My wife is a very hard woman to shop for, because she doesn’t want very much in the way of material things. Whenever I ask her what she wants for Christmas, her birthday, our anniversary, or whatever, she always says she has everything she wants.

Once in a while, she’ll let me buy her a bottle of perfume, and I’ve managed to get her a few pairs of earrings over the years, but that’s about it. I guess I should be grateful, she’s not only easy on the eyes, she’s easy on the pocketbook.

I, on the other hand, am easy to shop for. I want everything! I’m like a chimpanzee in a department store. If it lights up, makes noise, goes fast, or tastes good, I want two of each. Why do you think my friend Brenda Speidel calls me Gadget Boy?

I love wandering through the tool section at Lowes and Home Depot, even though I know it’s kind of like going to one of those stripper joints. Most of what I’m seeing I have no idea what to do with, and I’d probably just end up hurting myself if I tried.

Check Out Our Holiday Subscription Special Offer!

Of course, living in a motorhome (not to mention being of modest means) does put some restrictions on my wants and desires. I really miss my hot tub, from our life before fulltiming, but I just can’t figure out where to put one in a Winnebago.

Actually, there really is very little I want, and nothing I need, that I don’t have. Most of my wants are not things, but rather experiences. I really want to do some kayak fishing, someday I want to catch a fish from an ocean pier, I want to take a cruise, and I want to see Alaska one of these days.

But, if I had to choose one material thing I’d like Santa to bring me, assuming the big guy could figure out a way to slide down the chimney our motorhome doesn’t have, I guess it might be a DVR so I could record some of my favorite television programs. I know a lot of people don’t care all that much for television, but after a lifetime in the small town newspaper business, I’m a news hound and I like to watch the news, if for no other reason than to see who we’re at war with this week. And there are several silly sitcoms, and a drama or two that I enjoy watching. It’s kind of like junk food for the brain.

Of course, it wouldn’t do me any good to get a DVR anyway, according to Dish Network, who told me last week that you can’t watch TV in an RV! 

How about you? What do you want for Christmas?  A new RV? A flat screen TV? A GPS unit? Maybe a new laptop computer?

Or are you like me? Does your wish list include more experiences than things? Tell me about some of them.

Thought For The Day – Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to shop.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

My friend Brenda Speidel calls me Gadget Boy because I am always looking for some neat new toy to tell my readers about. But that’s okay, like the old saying goes, “the only difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys.” With Christmas coming, there has to be a gadget out there for every guy on your shopping list.

One of the most useful upgrades I have come by in years is my HTC Incredible Android phone.  I’m not a true geek, so I can’t tell you all of the technical specifics that make the Droid so much better, but it has the Blackberry beat in every way, in my opinion. It’s more user friendly, it gets better reception, it has more built in features, internet access is much faster with it, and there are more and better apps available.

One free app I recently downloaded is ShopSavvy. This is pretty cool. When I am in a store, I hold the Droid over an item’s barcode, and the software scans it, then tells me the price of the item online and in nearby stores. It even gives me directions to local stores stocking the item, and their addresses and telephone numbers. Now I never have to worry that I paid too much, and I can show a salesman the price just down the street and ask them to meet or beat it. Way cool!

I’m finding that I use the GPS features on the Droid as often as I do our Garmin GPS, and usually it’s more accurate and up to date. I especially like the Google street view, which shows me exactly what the neighborhood looks like where I’m going.

Check Out Our Holiday Subscription Special Offer!

Speaking of GPS units, blog reader Roger Parrish told me about a new techno toy he got; a Garmin Nuvi 465T Trucker GPS. Roger said this has all of the features of a regular GPS, with the addition of specialized routing options suitable for commercial trucks. If you have ever let your regular GPS lead you onto narrow, winding residential streets hardly suitable for an Oldsmobile, you can see the value of this GPS already! Roy said it  displays warning information of upcoming road conditions to make drivers aware of sharp curves, steep grades, side winds, and other possible hazards along the route. The GPS even has an FM traffic receiver to give drivers free alerts about traffic delays, road construction, and detours around the problem area.

Now, I haven’t actually seen this one, but somebody sent me a link that every RVer who uses WiFi to get online should have; a T-shirt with a built in WiFi signal detector! You could be the first in your RV park to have your very own WiFi Detector T-Shirt!

My buddy Phil May from TechnoRV is the guy who really knows gadgets, and he’s always got something new to drool over. Check out Phil’s You Tube video of The Beast, which has to be the brightest LED flashlight I’ve ever seen! I want one of these for the motorhome, and another for the Explorer!

Of course, I can’t afford every new gadget that comes along, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have any place to carry them in my motorhome. The good news is that since I can’t try them all, you can try some of them yourself, and tell me about them!

Now if somebody would just just invent a gadget that makes mornings go away. I have to take the Explorer to Camping Connection this morning to have the base plate installed, which means getting up way before my usual time.  I tried to get Miss Terry to take it over to them, and let me sleep in. But apparently there’s no app for that! 

Thought For The Day – My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

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.

Check Out Our Holiday Subscription Special Offer!

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.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

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!

Check Out Our Holiday Subscription Special Offer!

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.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Wow, I go away for one afternoon and the whole world changes! What’s up with that?

I had to get up earlier than usual for me yesterday morning, because I needed to be wide awake for a 9 a.m. conference call. I’ve found that folks tend to get offended or lose confidence in you if you snore during a business call.

The call took about an hour, and then I spent some time answering e-mails and checking some blog comments that were waiting for moderation. (To fight spam, all blog comments are held for review the first time somebody makes one. After that, the software recognizes their e-mail address and comments post immediately).

I also called my friend Greg White to ask his opinion on a couple of technical issues. No matter what questions I throw at him, from computers to digital cameras to synthetic transmission fluids, Greg always has the answers for me. Either he’s really smart, or he just makes stuff up off the top of his head and gets lucky a lot, I’m not sure which. Thanks for your input, Greg.

About the time I finished up with all that, Dave Damon showed up to borrow my Beanstalk ladder so he could fix something on his rig. Dave also reminded me that his wife, Jean, wants to give Terry and I massages while we’re here. I can hardly wait!

We left the Thousand Trails campground a little after noon, and drove around the area, dropping off bundles of sample copies of the Gypsy Journal at the local RV parks. We also stopped at the Camping World in Orlando to drop off a bundle of papers, but since we didn’t have a display rack for them, the manager said no. This is one of only two or three Camping World stores to say no in over twelve years. I understand their space limitations, but it’s a big store. We just don’t have the room to carry display racks with us, and we could never get back to refill them with every new issue with our travel schedule.

Interestingly enough, the nice folks at a very small RV parts store called Camping Connection, just a few miles east, were happy to have the papers, and found a place to display them. I guess if I need anything while we’re in the Orlando/Clermont area, I know who will get my business.

Check Out Our Holiday Subscription Special Offer! 

Once we were done dropping off sample newspapers, we drove to the Bass Pro Shop in Orlando to do some browsing. I love Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shop, because they are RV friendly, and most of their stores will let RVers park overnight, and because they have every kind of toy a grown up boy could want or need. Are you looking for a new shotgun, or a sleeping, bag, or a GPS, or a fishing rod? How about a pocket knife, a boat, or a tent? They’ve got it!  

Most of the employees I have met at these stores are very professional, but I ran into one dunderhead at the Orlando store. We plan to spend a week or so in the Florida Keys, and I wanted to buy a rod and reel to do some fishing. I was looking for an inexpensive rig that would do the job without breaking the bank, because experienced fishermen have told me that if you use a cheap reel for fishing salt water, you can pretty much expect to throw it away at the end of the season.

An employee in the fishing department asked if he could help me, and I told him what I was looking for. He shrugged and said “ You got a rod, you got a reel, you got some line and a hook. They all do the same thing.” I was tempted to pick up a cheap $10 kid’s rod and reel, and then one of their most expensive units (some selling for over $1,000) and seek out the manager and ask him why there was a difference in price, since they “all do the same thing.” Instead, I just took my money and left.

After stopping for dinner at a good Chinese buffet, we arrived back at the Thousand Trails preserve a little before 7 p.m., to find the place much busier than it had been before we left. I think everybody left Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, and they all got here at the same time! When we left a few hours before, about a third of the RV sites in our loop were empty, including the ones next to and across from us. When we got home, those and just about every other site we passed in our loop was filled. I go away for one afternoon and the place fills up!

I guess the annual snowbird migration has begun. And it will only get busier over the next few weeks!

Thought For The Day – The greatest ignorance is to reject something you know nothing about.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally