Even though our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally doesn’t officially start until next week, folks have been rolling in for the last two days!

Yesterday Mike and Elaine Loscher arrived to help with the rally. This will be the fourth or fifth Gypsy Gathering rally for this nice couple, who always show up prepared to volunteer to do whatever needs done to make the rally a success. Mike works long hours with the parking crew, and Miss Terry has come to rely on Elaine to help make registration go smoothly.

Shortly after Mike and Elaine pulled in, Bob and Molly Pinner arrived, along with Howie and Norah Glover, as part of an Escapees RV Club Class Reunion. Several other couples have also arrived for the reunion, including John and Doni Hargis, Dan and Dee Hawkey, and Rick and Terry Traver, to name a few.

Yesterday afternoon Phil Brown and Joy Waldrop dropped over to visit, along with Bill Joyce and Diane Melde. Both couples are staying at a Coast to Coast campground in nearby Wapakoneta, and they rode down together to say hello and check out the fairgrounds.

While we were visiting with them, Linda Fleeger came by to say hello. Linda is going to be presenting a seminar on Volunteering At National Wildlife Refuges at the rally, and she also volunteered herself and her pal Terry Traver to go out and collect door prizes from the local business community. I quickly passed that duty on to them, because we have been going in so many different directions at once that we still have not had time to call on anybody for door prizes.  

While all of this was going on, Brenda Speidel and Billie Barker had commandeered one of the fairgrounds buildings to sort rally T-shirts. It is always hard to know how many shirts to order, and in what sizes. Last year here in Ohio, we sold out of the smaller sizes, and were stuck with leftover XX and XXX sizes. But at our Arizona rally in February, the larger sizes sold out the first or second day, and we had leftover smaller sizes.

We have debated only having shirts available on a pre-order basis, but we have so many people who show up at the rallies at the last minute that they would be shut out. The problem, of course, is that as soon as the rally ends, any leftover shirts are just excess baggage and wasted money. The screen printer definitely does not want them back, and we don’t want to carry them around.

While all of this was going on, Bad Nick was busy too, posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled I Didn’t Do It! that I think will get some interesting responses.

On another topic, I reported Sunday that we had lost one of the safety pins from our Blue Ox tow bar. I got an e-mail from my friend Michele Henry at Phoenix Commercial Paint yesterday telling me that she had found the missing pin in her paint booth. Apparently I had not attached it securely when I moved the tow bar from our bus conversion to the Winnebago, and it fell out while the motorhome was in her shop getting the stripe painted on last week.

Several people have written to tell me that they had either heard of, or even experienced, having safety pins pulled out when parked at truck stops and highway rest areas. While we have never had that happen to us, one longtime reader lost the Jeep he was towing while going through Atlanta. He had stopped and taken a nap at a rest area south of the city just before. Mere coincidence? Who knows?

Whenever we stop for fuel or for a break at a rest area, and every morning before we hit the road, I always do a walk around to inspect the RV and our dinghy, to be sure everything looks okay. Even though we have and trust a PressurePro tire monitoring system, I check the tires for any cuts or damage that might have occurred from highway debris; check the tow bar, safety pins, and safety cables; check for leaks, and just look to see that the bumpers have not fallen off or something. (Hey, you might laugh, but you never had the Motorhome from Hell that we started our RV life in!)

It only takes a couple of minutes, but it gives me an excuse to get out and stretch my legs, and it’s always better to spot a potential problem when you’re safely off the road, rather than waiting for something to go wrong at 60 miles per hour.

Thought For The Day – I’m not old, I’m chronologically gifted.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

We were talking to a couple who are considering extended RV travel, and one of their concerns was safety. They have heard urban legends about RVers being attacked while they spend the night at places like Wal-Mart, small town parks, and rest areas.

We assured them that those kind of things almost never happen and not to spend a lot of time worrying about them. As I told them, they are in more danger from a traffic accident then they ever will be from a criminal, as long as they use common sense, keep their doors locked, and don’t spend any nights parked in an inner city ghetto. We have spent many, many nights dry camping in every corner of this country, in truck stops, highway rest areas, commercial parking lots, even in wide pullouts on back roads miles from nowhere. We have never felt threatened.

However, that does not mean that any of us are ever completely safe. You never know what that idiot coming down the road at you, riding a ton of steel might do, You can be as vigilant as is humanly possible and still become a victim in an instant, as these pictures show.

One of our subscribers sent me the photo on the left the other day. She was driving down a city street when a car driven by a seventeen year old girl who was text messaging somebody on her cell phone crossed the center line and hit her head on. Fortunately her airbag deployed and she was not injured.

Of the four girls in the other car, the front seat passenger had some cuts and bruises, but that was all, fortunately. Our friend said what really ticked her off was that the girl driving the other car never apologized, and never showed any concern for her own passenger. She was too busy being freaked out because her cell phone got broken in the accident! And there are airheads like that driving on every street and highway in America!

I took the photo to the right after a near miss I was involved in a few years ago in Tucson. I was driving down the street when the light gray car in the foreground roared passed me, driving halfway on the sidewalk. Two blocks down the street he ran a red light and slammed into the white car, which burst into flames. Fortunately, the older couple in the white car escaped uninjured. As the story turned out, the driver of the gray car had stolen it and was making his getaway. He jumped out and fled the scene on foot.  

No, I sleep just fine at night, wherever we are parked. It’s driving down the highway that sometimes scares the hell out of me!

Thought For The Day – You’re getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally