After our long day trip to Yuma on Thursday, we didn’t feel much like going anywhere yesterday, so we spent the day doing administrative tasks. I think the only time either of us went outside was when I carried the trash down to the dumpster.

Now that I had a better idea of the size and layout of the buildings available at the Yuma fairgrounds for our rally, I was able to update and refine the seminar schedule. I posted the updated schedule to the bottom of our rally web page, but there are still some gaps that I need to fill in as other seminars are confirmed. This is still a tentative schedule, and there will no doubt be changes as we get closer to the rally dates.

While I was busy with that, Miss Terry was doing some paperwork, logging in rally reservations, and recording some receipts for expenditures we made recently. When people learn that we are fulltime RVers and that we make our living by writing about our travels, they say that it must be fun having a job that is a permanent vacation. Yes indeed, it is a lot of fun. But it’s not all touring interesting places and sightseeing. There are a lot of days just like yesterday, when we’re sitting at our desks working at mundane tasks. But I still wouldn’t trade it for any other job in the world!

It was just as well, because even though the storm clouds had moved on, yesterday was pretty chilly, and we weren’t too interested in being outside anyway. We hope it eventually warms up enough that we can do some geocaching, or maybe even get our kayaks into the water.

Yes, there is a lot of water in Arizona, from small lakes like Lake Patagonia and White Mountain Lake, scattered all around the state, to some huge impoundments like 22 mile long Roosevelt Lake, northeast of Phoenix; or Lake Mead, which stretches for over 110 miles along the Colorado River, in the northwestern corner of the state.

Lately I have been looking at digital camcorders. I don’t need anything professional, but I’d like to experiment with putting some small videos on the blog from time to time. I’ve owned a couple of older style camcorders years ago, but the technology has changed a lot since then. I’ve been doing a little bit of research, and realized that I have a lot to learn, with so many choices and options on the market these days. I’d appreciate feedback from any of you who have camcorders as to what features you like and don’t like about yours.

I have to brag just a bit. A few months ago I collaborated with Christine Pinheiro on a new book titled The Step By Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit. Actually, Christine did all of the work, I just gave her some input, and she was kind enough to share credit for the book with me. Our book has won the Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award for 2010 in the writing category. I’ve never had one of my books win an award before!

Bad Nick didn’t want to go outside yesterday either, so he stayed in too, and posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled They Should Have Aimed Higher. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks?

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We were out of bed earlier than usual yesterday morning and hit the ground running, and didn’t slow down until well past midnight. Sometimes there just are not enough hours in the day.

We’re leaving Elkhart Campground today and driving 150 miles to Muskegon, Michigan for a week to spend some time visiting with my cousin Berni and her husband Rocky. We had several last minute things to get done before we left, not the least of them being laundry.

Elkhart Campground has full hookup pull through 50 amp sites, but the site we prefer has just 50 amp electric and water. That’s not a problem, because we have a large waste holding tank, so we only have to hit the dump station every couple of weeks. But Terry can’t do laundry with our onboard washer and dryer,so I dropped her off at the campground laundry, then ran to the post office to mail out some orders.

Back at the campground, I stopped to check in on Terry, and she was just putting the clothes in the dryer. While she was finishing up the laundry, I checked our propane tanks, and one was empty, so I drove up to the office to have it filled. When we built the bus conversion, we opted for a pair of portable propane tanks instead of a stationary onboard tank, because it makes it easier to refill. Instead of having to drive the bus to a propane station, I just take one of the tanks, as needed.

By then Terry was finished, so we ran to Wal-Mart to pick up some items. A few minutes after we got home, Jack and Paula Conrad, from Arcadia, Florida stopped over to visit. Jack and Paula have a very nice MCI bus conversion, and every year they host a large New Years bus rally in Arcadia.

We had a nice visit, and by the time they left, it was time to unload some of the bundles of papers in the van so we could load our kayaks and bicycles back in, and then reload the papers around them. While we were doing that, longtime Gypsy Journal subscribers Pete and Patty Gioia stopped by to say hello. Pete and Patty are a neat couple that Terry and I both enjoyed meeting, and we look forward to seeing them again in our travels.

With the van finished, there was still laundry to put away, a bed to be made, and blogs to write before we could begin to think about getting to bed.

We have a lot planned in the next few weeks. We’ll spend a week in Muskegon, and then we will return here for a couple of days, and head over to Bowling Green, Ohio to be vendors at the big FMCA rally July 20-23. As soon as the rally is over we’ll be on our way to Traverse City, Michigan for Terry’s annual oncologist checkup. 

August 3-7 will find us vending at the Newmar Kountry Klub Rally in Goshen, Indiana, if the nice lady in charge of the vendors ever sends me the necessary paperwork. I’ve talked to her twice now and each time she was going to e-mail it to me immediately, but I’m still waiting. We’ll have a week or two to catch our breath, and then August 24 – 28 we’ll be back in Goshen to vend at the Carriage Travel Club Grand National Rally.

With those events behind us, we’ll be in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania September 13 to 16 for the RV Lifestyle, Education & Safety Clinic held by the Recreational Vehicle Safety Education Foundation (RVSEF).

When we lost Gaylord Maxwell last year, Life on Wheels ended, which left a big hole in the education options for RVers. I was delighted when Walter Cannon, the head honcho at RVSEF, called to tell me that he was going to hold the new event, and asked me to present some seminars. If you have been lamenting the fact that you never got to attend a Life on Wheels conference, now is your chance. Several of my fellow Life on Wheels instructors will be participating in the RVSEF program. I hope we see you there.

As soon as we’re finished with the RVSEF educational clinic, we’ll be burning up the highway back to Celina, Ohio for our own Gypsy Gathering rally September 28 to October 2. This will be our second Eastern rally, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

I have posted a tentative schedule on the rally page on our website, just scroll down to the bottom of that page and check it out. This is NOT the final schedule, we’ll be adding several other seminars and doing some fine tuning before the rally date, but it will give you an idea of some of the offerings we have in store for you.

After that is all over, and after some appointments at the V.A. hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, we will be more than ready for some downtime.

We plan to head to Florida for a while, and I’m hoping that if I whine and snivel hard enough and long enough about needing a vacation, our pals Tom Owen and Diane Rojewski will invite us back to their houseboat in Key West for a week or three. By then, I’ll be ready for a tropical getaway.

Thought For The Day – I finally got my head together, now my body is falling apart.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

No matter how long you’ve been a fulltime RVer, you can still forget the simple things. Or at least I can. Tuesday night Miss Terry was washing some dishes and noticed that our water pump was making a low moaning noise. Hmmm…. I like to think that I’m the only reason moaning noises are coming out of our bus. I decided I’d better check things out.

I grabbed a flashlight, went outside and opened our water bay, and sure enough, our freshwater tank was almost empty. It was late in the evening, so we decided that we’d skip our baths that night and wait until the next morning to refill the tank.

So yesterday morning I got out my 50 foot water hose and stretched it out toward the nearest water bib here at Show Low Lake Campground. Way too short. No problem, I got out my backup 25 foot hose. I was still short, by about five feet. I started to get out my backup to my backup 25 foot hose, and discovered that it was missing. Then I remembered lending it to someone at our Gypsy Gathering rally in Casa Grande, but apparently I never got it back.

So it was off to Wally World for a new hose, I needed one anyway to replace the one I lost, and you can never have too much water hose, right? Back at the campground, I finally could fill our holding tank, and it was a good thing I did! If Miss Terry doesn’t have her morning coffee, she gets a bit testy. Throw in the fact that if I don’t get my shower, I get a bit ripe, and it’s not a recipe for romance.

In case you are wondering how we could run out of water, I have a good excuse. Nick happens. It explains a lot that goes wrong in my world.

We don’t have monitors on our fresh or waste water tanks. They never work anyway, so when we built our bus conversion, we didn’t mess with them. I have enough aggravation in my life already, I don’t need the hassle of tank monitors to add to my stress level. We know about how long we can go on a tank full of water before it’s time to refill, and I can open the bay and look at the tank if I need to be sure. This time around we were just so busy that it got away from us.

In case you’re new to RVing and don’t know it yet, holding tank monitors never work. Especially the ones in your waste tanks. I have seen newbies fret themselves into a tizzy over the fact that they just left the dump station, and their monitors still show the tank is full, or half full, or whatever. If you live this lifestyle long enough, you learn to ignore the monitors. Otherwise it will drive you to drink.

Over time (and not much time at all), gunk builds up on the contacts inside of the tank and give false readings. I’ve heard of a hundred ways to clean the contacts inside a holding tank, from pouring ice cubes down the toilet and driving around to knock the crud off, to filling the tank with water and baking soda, or bleach, not to mention all of the commercial chemicals you can waste your money on. Trust me; none of them work long term.

If you spend much time in an RV, you’ll get to know about how long you can go before you need to dump, depending on the size of your tank and how many people are in the RV. Of course, if you drink a gallon of that stuff my doctor made me drink before my colonoscopy, all bets are off. Either get a full hookup site, or park at the dump station, because you’re going to need it!

Experienced RVers can usually tell when the black tank is getting full based on the way it sounds when they flush. Or you can just follow Uncle Nicky’s RV Potty Rule, which I’ve shared with hundreds of Life on Wheels students, but am now going to tell you too, “If you flush the toilet and your butt gets wet, it’s time to dump!” Trust me, it’s much more reliable than any darned holding tank sensor on the market!

Thought For The Day – I finally got my head together, now my body is falling apart.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

The Affinity rally ended yesterday, and while we had a good time visiting with old friends and meeting some new ones, it was a break even event for us financially.

While we’d have loved to come away with buckets full of cash, going in we said that if we could cover our costs and introduce some new readers to the Gypsy Journal, we’d be happy with that, and we accomplished that goal.

So what’s with people and their dogs?

Though we choose not to own a pet while we travel, I love dogs. I love big floppy eared mixed breed mutts. I love AKC dogs with pedigrees that make my own family tree look pretty shabby by comparison. My preference is big dogs, but I’m quite content with the medium size breeds too.

My good friend Ann Pruitt has an adorable medium size service dog named Curlie Sue whom I have a special relationship with. My pal Mike Howard in Kingman, Arizona lives next door to a massive mutt named Skeeter who is taller than me when he stands on his hind legs. They’re both on my Favorite Dog list.

In a pinch I’ll even cozy up to a small dog, unless it’s a yappy little mutt with a big mouth and a bad attitude.

I don’t like French poodles, probably because the only things French I like are toast, fries, and kisses, though not necessarily in that order. Don’t tell Chris and Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour, but I even sneaked a surreptitious scratch behind the ears of their yappy little poodle Odie once when nobody was looking. When you need a dog fix bad enough, I guess any old mutt will do.

My favorite dogs are German shepherds, and I’ll walk a block out of my way to meet and pet every one I see. I don’t trust pit bulls, most of whom deserve their bad reputation, no matter what their fans will tell you. In my many years in the newspaper business, I never covered a story about a collie mauling a kid, but I did have to report on too many sad stories involving pit bull attacks.

So, overall, I’m a dyed in the wool dog lover.

What I don’t like are irresponsible dog owners, and people who think the rules do not apply to their dogs. People who allow their dogs to bark endlessly, or who go off and leave their noisy dogs back in the RV to annoy everybody in the campground in their absence.

I get really ticked off by people at public events where dogs are specifically prohibited, but who insist on bringing their canine companions in anyway. We saw dozens of people doing this at the Affinity rally in Albuquerque. One person after another came wandering through the vendor area with their dogs. One lady even had two little mutts in a twin baby carriage, forcing shoppers to find a way around her as she blocked the aisles.

Besides being against the rules, some people, like Miss Terry, are allergic to dogs, and some are afraid of them. But these inconsiderate pet owners could care less. After all, it’s all about them.

We welcome dog owners to bring their critters to our Gypsy Gathering rallies, but we make it very clear that their pets are not allowed in the buildings or in the vendor area, as mandated by our insurance company and the fairgrounds who rent us the space, and I don’t hesitate to enforce the rule.

Yet we have had people show up at seminars and in the vendor area with their dogs. A couple of years ago at our rally in Casa Grande, Arizona, we even had a woman carrying her dog in to get donuts in the morning, leaning over the open box of pastries with the dog in her arms!

Invariably when I tell someone they are breaking the rules, I get the same reply “But this is my baby!”

No, it’s not your baby. You may consider it your fur kid, but it’s still an animal. I wasn’t a memorable student in high school, but even I learned that much in biology class! Human babies have two legs, and if that thing has four legs and is your baby, you need to sell that freak to a sideshow!

Thought For The Day – The treasure you find is rarely what you thought you were looking for.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

At least the weather cleared up here in Albuquerque, and though it wasn’t exactly warm yesterday, it wasn’t snowing either.

We had a busy day helping out in the RV Hall of Fame Museum booth, and managed to pass out a lot of copies of the Gypsy Journal, and to make a sale or two along the way. I think most vendors had a better day yesterday, mainly because the weather was better and more folks were out, and also because after the fiasco Friday with the bus schedules, a lot of people drove their cars to the fairgrounds.

The folks in charge of the rally also brought more buses in yesterday, and we didn’t see the long lines of people waiting for their ride back to the Balloon Fiesta Park.

Some local people who have vintage cars and travel trailers brought them by the fairgrounds to put them on display yesterday, and they drew an admiring crowd. What neat old rigs!

For Terry and I, the opportunity to see so many of our RVing friends makes any rally a special event. I can’t keep track of everybody who came by to visit with us, but there sure were a bunch of folks.

Dick and Gaye La Vigne, who were at our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally are helping out in a friend’s vendor booth, and have stopped by several times, as have Bob and Clara Lee. Now I have to tell you, Bob is a real character. He’s older than dirt, and his jokes were worn out the first time he heard them on the school playground, but he’s such a nice fellow and Clara is such a sweetheart, that we look forward to seeing them over and over again.

Another good friend who stopped by is Michael Chang, whom we first met when he was a student at several Life on Wheels sessions, and who also joined us for our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally last September.

We also got to visit with Jeff and Barb Franz. I owe Jeff a big thank you, because while we were at Life on Wheels in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania last year, I started seeing an alarming number of floaters in my left eye. When I reported it in the blog, Jeff, who is an optician, immediately contacted me and urged me to get immediate medical care because he said it was very possibly a torn retina. Based upon his warning, we got it taken care of that very morning, before things got out of hand. 

There were a lot of other people who have taken the time to stop by, and I’m sorry that I can’t remember everybody’s name, but even if I could, I don’t think we’d have room here for a roll call. But we sure enjoyed seeing all of you.

I don’t want to be a complete jerk, but I have to address something here. I upset a few readers when I did not post their replies to my blog about the wacko who felt it was his duty to tell me the current administration is rounding up Vietnam vets for transport to a concentration camp.

The point of that post was to demonstrate how far out in left (or right) field people can get. As I closed that post, I asked people not to start sending me all of their political viewpoints, and joked that I have a delete button. This is supposed to be an RV blog, and overall I try to stay focused on the RV lifestyle, though I may exercise my editorial privilege and wander off track a bit now and then.

Still, some readers sent comments that were getting into the realm of a political debate, and I did not post them. In response, one writer accused me of censorship. Yeah, I guess you can call it that, if you want. It’s my blog, and I reserve the right to moderate the posts and comments.

Another reader demanded I allow him his freedom of the press. No way would I step on that basic American right. But you have to understand something. Freedom of the press is not guaranteed to everybody. Freedom of the press is guaranteed to anyone who owns a press. No newspaper has an obligation to print a reader’s letter or comment that they choose not to. Nor does a blog.

I certainly encourage anyone who wants to express their political (or any other) viewpoints to start their own newspaper, or their own blog. Just log onto www.wordpress.com and have at it. It’s even free, and if you send me a link, I’ll read it at least once.

Thought For The Day – We need each other more than we need stuff.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally