Longtime Gypsy Journal and blog readers probably already know that I am fascinated by those small world encounters that we have or hear about all the time.

You know what I mean, those chance conversations with a new friend in a campground, where you suddenly realize that you both worked at the same company 20 years and 3,000 miles ago. Or discovering that the longtime acquaintance you have always nodded to at RV rallies when you cross paths is your second cousin’s brother-in-law. Or pulling into an RV park and finding that the folks in the next site are people you shared a volunteer project with last summer. I call it small world syndrome, and we have had it happen to us more times than I can count.

Among my past publishing endeavors, years ago I put out a racing newspaper. I was standing in the press box of a small town dirt track once and got to talking to a gentleman who was visiting from out of state, looking for a race track to buy, which would be the fulfillment of his longtime dream. He said that now that he was retired from being a school administrator, he finally could get his racetrack. Can you imagine the surprise we both got when we talked a bit more, and discovered that he had been the incoming principal of my high school back in Toledo, Ohio the year I graduated early to join the Army?

Just last summer, Terry and I were helping our buddy Al Hesselbart by playing tour guides to a group from the Heartland Owners Club at the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana. One custom built RV on display at the museum has emblems from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York incorporated into the design.

One of the men taking the tour pointed the emblems out to his wife and said that they reminded him of his old days in the Army. I spent a couple of my Army years teaching firearms and close combat at West Point, and after hearing his comment, we got to talking. It turns out that he left the Academy a few years before I arrived, and I had taken over his old job!

It has happened to us more times than I can count. We have pulled up to an intersection and looked over and seen friends sitting in their RV across the street; been filling our motorhome’s fuel tank and had other RVing friends pull in to the fuel island next to us; and stopped in roadside rest areas for a stretch and potty break, and met up with fulltimers we have crossed paths with all over the country. None of these unplanned meetings were expected, they just happened.

We had another small world encounter yesterday. We drove 100 miles north to Cordes Junction, Arizona to meet Bill Smith, head pressman for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper in Flagstaff. Because there is so much snow on the ground up north, and we don’t have snow tires on our van, Bill had volunteered to drive 100 miles south to meet us halfway and deliver the new issue of the Gypsy Journal to us.

I have known Bill close to 20 years, ever since my newspaper days here in Arizona, and Terry has known him over ten years. Yesterday we were telling Bill about our travels, and he asked if we ever got up to Maine. We told him we had, and about visiting Saint Johns, the old grade school Terry had attended in Bangor.

Bill said he had grown up in Bangor, and then shocked us by telling us that he had gone to the same school! Of course, Bill is so old he has moss growing on his back, and Terry is only a few years out of puberty, so they weren’t there at the same time, but it was still fun listening to them reminisce.

Bill asked Terry what part of Bangor she had grown up in, and she told him that her father was stationed at Dow Air Force Base there, and they had lived in post housing. Bill blew us away again, when he said that when he joined the Air Force, he had been stationed right there in his hometown, at Dow!

I know our experiences are not unique. How many small world encounters have you had?

While we were out making new memories, Bad Nick was home writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled I Like Arizona! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Many of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. Sing your songs now.

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We spent most of the day yesterday playing tour guide at the RV Hall of Fame Museum to members of the Heartland Owners Club, who were in the area for their annual rally. It was a lot of fun.

Here is a picture of Terry sitting with her new friend, Poker Alice. Poker Alice was a famous lady gambler and madam who was well known in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota in the old days for her luck with cards, the cigars she smoked, and the .38 revolver she carried in a pocket in case some card sharp tried to cheat her. I wrote a story about her which is in my book Highway History And Back Road Mystery. Of course, this isn’t the real Poker Alice. That luminary died in 1930 and is buried in Sturgis. But this likeness of the old gal on display at the museum is pretty accurate.

Things got off to a slow start, because of a scheduling mix up so Terry and I, and several other volunteers called in for the occasion, spent the first couple of hours just chatting with regular visitors to the museum. Then the chartered buses pulled up with the Heartland group and the floodgates opened. Over 150 folks from the rally had a good time seeing all of the neat old RVs on display, and we had a good time visiting with them.

In ten years of publishing the Gypsy Journal, we have been approached by several RV manufacturers about advertising, but Heartland is the only one we have accepted advertising from, because they convinced me that they build a quality product and stand behind it.

The Heartland owners we talked to at the museum were just as impressed. The factory is located here in Elkhart, and they sent a small army of service techs to the rally to handle any problems owners had with rigs. Everybody was impressed with how accommodating they were. One comment I heard was “They promised less and delivered more.” A fifth wheel does not fit our needs or lifestyle, but if Terry and I were going to buy a fifth wheel, Heartland would be the first and last one we looked at.

I also talked to some of the vendors who were at the Heartland Rally, and all of them were impressed with the reception they got and the amount of business they did. I really wish we would not have been sick so we could have attended.

Unfortunately, we did have a Bad Nick sighting at the museum yesterday. One of the most unique vehicles in the collection is this wild custom motorhome called Star Streak II, built on a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado chassis, which has been featured on the Discovery Channel.

I enjoyed taking visitors into the RV to show them its many unique features, including a large screened roof vent. One family had a little boy who immediately started flipping switches and pulling on things.

His father immediately chastised him and told him not to touch things, but you know how kids can be. In no time at all he was reaching for a toggle switch on the wall and I told him “Be careful there, I’m not sure which switch it is, but one of them operates the ejector. A while back we lost a nine year old who touched it and went right through that hole in the roof. We looked for him everywhere, but the place closes at 5 o’clock, so what could we do? He still hasn’t turned up.”

The boy’s eyes were bigger than the RVs’ hubcaps, and his mouth was hanging so far open a sparrow could have flown in. I couldn’t resist taking it a step further, so I said “The security guard says sometimes late at night he hears the boy’s voice calling out, but it’s a big place and he’s an old man, so who knows?” The boy stuck his hands deep into his pockets and never took them out until he was well clear of the RV! Bad Nick!

I had another one of those small world events that happen to me all of the time while I was giving some folks a tour of the Cadillac motorhome. Paul Jones, the man who built it, was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the car has two West Point emblems mounted on the front fenders.

Back when I was a young solder, about 100 years ago, I spent a couple of years at West Point as a firearms instructor. (Sleep well tonight, I helped train the guys running the Army today!).

As one couple was looking at the RV, the husband saw the emblems and commented that he was sure familiar with them. “Were you a cadidiot?” I asked him, using the slang term we enlisted men assigned to the Academy used for cadets. “No, but I was a firearms instructor there,” he replied. As it turns out, he had the same job I did, only about four years before my arrival! How cool is that?

Thought For The Day – Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.

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