Terry did a lot of pre-packing the motorhome Wednesday night, so yesterday morning it was a simple job to run in our bedroom and living room slides, pull up our HWH leveling jacks, unhook our utilities, and get ready to hit the road.

We pulled out of the Hershey Thousand Trails campground, drove west several miles on U.S. Highway 322, then got onto Interstate 83 for a short distance before we left that for U.S. Highway 15, a nice four lane road that took us south to Gettysburg.

We arrived at Round Top Campground about 11:30, and the helpful staff quickly led us to our full hookup RV site and made sure we had everything we needed.  It was an easy driving day of exactly 62 miles from our site at the Thousand Trails to our site at Round Top Campground. 

Our site here is a level back-in with 50 amp electric, and life is good. It’s been about three weeks since our mail has caught up to us, and there was a big box waiting for us when we checked in. Once we were settled into our site, we sorted through it, then made a run to the bank to make a deposit, and stopped for an early dinner before we returned to our motorhome at Round Top Campground. We spent the evening filling the orders that came in with the mail, and watching the season premiers of The Big Bang Theory and Gray’s Anatomy.

Round Top Campground seems to have a lot of seasonal sites, as well as RV sites available; at nightly or weekly rates. It’s just far enough away from town to be quiet, but still only about five minutes to the Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park. 

Gettysburg is, of course, the town where the pivotal Civil War battle took place in 1863. The entire town is a historical site, and over 1,300 monuments, markers, and memorials commemorate the intense fighting that took place here. Everywhere you look, there is a statue, a plaque, or a cannon. It seems like every unit that took part in the battle has its own memorial or statue. And of course, the generals who led those units are also honored with statues, like this one of Union General Meade.
We toured Gettysburg and did a feature story on it, as well as one on President Eisenhower’s farm, a few years ago. But the new expanded National Parks Visitor Center has opened since then, so we want to check it out, and maybe hit a couple of other places we missed when we were here before.

We’ll only be here a couple of days, because we have reservations at Cherry Hill Park in College Park, Maryland for next week, while we tour Washington, D.C. It’s about the most expensive RV park we’ve ever stayed in, but we can buy tickets for the metro in the park office, and a city bus comes through and takes you right to the station. On our last trip to Washington, we found that the convenience is well worth the extra cost.

Meanwhile, Bad Nick is at it again, with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Being A Woman Shouldn’t Matter. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – I thought about being born again, but my mother refused.

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The Hershey RV Show finally ended yesterday, and it was the longest week of our lives. We are so glad that it is over! We have worked a lot of RV rallies over the years, but this was our first RV show. I’m pretty sure it will be our last, too.

The good news is that, according to the folks running the Hershey Show, they had record attendance. Uh huh. Here is a picture of the vendor aisle where our booth was yesterday about mid-morning. Sunday was supposed to be the other “super busy day” of the rally. Does this look familiar? If not, look at my last couple of blog posts. Oh yeah, another record setting attendance day!

My friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart was displaying this really cool 1915 Model A camper at the show. Pretty cool, huh?

Al set a record of his own at the show yesterday morning, when absolutely nobody showed up for his always popular 100 Years of RVs seminar. I didn’t want Al to feel too bad about that, so I also had nobody at all at my Meandering Down The Highway seminar at 2:30 p.m. 

After about 15 minutes of sitting in the room alone, I began packing up my computer and projector, and one of the show dweebs poked her head inside and told me I had to stay in the room in case anybody did eventually did show up.  Well, you know how well that worked out, don’t you?

The show was supposed to end at 5 p.m., and vendors were not allowed to start packing up until then. But there were no customers and we were way past fed up, so I went back to our booth and we started packing things away and taking them out to the van.

We were about finished when another show representative came by and told us that we were breaking their rules by leaving early. Yeah, and your point is?

In looking over our totals for the show, we have taken in much more money on the very first day of many RV rallies with only a few hundred RVs attending than we did in our week at the “biggest RV show in the world!

While the show was a total bust, we could have lived with that if the folks putting on the event were more organized, and treated their vendors with some respect. But when they have so many rules that even they can’t agree on them; when you arrive and get a hassle just to get your name badges and parking permits; when nobody can tell you even the most basic information about where to park to unload your inventory; when they  treat you like an idiot and blow smoke up your butt about the numbers, it’s just too much to deal with.

But at least it’s over, and we’ll spend today licking our wounds and getting some much needed rest. We have a few more days here at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground, and then we’re going to Gettysburg for a couple of days before we continue on to Washington, D.C.

Somebody e-mailed me to say that they were sorry to hear that we would not be returning to this area because the show was a bust, because there is so much to see and do here that we would enjoy. No problem, we love this area and we will be back again for sure. We will just spend our time exploring and having fun, not stuck at the RV show.

Thought For The Day – It’s hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything.

Today is the last day of the Hershey RV Show, and it couldn’t end soon enough for us. We are worn out physically and mentally, and just want to go to bed and sleep for about 48 hours straight.

All week long the show promoters and other vendors have been telling us “Just wait until Friday and Saturday. This place will be a madhouse!” Well, Friday came and went, and it was nothing special. A little busier than earlier in the week, but still very slow by RV rally standards.

Yesterday (Saturday) the Giant Center was packed in the outside RV display area, and on the upper indoor vendor area. But for much of the day down on the main vendor floor, it was a still pretty slow. We would have occasional rushes, when the crowds were so heavy that nobody could stop and talk to a vendor even if they had wanted to (and most didn’t want to), but then things would slow back down again.

And just like the rest of the week, by 6 p.m. everybody had pretty much disappeared, and all of us vendors spent the next two hours staring at each other across the aisles. When we got back to our motorhome, parked at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground, Terry added up our sales figures for the day, and we had taken in even less money on Saturday then we had on Friday! So much for the predictions of huge sales Friday and Saturday.

The folks running the show claim that last year they had over 37,000 attendees, and said this year the show was going to be even bigger. Yesterday, they said that from Wednesday to Friday of this week, they had just over 15,000 people coming through the gates. I very much doubt that figure is accurate, based upon what the vendors saw. And even if it is a true figure, there’s no way they will come anywhere near that 37,000 figure by the end of the day today. A lot of vendors and show attendees have told us that the show was much better when it was held in Harrisburg. I think it would have to have been, because it darn sure couldn’t have been any worse!

At least we got to make some new friends while we were here, and we also got to see some folks we have not seen in a while. Yesterday, Paul and Marti Dahl stopped in to say hello, and it was nice to talk to them. Paul is a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, and Marti is a nursing home administrator. They are counting the days until they can retire and travel fulltime in their Class A motorhome. 

Another couple we got to talk to for a while were blog readers Ed and Blondie, whose last name fails me now, I’m afraid. But they were fun people, and they also sat in on my Highway History and Back Road Mystery seminar.

Sean Magee really flattered us when he told us that he drove 90 minutes to come to the show, just to see Terry and me. I really felt a connection with Sean, he’s a very special guy who has a lot of love for his fellow man, and especially children.

There were others who stopped by our vendor booth to say hello, and I’m sorry, both Terry and I are so foggy right now that we just cannot remember everybody’s names. But we really were happy to see all of you, and we really appreciate the time you took to stop and introduce yourselves.

Today is a shorter day, only 8 hours instead of the 11 we’ve been working all week. Of course, then we have to pack everything up and load the van before we’re finally through with this sad excuse for an RV show. Miss Terry and I have an agreement that if I get forgetful someday and say I want to come back here again, she can bash my head in with a frying pan, and then drag my bleeding carcass out to the curb and leave it.

Thought For The Day – Hard work never killed anyone, but why give it a chance?

Okay, maybe I didn’t shave my legs, but I was still up before 7 a.m., and I even brushed my teeth! That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

Why was I up at such an ungodly hour, you may ask? Because we’re working a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show this week – America’s “largest” RV show. I know it’s the largest, because it says so right there on their website. Uh huh, and I stand six feet tall, weigh 100 pounds, and have a full head of hair.  It must be true, because you read it right here on my blog, right?

Here is a picture I took about 10 a.m. yesterday morning of the aisle where our vendor booth is located. Everybody you see in this picture is a vendor, except for the person in the gray sweatshirt in the rear left side of the aisle.

Here’s another picture I took of our vendor aisle, from the opposite direction, just before 11 a.m. Hey, it’s a customer, the guy in the blue jeans in the rear! Everyone else you see is a vendor.

About 2 p.m. it started to rain, driving all of the people who were outside looking at RVs inside the building. We had a rush!

And here’s the vendor aisle just before 7 p.m. The guy on the left with the white hat on is a customer, the guy on the right, fiddling with the bike is a vendor. Do you see a pattern here?  While we did have a few (very few) little busy spurts, most of the day I could have fired a shotgun down the aisle and never hit anybody.

Last year, the Hershey Show claimed to have 37,000 attendees. Unless they all show up in one really big bus today or tomorrow, I don’t think they’ll be breaking any records soon.

Vendor hours are from 9 a.m., to 8 p.m., and if you have never stood on top of an ice rink for eleven hours, trust me, it’s an experience you don’t need to seek out. Just as they did Wednesday evening. a lot of vendors gave up and left a little after 6 p.m., and the place was almost empty. The show directors came on the public address system several times, warning vendors that they were not allowed to leave before 8 p.m. Many ignored them, because they had already left.

Miss Terry wanted to stick it out until closing time, and I grudgingly agreed, until somebody from the show came through the vendor area “taking attendance.” Apparently, if you leave early, they fine you, and if you won’t pay the fine, you can’t come back next year. Now, anybody who knows me well knows that the best way to get the Nixter to do something it to tell me I can’t do it! As soon as Terry told me about the attendance taker, I was packed up and out of there in about five minutes!

It is totally asinine to expect vendors to stand around on a cold ice rink for that many hours a day if they don’t have any customers to sell to! A longtime vendor told me that the number of vendors has dropped dramatically at this show in the last few years. Why do you think that is?

They tell us that today and Saturday will be killer days, with customers pouring in the doors, but it would really have to do a dramatic turnaround before we would ever consider coming back to this show. Lost time is lost time, and you can never get it back, no matter how well you do the next day. Never say never, but I just don’t see it happening for us.

Thought For The Day – The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.

Click Here To Register For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally!

It’s getting close to that time of year again. The leaves are already beginning to turn in some places up north, and before we know it, the snowbirds will start migrating south for the winter.

If you follow the seasons, and will be away from your summer address for the winter, please don’t forget to send us a note or an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net giving us your winter address, so your Gypsy Journal subscription will get to you. Unless you pay for the first class postage upgrade to your subscription, the post office will not forward the paper. 

We spent yesterday printing more of our RV guides and making CDs to stock the inventory at our vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show, where we will be working eleven hours a day for the next few days.

We took a break for a while to visit with Russ and Patty Frady, longtime subscribers who stopped in for a quick visit. Russ took a bundle of sample issues of the Gypsy Journal to pass out at campgrounds in their travels. We appreciate them helping to spread the word.

Did I mention that there are a lot of geese here at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground? They’re everywhere, and while they are pretty, they are filthy, obnoxious critters. As I wrote before, this isn’t a place to walk around barefoot!

I didn’t have space in yesterday’s blog to tell you about our stop at Bird In Hand, another Amish town in Lancaster County. The Old Village Store sells an interesting collection of traditional Amish goods, tourist souvenirs, and antiques.

On the store’s crowded shelves, and upstairs in the antiques showroom, you can find flyswatters, Bag Balm, kitchen tools, Amish hats and shawls, recipe books, toys, and furniture that was old when your grandparents were kids.

You can even buy pumpkins and squash!

A couple of blog readers wrote to ask me what a “chocolate fountain” is, which I mentioned when I wrote about our dinner at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord. Well, it’s just what it sounds like, a fountain of warm melted chocolate cascading down from the top. People skewer strawberries, banana chunks and such, and dip them under the flowing chocolate for a delicious treat. Think of it as a vertical chocolate fondue, if you will.

We were originally scheduled to be a part of the Trade Days at the Hershey RV Show, which were Monday and Tuesday, but we skipped them to go sightseeing. I’m glad we did, because Al Hesselbart, from the RV Hall of Fame Museum, has been there, and he said it was dead. Al said that at one point yesterday afternoon, the vendors were playing frisbee football in the show aisles because they were bored and had not had any customers all day long. I like Al, but Miss Terry’s a lot prettier, and  I’d much rather spend time exploring the back roads with her than staring at him all day long!

Today the show opens to the public, and  I guess you could say that we’re cautiously optimistic. We have worked a lot of RV rallies, but this will be our first experience vending at an RV show, and we’re not sure how it will work out. We’re looking forward to seeing a lot of new people and introducing them to the Gypsy Journal, and hopefully some of them will like what they see well enough to subscribe. It’s going to be an interesting week.

When I took a break from the computer yesterday, Bad Nick  grabbed the keyboard and wrote a new Bad Nick Blog titled Let Them Serve! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

Click Here To Register For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally!