Can you be exhausted, footsore, and ache over every inch of your body, and still be having a fantastic time? You can if you’re running a Gypsy Journal rally!

Yesterday, after morning coffee and donuts, furnished by Bradd & Hall RV furniture, I spent part of the morning checking up on our vendors and seminar rooms to be sure everything was going well. Then late in the morning I did my Gypsy Journal FAQs seminar, an informal chat in which I tell the audience how we began our 12 year traveling and publishing adventure, why we do things the way we do, and what we see for our future.

I couldn’t get away for lunch, so Greg White grabbed a sandwich for me while he was out running errands, and in the afternoon I sat in on Roger Marble’s excellent Beginning Genealogy seminar.

At 7 p.m. we had door prizes, and then the real fun began. First Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School, in his pumpkin persona, took to the stage to act like…well, an orange version of Dennis Hill.

I eventually had to climb up on stage and put a leash on Dennis, because the crowd was having way too much fun! He’s wearing the world’s one and only orange Gypsy Gathering T-shirt.

Then it was time for the highlight of the evening, our Hoosier Honey Beauty Contest. Six of the most bizarre looking women, who had been pretty run of the mill middle aged men an hour or so before, strutted their stuff on the stage to win the coveted crown.

When he (or she) isn’t breaking hearts or creating nightmares for men nationwide, this is Al Hesselbart, author and historian for the RV Hall of Fame Museum. The things you don’t know about your friends until a cheap 99 cent tiara is on the line!

I miss my momma, but not that bad, thank you just the same!

Here’s a face that only a mother or a cellmate could love!

During the contest, I had to lecture several of the “ladies” on decorum. Apparently keeping their legs crossed is a real problem in their world.

Here are all six of our contestants, waiting for the audience to decide the winner by popular vote. Be still, my heart!

And the winner is Carmalita Camelback, aka Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour!

Here is Denny Orr checking out our new Beauty Queen. I’m not sure what Denny is thinking, but forget it buddy. There’s not that much booze in the entire world!

After the beauty contest, the “ladies” collected donations from the audience for the Escapees CARE program. Our winner had a lot of money stuffed in her bodice.

All told, we raised $450 for CARE. Here I am presenting it to Brenda Neil from the Escapees RV Club.

It was a busy and fun day, and today we get to do it all over again!

So yes, I’m sore, exhausted, and ache in places I didn’t even know I had. But I’m sure having fun!

Thought For The Day – We all have to get older, but growing up is optional.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a morning person. Never have been, never will be. I used to do a lot of hunting and fishing, but I never subscribed to the theory that you have to roll out of bed at O-Dark-30 just to ambush a bunny rabbit or hook a trout. Those critters are still out there at noon.

I usually do bookwork and research during the day, start writing about 9 p.m., and work until 1 or 2 a.m. before I call it a day. So I seldom get into an upright position before 9 a.m. That’s just what works best for me.

But the last few days I have been up way too early. We had company over the weekend, and Miss Terry said I had to get up and be a good host. Then yesterday I had to have my van in a shop just after 8 a.m. to have some work done on it. And this morning we are taking the Winnebago to Carlyle Lehman at Focal Wood Products in Nappanee to have our custom desks/workstations installed. Carlyle is an excellent Amish craftsman, but those people sure do get up early in the morning! Did I mention that I’m not a morning person?

We’re slowly getting settled into the new motorhome, and once we get the new work stations installed today, we’ll start feeling more organized and at home. It is amazing that our bus was 40 feet long, just like the Winnebago, but the motorhome is six inches wider, and with the living room and bedroom slides, it seems so much bigger inside.

We’ll be here in Elkhart until about the 20^th, then we’ll head over to Celina, Ohio to start getting things set up for our Gypsy Gathering rally. We have had a lot of people offer to volunteer to help out at the rally, but one of the jobs we really need done is someone to come in early and canvass the local businesses soliciting door prizes. Last year the business community in Celina was very welcoming and receptive, but the folks who collected door prizes can’t make it this time around. Anyone feel like pounding the pavement?

I have to make a decision soon about my Today’s Hero Blog. When I came up with the idea, I hoped to be able to showcase the unsung heroes in our world who give of themselves to help others. It’s something I really believe in, but I have been receiving very few submissions in the last month or so, and without input from our readers, it can’t continue. If there is someone special in your life that you think deserves recognition for their good deeds, send me an e-mail and let’s share their story with the rest of the world.

Thought For The Day – It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

In Thursday’s blog, I mentioned that our inner children are whimsical, and our travel plans are set in jello. As Mac McClellan wrote in his Casino Travel blog on RV.Net, we have a general idea for our year’s travels, and anchor points along the way. Between those, we like to just roll with the flow and take it as it comes.

We prefer not making reservations, because then we have some place we have to be at a given time. What fun is that? What if we find a neat place along the way and want to tarry there for a while? What if we discover an interesting back road we want to explore? So, about the only time we make reservations is when we are going into a high use area during their peak times. Otherwise, we play it by ear.

We’ll be leaving the Texas Gulf Coast in a few days headed west. As of right this very minute, we plan to spend the rest of the winter and the spring in Arizona. We’ll be in Casa Grande in a couple of weeks getting things arranged for our Gypsy Gathering rally, and after the rally we plan to spend some time in Tucson and southern Arizona. Now that we have our kayaks, and with Miss Terry’s newfound interest in fishing, I would like to introduce her to bass fishing on a couple of my favorite lakes.

From Tucson we may go up to the Thousand Trails in the Verde Valley, or maybe we’ll go hang out at the Escapees North Ranch campground near Congress, Arizona until it warms up a bit in the high country. Since we don’t have to rush back east for Life on Wheels, we want to spend a few weeks in our old hometown of Show Low, in Arizona’s White Mountains spoiling our grandkids

We have never been to The Rally, which will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April, so we may get a vendor booth there. Then I think we’ll head for the Pacific Northwest. It’s been a long time since we’ve visited the Oregon and Washington coasts, which is a very special place to me. The only time Terry has ever been up that way was just before she was diagnosed with cancer, and she would like to see it again through healthy eyes.

Sometime toward the end of summer we’ll start making our way east to Traverse City, Michigan for Terry’s annual checkup with her oncologist, and then we’ll be in Celina, Ohio in September for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

From there, who knows? We’ve never explored the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas. I think it’s about time. We both have fallen in love with the Florida Keys. Maybe I’ll try to weasel another visit to our pals Tom Owen and Diane Rojewski’s houseboat in Key West.

That’s the general plan as of this moment. But than again…. autumn in Branson is supposed to be really pretty…. or maybe leaf peeping in New England … or?

Thought For The Day – We don’t have to change friends if we understand that sometimes friends change.

With Christmas behind us, it’s time to get serious about our Gypsy Gathering rally February 9-13 in Casa Grande, Arizona. We have more reservations coming in every day, and I have had several suggestions for seminars folks would like to see. We are trying to make all of those seminars happen, but I still need some help finishing out the seminar lineup.

My friend Cheryl Green is a consultant with Creative Memories and will be presenting seminars on digital scrapbooking, and a hands-on workshop on scrapbooking and card making. Cheryl presented her seminars at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering in September and it was a big hit, so we’re excited to have her joining us in Arizona.

We have also had several requests for a seminar on geocaching, and I have added one to the schedule. I’m not sure who will be presenting it yet, either myself, or do I have an experienced geocacher out there who is interested?

Someone also suggested a seminar on map reading. Yes, even with GPS units and computer technology, there is still a place for maps in this high tech world of ours. I’m trying to put that together now.

Several people have asked about a cooking seminar, or a seminar dedicated to convection cooking. I know we will have at least one cooking seminar, and I’m trying to find someone to cover the convection class now. And before you ask why Miss Terry doesn’t present that class, she doesn’t use a convection oven and much prefers to stick with her conventional gas range and oven.

It’s going to be a fun rally, and we look forward to seeing a lot of you there. At our first rally we had 185 RVs, and this year we had 254. Can we top that number this time around? Terry and I have to walk a fine line with our rallies; we need them to be big enough to cover the expenses and hopefully some of our effort, but we don’t want them to get too big and start losing the small, informal feeling we have worked to create for our attendees.

We are also investigating alternate locations for future Western rallies. With the changes in management at the Pinal County Fairgrounds in Casa Grande, I’m not sure if we will be able to continue using that venue. From the very start, Terry and I have debated whether we should return to the same place every year for our rallies, both east and west, or if we should take them to new locales. We’re still not sure which way to go with that. Casa Grande is convenient to snowbird hotspots like Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma, as well as all of the RVers who go to Quartzsite every year. But what about someplace in California, Oregon, or Washington? Maybe later in the year? What are your thoughts?

Several people have suggested that we hold our established winter Western and fall Eastern rallies in familiar locations, and then have a third floating rally that might be anywhere, during the summer. Miss Terry quickly reminded me that there are only so many weeks in a year, and that I pull her in enough different directions at once as it is, so I guess we’ll stick to two rallies a year.

Thought For The Day – Sometimes when I’m angry, I have the right to be, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.