Fortunately, most RVers we know are pretty mellow people who, aside from a heightened sense of adventure and a love for seeing what’s over the next hill and around the next bend in the road, are pretty much like anybody else you’d encounter anywhere.

Most RVers, especially fulltimers, seem to be pretty tolerant people, and accept everybody for who they are. We’ve sat around campfires where the group included everybody from retired surgeons to former schoolteachers, truck drivers, and mailmen. Nobody cares what you did in your past life, they just want to know where you were yesterday, and where you’re headed next week.

However, every once in a while we run into a snob. Such was the case recently when we had a conversation with somebody who proceeded to let us know that anyone who didn’t own the same type of upscale diesel pusher they did was certainly not on a equal level, and was probably mentally or morally suspect as well.

When talking about our Gypsy Gathering rallies, this person made the comment that they were not comfortable at our event because we let “everybody” in, even people in cheap used RVs, and that you never know what to expect from those kind of people. I was tempted to reply that until recently, Terry and I lived and traveled in a 34 year old homebuilt bus conversion. I guess that means we certainly qualified as those kind of people!

On the other end of the spectrum, I had an e-mail exchange with a fellow who wants to buy a cheap used diesel powered transit or school bus for about $3,000 to $5,000, spend a couple of thousand dollars converting it, and hit the road.

He told me that he doesn’t plan to put in a bed, just get a fold out couch from a thrift store, and that he won’t be adding a bathroom. He plans to spend a week or two at a time in different towns, staying at WalMart stores and truck stops, and that he can use their bathrooms to clean up in, when he needs to.

He went on to tell me that he won’t have to buy fuel, because restaurants are eager to give away their waste vegetable oil, and he can pour it directly into his fuel tank and go on down the road. He figures he could live easily on a couple of hundred dollars a month.

I tried to explain to him the hundred and one reasons why his plan wouldn’t work, from the fact that waste vegetable oil isn’t quite that easy to come by, and that you can’t just pour it in your tank and go, and that living in WalMart parking lots wasn’t exactly RVing. But the response was basically of the mindset of “My mind’s already made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”

So we have a prima donna who pulls up to a dump station and says “Well, ours doesn’t stink,” and somebody who basically wants to be a motorized hobo. Aren’t you glad most of the folks who park next to you at your favorite campground fall somewhere in the middle of these two? I sure am!

Thought For The Day -  Except for ending slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, war has never solved anything.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

It’s just as well that I’m stuck inside working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, because it’s raining again. We had one mostly clear day Wednesday to give us a break, but yesterday it started all over again, with more rain forecast today.

I know a couple of people who want to leave Summerdale, but the ground is so saturated that they aren’t sure they can even get their RVs out of their campsites. As soon as we get the new issue printed and mailed, we’ll be right behind them. I’m ready to head west.

I spent most of yesterday at my computer, except for an hour or so in the afternoon, when I began to get droopy and stretched out on the couch for a nap. We had a late breakfast or an early lunch, depending on what you want to call it, and when evening rolled around, we weren’t really hungry, so Miss Terry made up a batch of her homemade peanut butter cookies, which were delicious with a cold glass of milk. She says she really misses the Avanti gas range and oven she had in our bus conversion, but I think she’s getting the hang of using the convection oven in our Winnebago.

Judging from the responses to my last couple of blog posts, and the many, many e-mails I have received about our problems with our insurance claim, this has really stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Though PoliSeek, whom we purchased our insurance from, has never called me back, yesterday two other agents who sell for National Interstate contacted the bigwigs at that company, after their customers read my blog comments and e-mailed them. One said that she had already lost customers over the issue, who were taking their business elsewhere. The company told one of them that they were already aware of the blog posts on the subject and were going to get the issue resolved immediately.

Suddenly there seems to have been a complete change of attitude on the part of the claims adjuster I have been working with. He called to tell me that they didn’t have to wait for the last set of notarized papers I sent him listing the items stolen, all I needed to do was go out and buy replacements and they would reimburse me. I explained that I don’t have huge piles of money laying around to go on a shopping spree, and that we had acquired those things over time. He said no problem, just find them on the internet and send him a link to web pages showing their prices and they will send me out a check for whatever the total comes to. Suddenly that 180 day time frame that existed to settle the claim in seems to have disappeared.

I’m still waiting for word on the final repairs that have to be made at Camping World, but he assured me that it will all be resolved very quickly. I’m still skeptical, based upon National Interstate’s past performance, but I hope they will now follow through.

And while I’m appreciative of the other agents, whom I have no business dealings with, for going to bat for us, I’m thoroughly pissed that my own agent, PoliSeek still has ignored us. One of the other agents who contacted the company made one phone call, and had three managers from National Interstate contact her within 24 hours to find out the details to get the issue resolved. Why couldn’t PoliSeek do that for me? They sure have made a lot of commission money from my premiums over the years, since they cover our motorhome, two other vehicles, and I used them for coverage on the bus and my motorcycle before I sold them. I also used them to secure insurance for our Gypsy Gathering rallies. They have lost our business, and I will make it a point to tell any other RVers I talk to (and I talk to a lot of RVers over the course of a year), just how bad they treated us.

So yes, things look better, based upon my last conversations with the claims adjuster. But this whole thing leaves me wondering how many people out there have the same problems, but do not have access to the wide audience I do, to vent their frustrations in public, and instead just have to bend over and take it. It shouldn’t have to be that way for anybody.

Thought For The Day – He who knows nothing, doubts nothing.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Living on limited electric power seems to be a major concern for many RVers, and I have never understood why.

Time and time again I have had people ask when registering for our Gypsy Gathering rallies if we will have 50 amp power available. When I tell them that (depending on the location) we will only have 30 amps, or maybe even 15 amp power, they freak out. We have had more than one RVer cancel a rally reservation when they learned we don’t have 50 amp power. What has amazed me more than once is that they canceled on our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally, after spending a week or two (or more) dry camping at Quartzsite! After that, even 15 amps is pure luxury to us!

Living on limited power is no problem if you understand how to manage your power consumption properly. We just spent a week parked in a relative’s driveway in Traverse City, Michigan plugged into 15 amp power. Actually, with the multiple cords we had to run to reach an outlet, I’m sure there was quite a power loss between the power outlet and our bus conversion. But we had no problems. We have a house style refrigerator that was plugged in all of the time, Terry made coffee every morning, and we used our computers, CradlePoint wireless router, and laser printer with ease. Terry even did a load or two of laundry and used our 110 volt apartment size electric dryer!

Of course, we did not use everything at once. When not needed, we turned the laser printer off to conserve power, and when she had the dryer running, we were careful not to use any more power than needed during the drying cycle. We never tripped a breaker and never felt like we were living on the edge.

One thing we always do when hooking up to a limited power source is to turn the battery charge rate on our Magnum Energy inverter/charger down to 10%. We don’t need any more than that, and the batteries charge up just fine while we sleep. Of course, we also have 540 watts of solar panels on the roof, and that helps too. But we got by just fine even before we had the panels. We also switch our gas/electric water heater to just gas to lessen our power needs. If we had an RV style refrigerator, we’d switch it to gas only to save power.

We have been to many different RV rallies where there were so many rigs hooked into the same circuit that we had 10 amps of power at best, and unless somebody insisted on making coffee in the morning, or fired up their curling iron, everybody survived. Of course, if somebody turned on one of the aforementioned appliances, there were circuit breakers popping all over the rally grounds!

At an Escapees Fun Days rally once, the fellow next to us insisted on turning on his air conditioner, which of course blacked out our whole line of RVs. He just couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of “roughing it” and earned himself some pretty bad karma from his neighbors by the time the rally ended.

Even if you always stay at RV parks and never plan on going to an RV rally or plugging into an electrical outlet on the side of some friend or relative’s garage, you should still practice living on limited power, just in case. You never know when some unexpected breakdown will find you parked at a repair shop overnight or for the weekend and all they have is a 15 amp receptacle you can use. 

I’m always amazed at the folks with big coaches who insist they cannot survive on less than 50 amp power. A couple of years ago, at the Verde Valley Thousand Trails preserve in Camp Verde, Arizona, a rather obnoxious and overbearing “gentleman” was giving the poor girl at the ranger station grief because he insisted on being assigned a site with 50 amp electric. She explained to him over and over that there were no 50 amp sites in the campground, only 30 amps, but he was just not having any of that. 

Finally I interrupted and asked him why he felt he must have 50 amps. He looked down at me like I was the village idiot, put his hands on his hips and said, in a very condescending tone of voice, “Because, my good man, I have a 50 amp coach!” (By the way, if someone tells you he has a “coach” instead of an RV, there’s a good bet he’s going to be a jerk!)

I tried to explain to him that with a 30 amp dog bone adapter, he could plug in to the campground’s 30 amp power, and since the weather was very pleasant, he wouldn’t need his air conditioners. I even went so far as to tell him that the campground store had the 30 amp adapters if he didn’t own one.

He looked down at me again and said “Why, thank you, sir! Obviously I’m not as smart as I thought I was!”

Well, you know that Bad Nick wasn’t going to let that one pass, so he replied with a big grin “No, but you’re just as smart as I thought you were!” 

Thought For The Day – I do not intend to tiptoe through life only to arrive safely at death.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally