After saying our goodbyes to Dennis and Irma, the managers at Crossroads RV Park in Wells, Nevada, we left yesterday morning at 10 a.m. and drove east on Interstate 80. We only had 180 miles to go, so it was an easy day on the road.

Terry loves taking pictures as we travel, and she’s gotten really good at it. When we’re doing 60 miles per hour, it takes some practice to get a nicely framed, cleanly focused picture. Especially with a pocket digital camera. The great thing about digital cameras is that you can shoot all you want and it doesn’t cost anything. That’s one of the first things I learned about taking newspaper pictures – shoot a lot of film and your chances of getting something worth using are greatly increased.

Here is a dramatic rock formation Terry spotted on the other side of the highway. She found a bug-free spot on the windshield to shoot through and framed it just right.

And here’s another one that she took out the side window as we passed.

It was 60 miles from Wells to the Utah state line, and as we topped the hill at Wendover, we were greeted by a breathtaking view of the famous Bonneville Salt Flats spread out before us. We thought that the salt flats we saw the day before in Nevada were impressive until we saw this huge expanse of white wasteland.

If my dashboard thermometer had not told me that the outside temperature was 93 degrees, I would have believed we were driving through a snow covered prairie somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska.

The salt flats stretched out for over forty miles, and it was monotonous after a while. This apparently is a problem for a lot of drivers, because we saw several signs warning drowsy drivers to pull over.

We actually found the drive a bit intimidating for some reason. It was a nice flat road, but the place just felt hostile. Very little lives here, just a few scrub bushes. We never saw a bird or any other critter for the entire 40 miles.

We also saw constant mirages that looked like water on the roadway ahead of us, but when we got there, the road was always dry. We’ve seen this phenomena many times in the past.

As we continued east, big cloud formations built up on the horizon, and we thought we were in for a real storm, but nothing happened.

Then we got our first view of the Great Salt Lake. This massive body of water is 75 miles long and 30 miles wide, with a surface area of 1,500 square miles. The water’s salinity is sometimes as much as 28%, which is three to five times more than sea water.

We stopped at the Flying J at Lake Point, just east of Salt Lake City, to top off our fuel tank, and guess what? Just like in Winnemucca the day before, the RV island was closed. But this time the truck islands were not too busy, so we pulled over there. We didn’t really need fuel, but I wanted to have a full tank when we leave Salt Lake City in a week, and the Flying J was handy.

Back on the highway, we connected with Interstate 215 and took it north a few miles to North Salt Lake City, where we pulled into Pony Express RV Resort. We couldn’t believe it, but there is another Flying J at the same exit!

Pony Express is a very nice, new RV resort, a bit more upscale than our usual haunts, but it is convenient for me to do my genealogical research. We have a nice concrete pull through 50 amp full hookup site, with a great view of the Wasatch Mountains.

By the time we were parked, had the jacks down and the slides out, and were all hooked up, we were famished. So we went to the Empire Chinese Gourmet buffet, a few miles north, and it was very nice. We have been wanting a good Chinese buffet for quite a while now, and this one was a winner.

Back at the motorhome, we were disappointed to discover that even though we have a full five bars of high speed EVDO service, internet access with our Verizon air card is terribly slow. I took the card out of the router and put it directly into my computer to update its settings and location, but that didn’t seem to do any good. When I first switched to an air card a couple of years ago, I was very pleased with the service, but over time it has gotten slower and slower. Especially in busy metropolitan areas. Our speed in tiny Wells, Nevada the day before, was twice as fast as we have here in Salt Lake City. Posting the blog may be a real challenge.

We have eight or ten different people who want to get together with us while we’re here, and we’ll try to hook up with as many as we can, but there just isn’t that much time, since I plan to spend several days at the Family History Center peering up my family tree, and Terry has a lot of preparations to finish before we leave for Colorado next week.

Bad Nick has been quiet lately, but he’s back with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Do We Just Ignore Them? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

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We can tell it’s a holiday weekend, because the traffic is terrible in this little mountain community as people escape the heat of the desert and come up here to cool off. Up until now, besides the campground host, we have usually been sharing the Elks campground with only  one or two other RVs.

But beginning yesterday, we have seen one RV after another pulling into the campground. We have a Class C Grayhawk parked two sites over from us, a beautiful new Newmar diesel pusher is behind us, another motorhome and a big fifth wheel are a few sites down on the other side, and there are a few others scattered around.

Compared to commercial RV parks, we still have lots of room and privacy, but it has been interesting to see so many new arrivals. I don’t know how many are here for extended stays, and how many are just here for the holiday weekend, but since they all seem to be retired, I don’t think they have to be anywhere in a hurry.

I seem to find a way to get into mischief everywhere I go. Case in point, Friday I went up to the Elks lodge to extend our stay. As with every other lodge we have been to, registration is done at the bar, and there was an older lady there registering for a campsite at the same time. I have never met a stranger, so while they were completing our paperwork, I said hello and asked where she was coming in from. She said Tucson, and I mentioned that it must be getting pretty hot down there by now. She must have thought I was trying to pick her up, despite the 15 or 20 year age difference between us, because she said “Look, I’m married, okay?”

Ouch! And here I thought I had my very own cougar! When I got back to our Winnebago and told Terry and my daughter about the incident, they both had a good laugh at my expense.

Hoping to avoid all of the holiday traffic, yesterday we hung around the motorhome all day. I dumped our black tank, and spent most of the day doing genealogical research online. I was surprised to learn about a daredevil in my family tree. On the Genealogy Bank website, I discovered an 1889 newspaper article reporting that my grandfather, Joseph Russell, then a 16 year old boy, had jumped 110 feet into the Ohio River from a railroad bridge in Cincinnati, on a bet. The story said he was uninjured, and I had to laugh as I remembered my mom saying things like “If so and so jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” If I had known this back then, I could have shot back “Why not, Grandpa did!” On second thought, maybe not. My mom was little, but she was feisty. She may have thrown me off a bridge for smarting off to her!

While I was goofing off, Miss Terry was hard at work, hanging this Levolor blind in the window over her workstation. The three windows in the front of the motorhome are much larger than the ones she already did in the bedroom and bathroom, and the first one was a learning experience. Hanging the blinds is not as easy as the folks at Lowes would have you believe.

But Terry loves a challenge, and she’s so darned stubborn that she never gives up. So even though she had to do some physical contortions to get to everything, and she had to back up and attack the problem from a different angle a time or two, the result came out great, don’t you think?

We are really pleased with the new look they give our Winnebago. Terry has two more windows to go, and she said the lessons she learned on this one will make those a little easier. 

I may not have accomplished much yesterday, but Bad Nick was working just as hard as Terry, pounding out a new Bad Nick Blog titled It Wasn’t About Slavery. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Rehab is for quitters!

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Every time we come back to our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona to visit my daughter Tiffany and her family, poor Terry suffers from terrible allergies. When we lived here it wasn’t as much of a problem, but having been gone for almost eleven years, she has lost  whatever immunity she had to the local pollen. So her eyes are red and itchy, she is sneezing and coughing, and she’d surely shoot me if I tried to take her picture right now.

We’re at 6500 feet here, and a few miles up the road, Pinetop-Lakeside is over 7000 feet, so we both feel the effects of the altitude quite a bit. I keep telling Tiffany that she’d be much happier living somewhere else like, oh, say Aransas Pass or Rockport, Texas, and that we’d visit her much more often there.

Yesterday was another windy day, and since Miss Terry was feeling under the weather, we stayed home and I spent the day working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal. This will be our Eleventh Anniversary Issue, how time flies! The brainchild I conceived sitting at our kitchen table when we were trying to decide if we could earn a living on the road has grown every year, thanks to the support of so many of our loyal readers. We feel very blessed to be able to make our living in such a fun way.

Except for a potty break or two, and stepping outside to show the propane delivery guy where our LP tank is, I was at my desk all day, until it was time for dinner.

In the evening, my cousin Rocky Frees sent me a link to a newspaper obituary for my uncle Charles Saxton, who was killed in action during World War II. Rocky had found the link on a Google News Archive search, and if he wasn’t almost 1800 miles away in Muskegon, Michigan, I’d kiss Rocky right on his face! My genealogical research on my dad’s side of the family has been nearly impossible, but within just a few minutes of searching on the website, I found my grandfather’s death notice, as well as those for two of my dad’s sisters and one of my brothers, and a ton of other information. I knew I should have been working on the paper, but I couldn’t resist logging onto Ancestry.com and inputting all of this new information, which in turn led me to even more data! I could have stayed at it for hours, but I had a blog to write.

After I wrote in yesterday’s blog that I would be sponsoring people to join the Elkhart, Indiana Moose lodge during our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, I had a couple of e-mails from ladies asking if the Elks and Moose will accept women as members. Yes, I have sponsored several women to both organizations.

Today I’ll be back at it, but if Terry feels any better we may sneak away for an hour or two to go into town and visit Tiffany. I have grandkids to snuggle with, and I haven’t been near a Dairy Queen in weeks.

Thought For The Day – Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally! 

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 spent Saturday relaxing at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground. At least I did. Poor Miss Terry had several loads of laundry to catch up on, as well as cleaning up all of the mud and dirt tracked in during the Escapade at Sedalia.

I had a backlog of e-mail to catch up on, and worked my way through that, then entered some new subscriptions that had come in during the rally. We have very poor Verizon service on our cell phones and air card, only 1X Extended Network instead of the much faster EVDO service we get in most places.

We can get online and make calls, but we have to be patient to do so. I did a speed test, and our download speed is only 66 kbs, while upload is 28 kbs. That’s a little better then the dismal service we had in Kingman, Arizona back in March, but nowhere near the 1500 to 2200 kbs we had in Apache Junction and other places around the country.

If you have not been to a Corps of Engineers campground before, you have no idea what you are missing. They are some of the best values in the RV world. Our site at Ray Behrens Campground on Mark Twain Lake is typical of the other Corps parks we have visited, with the added plus of a full hookup site, which not all Corps campgrounds have. But every one we have visited has had huge sites, is super clean, and at a great price.

As these photos I took yesterday show, there is room for any size RV. With our 40 foot MCI bus conversion and extended length Ford cargo van in our paved site, we could still park another full size car or truck. We have neighbors in everything from tents to fifth wheel trailers, and lots of room between the sites so we don’t feel cramped. The restrooms are clean and the grass is carefully trimmed.

Yesterday, longtime Gypsy Journal readers Joy and Phil Brown stopped by to visit. They are in the area doing genealogical research, which is one of Joy’s passions, and it was nice to see them. Be sure to check out their Backroad Chronicles blog.

Also yesterday, our friends Bob and Molly Pinner pulled into the site across from us in their beautiful Monaco Dynasty motorhome, and we had a nice visit with them. Bob and Molly are a wonderful couple we have enjoyed meeting up with at our Gypsy Gathering rallies and other RV events across the country. Bob and Molly share their traveling adventures in their excellent Moon River And We blog.

Speaking of Gypsy Gathering rallies, several people have been asking me if Chris and Jim Guld of Geeks on Tour would be putting on their Computer Boot Camp at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally in September. I have confirmed with Chris that they are going to hold the Boot Camp, so visit their website or send them an e-mail for more details.

At last year’s rally the Boot Camp was so successful that they repeated it a second time. Miss Terry participated in the second session the Boot Camp, at the end of the rally, and learned a tremendous amount about how to get the most out of her computer.

Thought For The Day – The aging process could be slowed down dramatically if it had to work its way through Congress.

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