This part of northern Indiana is a stronghold of the Amish people, and wherever you travel around the communities of Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, and the surrounding area, you are likely to see Amish women  in their simple handmade dresses, their heads covered in white kapps, and men wearing black straw hats or stocking caps.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Amish people, including that they will not ride in automobiles, use electricity, or telephones. Drive anywhere around here and you will encounter horse drawn buggies and wagons on the roadways.

But, while they do not drive automobiles, the Amish will ride in them, and they frequently hire a non-Amish driver to take them to restaurants, stores, or other places too far to conveniently reach by buggy.

Drive any Amish back road in this region, and you will see small white structures in some yards that look like an enclosed telephone booth, and that is exactly what they are! Their religion does not permit a telephone in the house, and the “phone haus” is built for function, not comfort. There is no heat or cooling, and usually no chair. This is a place to do business, not sit and gab! If an Amish person advertises something for sale, they will include the telephone number and instructions to “call between 7 and 8 a.m.” or whatever time suits their schedule.

Yesterday, we drove out to Nappanee to visit with our friend Carylye Lehman at Focal Wood Products. Carlyle is a fantastic craftsman who built the desk units in our Winnebago motorhome last year, and he has a fast growing reputation with RVers for top quality custom wood furniture.

The tools in Carlyle’s shop are all powered by electricity, courtesy of a huge 40 KW diesel generator.  So as you can see, while the Amish do avoid many of the “modern” conveniences of our way of life, they have embraced some technology to give them the ability to conduct business.

We have also found it interesting to see Amish buggies lined up at the drive through window at McDonald’s, or to note such goodies as Pepsi and potato chips in their shopping carts at WalMart.

All day yesterday the wind blew hard, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour. If the wind lets up a little bit, we plan to leave Elkhart Campground today and start making our way eastward toward the Hershey (Pennsylvania) Thousand Trails preserve, where we will have a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show next week.

It’s about 600 miles to our destination, and we’ll do it in two days. I have no idea where we’ll be tonight, but there is always an RV friendly WalMart, a truck stop, or someplace else to get off the road for the night.

Thought For The Day – Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after.

Life gets in the way while you’re making other plans. We had originally planned on being vendors at the FMCA rally in Albert Lea, Minnesota next week, but decided against that and came over to Indiana to take part in the Heartland Owners Rally at the Elkhart County Fairgrounds in Goshen today and tomorrow. As it turns out, we’ll miss that event too.

Terry is on her fourth day of antibiotics, but still feeling bad, and Wednesday night it hit me hard too. I woke up feeling like I had been rode hard and put away wet.

I went to see the same nurse practioneer Terry did on Monday, and she said no, it’s not the flu after all, just colds that have turned into really bad sinus, ear, and upper respiratory infections. So now we’re both on a diet of antibiotics and other meds.

I called Jim Beletti, head honcho at the Heartland Rally and expressed our regrets, but told him we are going to skip the rally. We are just not up to vending for eight or nine hours a day and we don’t want to run the risk of making everyone else at the rally sick just to sell some books and subscriptions. We dropped off some door prizes and a few bundles of sample copies of the Gypsy Journal, and hopefully folks will pick them up and read them, which could result in an order or two.

When we stopped at Wally World to get one of my prescriptions filled, we were disappointed to see two RVs, a fifth wheel and a big diesel pusher, with their jacks down on the pavement and the slide room out on the motorhome. We were even more disappointed to see Escapees RV Club stickers on both rigs. It was just after 5 p.m. and the people from the motorhome were crawling into a car to drive away as we saw them.

Folks, this kind of thing does more to hurt us being welcome to park on private business parking lots, and to make us look bad in the eyes of the public, than a lot of RV park owners complaining to city councils that we are taking money out of their pockets. In fact, it gives those same RV park owners more ammunition to use against us. If you are not familiar with the Escapees’ Good Neighbor Policy on overnight parking, check it out at the link provided. It is up to all of us to be good guests so we will be welcomed back again. 

Thought For The Day – Nothing’s impossible for those who don’t have to do it.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

Miss Terry is still feeling pretty bad, so she spent much of yesterday napping and trying to regain her strength. What we first thought was a cold now seems to be a bad sinus infection. If she’s not better soon, I’m going to drag her kicking and screaming to a doctor.

While she was lying down, I worked on some details for our upcoming Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally in Celina, Ohio. I had two different vendors who wanted to come that I had to send e-mails to expressing regrets because we already have other vendors selling the same products. If you want to attend the rally as a vendor, get in touch with me at editor@gypsyjournal.net to reserve your site soon so you don’t miss out.

Then I reviewed a couple of proposals for new seminars at the rally. One I had to decline, because it was nothing but a sales pitch. We do allow our vendors to present seminars, but we encourage them to give an unbiased overview of the whole topic, not just a description of their products. Since this seminar was titled “Why XYZ Campground Membership Beats The Competition” I had no problem determining that it was not appropriate for the rally. The other seminar, on switching your RV’s old style TV for a new LCD model, looks good, and I think it will be well received. I’m also working on a new seminar for the rally that I think will be fun.

With that done, I went for a walk around the campground, stopping to chat with some folks who are here for the Heartland Owners Rally later this week in Goshen. One of them had a nice old dog, so I was able to get my puppy fix.

Being in an RV park that caters to fulltimers and extended time RVers is kind of like being in a small town. Everywhere you go you run into somebody you know. Some of the regulars we see here at Elkhart Campground every year were out and about, and I visited with them. Then I ran into campground owners Bob and Gita Patel, and they welcomed me back for the season.

The local economy may be down, but business seems to be good here at the campground. There are plenty of RVs here, and during the afternoon I watched quite a few more arrive.

One was a nice looking Monaco diesel pusher with a For Sale sign in the window. I asked the owner about it, and while it is a nice coach, he’s upside down and owes about 50% more on it than he can ever hope to get out of it. He’s aware of that, but says he keeps hoping he’ll stumble onto a buyer with more money than common sense. I wished him luck, but that’s not me. I have even less money than I do common sense!

Thought For The Day – Don’t argue with an idiot….they will bring you to their level and then beat you with experience!

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally