winnebago, but never got around to doing. The installer was a very nice young man, and when we asked if he had any need of the older TV, he was happy to take it for his son’s bedroom.

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The new HD DVR is cool. It’s a single box with two receivers built into it, and we can watch and record two different stations at the same time. How cool is that?

The only problem was that, after the installation we didn’t have our east and west coast distant network feeds, so I called All American Direct, who provides distant network service for Dish. The nice tech there deleted our old receiver and entered the serial number of our new receiver into our account, and within about five minutes our east and west coast feeds were back.

Well, they were back, but the on-screen menu that shows the upcoming programming just said No Info in every time slot. I called Dish back, they had me reboot the new receiver, and the updated program information downloaded. Life is good!

I wasn’t sure if we would have to reprogram our Winegard Trav’ler automatic rooftop satellite dish for the new receiver, but we pushed the button to stow it, and then deployed it again, and it went right up and locked onto the signal with no problem. Hopefully it will do the same thing at our next location.

With that out of the way, we went to a late lunch/early dinner (linner) at a nice Chinese buffet in Orlando, called Billy Wong’s, with Dave and Jean Damon, 303 vendors we know from the RV rally circuit. We had a nice meal, and lots of interesting conversation.

Speaking of our next location, we’re due to leave the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve on Sunday, and the plan has been to go down to Fort Lauderdale and spend a day or three bothering Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, and then to go on down to Key West. But with the cold front that is coming through the area, even Key West will be much cooler than it was on our visit two years ago. I’m not sure if we’ll want to do much kayaking unless it warms back up. We’re hoping for rising temperatures soon!

Thought For The Day – It’s no coincidence that there’s only a one letter difference between “garage sale” and “garbage sale.”

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It was one year ago yesterday that we had the most frightening experience in our lives as fulltime RVers. Longtime readers may remember that it was on December 4, 2009 that we returned to our Winnebago, which was parked in the campground at an RV repair facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and came face to face with an armed burglar inside our motorhome.

By the time I realized what was happening, I was already out of our van and approaching the door of the RV, and he was pointing a gun at me. In the confrontation that followed, I managed to slam the RV’s door on his hand and disarmed the intruder. He got away, only to show up at a hospital three days later with seven broken bones in his wrist and hand.

As it turned out, he was a career criminal out on bail on other charges, and with outstanding warrants. He’s back in prison where he belongs, and will be for a long time, or until the next parole board believes his sob story about how he grew up poor and was victimized by life and the system.

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Besides some things that were missing, the intruder and whoever had been with him trashed the inside of our RV, throwing electronic components on the floor and stomping on them, slashing furniture, and ripping down window blinds.

A frustrating battle with our insurance company followed, but we finally prevailed, and were able to put our motorhome and our lives back together. Living well really is the best revenge.

What a difference a year makes! Back then, we spent the next week freezing our butts off in Indiana while repairs were made to our RV so we could leave. Now we’re in Florida, where a cold front is coming through, and temperatures are predicted to dip as low as 29 degrees in the next few days. So yes, we’ll be freezing our butts off again, but if that’s the worst that can happen, we can deal with it.

Our lives have gone on, and while we have put the burglary behind us, we still feel violated, and disgusted with a system that had let the creep out of prison early so he could prey on us and others. We don’t fear traveling in our RV, and we still dry camp frequently. Inside our motorhome, we feel secure, but Terry and I are both a little apprehensive when we return to our coach after dark, unless we’re parked in a campground we know.

We had a motion detector light installed at our door, and while we refuse to live in fear, we are not nearly as complacent as we had become. We realize that while what happened to us can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time, the odds against the average RVer ever having such an experience are very, very slim.  We still feel that this is the greatest lifestyle in the world, and every new day is an adventure, whether we’re camping in the desert of Arizona and listening to the coyotes singing us to sleep, or parked under a palm tree in Florida enjoying a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

Thought For The Day – If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics are all wrong.

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Thank you to everybody who e-mailed get well wishes to us. We’ve come through the worst of it, and I think we’re going to live after all.

Yesterday afternoon we drove into town and dropped off bundles of sample copies of the Gypsy Journal at several RV parks. We stopped at four or five different RV parks, and it didn’t look like any of them were much more than half full. Is it going to be a slow season in Florida, or did everybody wait until after Turkey Day to hit the road?

After we finished with the RV parks, we stopped at WalMart to get some more meds, and a few things Terry needed to restock our larder. I try very hard to avoid going into any store between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but sometimes things get desperate, and a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. I was out of Pop Tarts and Jello pudding cups.

I was surprised that the store was no more crowded than it normally is. I guess all of the Black Friday shoppers were home sleeping off their ordeal of the day before. Or maybe they’re doing more of their shopping online.

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I’m curious. How many of you blog readers shop online for Christmas gifts, or for things you need yourself? We don’t do it a lot, but last night Terry ordered a pair of those comfy Tee Pee Creepers slippers for somebody, and I’m about to order a Kodak Vi8 camcorder from Amazon for a new project I’m working on. I’m also going to contact Tim and Crystal Ryerson from Inflatable Boats 4 Less and have them send me out an electric pump for my Sea Eagle PaddleSki 435 inflatable kayak.

For fulltimers who move around a lot, being in one location long enough to receive packages can be a problem. RV parks differ in their policies about accepting mail and packages. Some will allow you to have anything sent to you, in care of the office address, others will only allow FedEx or UPS packages, and some will not allow anything at all. I much prefer a campground where I can have both packages and my regular mail sent to me, instead of having to trudge down to the post office and stand in a long line to get my mail by General Delivery.  And since the post office won’t accept FedEx or UPS general delivery packages, it can be a hassle when ordering online.

Today we are leaving the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground and are headed back to the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve so we’ll be ready to get the base plate installed in our Ford Explorer next week. We’re taking a different route back than the one we came in on a week ago, one that my friend George Sharrer tells me will shave about 15 miles off the trip. Once again, Terry will follow me in the Explorer. I’ll sure be glad when we have it set up for towing, I miss her when we travel this way. I don’t think I could enjoy being a solo RVer.

I booked us into the Thousand Trails for fourteen days, though I’m not sure we’ll actually stay that long. If we get everything wrapped up, I really want to get down to the Keys and play for a while.

Thought For The Day – Those that judge us don’t matter. Those that matter don’t judge us.

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We had a lot to get done yesterday, and accomplished very little of it. Some days are just like that, I guess.

We had quite a bit of stuff that we had been carrying around in the van that we decided had to go away, so I loaded it into the Explorer to drop off at a Goodwill or Salvation Army. It’s amazing what you discover that you had forgotten you own!

A little after noon we drove back to the car dealer in Winter Haven, where we bought the Explorer, to pick up the the SMI auxiliary brake that they had agreed to disconnect from the van, and to drop off the van’s title, which we had forgotten the day before. Along the way, we stopped at a Salvation Army store and unloaded the items we had to donate.

We had noticed a squealing noise coming from the Explorer, that I suspected was a fan belt or something like that. It wasn’t a big deal, just irritating. So I asked their service department to take a look, and they decided that a serpentine belt and a pulley were glazed, which was causing the noise.

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They pulled the vehicle into the shop to change them, and said it would take  a couple of hours to get the parts and do the job. Okay, we were there, they were paying for it under warranty, so we’d get it out of the way.

Well, we all know that no job ever gets done in the time allocated, right? The two hours stretched out to almost three before they were done, but they did a good job. This was supposed to be a quick trip, so I had not taken my iPad with me, so I spent the time reading old magazines about topics I had no interest in, while Miss Terry, always better prepared, had a book to read.

We needed to find a Fed Ex drop box to send the loan paperwork back to Alliant Credit Union, and we thought we had seen one in a shopping center we would pass on the way out of town. As it turned out, we were wrong, so we stopped at a hotel to ask if they knew of one nearby. They didn’t.

Again, if I had my iPad, I could have gone online and found one quickly, but we figured we’d pass a Staples or Office Depot, which usually does Fed Ex shipping. No such luck.

Miss Terry was driving, so I got online with my Droid Incredible and looked up Fed Ex, called them, and they gave me the location of the nearest Fed Ex drop box. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing? I entered the address into our Garmin GPS, which directed us a mile north, only to then tell us to make a U-turn and drive two miles back south to the drop box! Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

Eventually we found the drop box, deposited the envelope, and headed back to the Thousand Trails campground. We stopped along the way for a bite to eat, made a stop at Lowes, and got back to our motorhome just after dark.

We’re due to leave here tomorrow, and we still have to pack the Explorer, get our hard kayaks onto the roof, and get some other chores done. All the stuff we had planned to accomplish yesterday!

Thought For The Day – Friendship isn’t a big thing, it’s a million little things.

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