After reading the Thought For The Day in yesterday’s blog (When you go into court, your fate is in the hands of twelve people who aren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty), two different wannabe fulltimers e-mailed me to ask how fulltimers handle civic obligations such as voting and jury duty. Do they have to return to whatever town they are domiciled in to cast their votes, or if they are chosen for jury duty?

When we started our fulltiming lifestyle, we chose Texas as our legal domicile, and our mailing service was with the Escapees in Livingston. Two or three times over the years we received notices of jury duty. In each case we just called the Polk County courthouse, explained that we were Escapees and were traveling in another part of the country, and that we would not be back in the area for several months. In each case, we were dismissed, and asked to stop in and volunteer for jury duty the next time we were in Livingston for a while.

A couple of years ago, we switched our domicile to South Dakota. We have not received any jury summonses so far, but my understanding is that if we do, all it takes is a telephone call and an explanation that we are out of state, and we’ll be dismissed.

Voting, no matter where you are domiciled, can be done by absentee ballot. Just contact the local authority that handles such things and request an absentee ballot. Fulltimers do it all the time.

Another question I get frequently is how does one renew their driver’s license if they are fulltimers. It depends on the state. In Texas, we renewed online once, and most states have that service available. Some states allow you to renew your license online or by mail one time, and then require you to appear in person the next time around.

Some states require drivers past a certain age to appear in person and take an eye test to renew their licenses. License renewals usually fall on your birthday. In every state that I know of, you can renew your license anywhere from 30 to 90 days in advance, so if your birthday falls in the middle of the winter, you can usually go earlier and get it done, rather than returning to someplace like South Dakota (a popular domicile state for fulltimers) in the middle of January or February.

Texas also requires an annual vehicle safety inspection, and depending on which county you are registered in, you may also need an emissions test to renew your license plates. Polk County, home of the Escapees, does not require an emissions test. You do not have to return to Texas to renew your license plates, it can be done by mail or online. You are only required to get a safety inspection when you bring the vehicle into Texas, so if you are traveling, you do not need to return to get a safety inspection. Just get it done the next time you are in Texas. In our bus conversion, we once went several years without a safety inspection, because we were not in Texas during that time period. South Dakota does not require a vehicle safety or emissions inspection.

Life on the road is a lot of fun, and even though we do have to handle things like jury duty, voting, and renewing licenses, none of them are a major obstacle. With a little planning, a telephone call or two, or a few minutes online, any of our civic obligations are a piece of cake. 

Thought For The Day – Don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

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I don’t know why I even try to give our readers an idea of our travel plans, because the minute I do, everything changes. I reported in yesterday’s blog that we would send the CD with the new issue to our printer, and hopefully head west by way of Livingston, Texas and across the central part of the Lone Star State. What a difference a day makes! 

When I called the printer we normally use here in this part of the country, they didn’t have us on the schedule as promised, our contact person was unavailable, and it was obvious they were neck deep in chaos due to internal problems. Now what? We’re already running late and we don’t have time to wait for them to resolve their personnel issues.

I called another newspaper printer we have used in Victoria, Texas, explained our problem, and the customer service rep we work with there promised that if I could overnight the CD to her, she’d make getting us printed a priority. So it looks like we’ll be driving across Interstate 10 counting the road kill after all.

Publishing a newspaper on the road presents these kinds of challenges all the time. It would be great to have one newspaper do all of our printing, but the cost of having them ship the finished issue to us wherever we happen to be would be prohibitive, and timing would become a real issue. Most newspapers could actually handle the mailing for us as well, but besides the papers for our subscribers, we also print several thousand extra copies of each issue to pass out at RV parks, rallies, etc, and those would have to be shipped to us, with the inherent costs mentioned above.

Anyway, with all of that worked out yesterday morning, we drove about 35 miles to Pensacola, Florida to take care of some business, and made the mistake of stopping at a couple of stores. I was quickly reminded of why I try to avoid stores from Thanksgiving until New Years Day. Crowds of shoppers, everybody in a hurry, screaming kids, and frazzled store employees are about as far from the spirit of Christmas as you can get. Bah humbug!

Today we have an appointment at Camping World in Robertsdale to get the last of the repairs done to our motorhome from our burglary and vandalism. Our appointment is for 8 a.m., and they say we’ll be out by noon.

We had expected to be here in Summerdale until after Christmas, and probably until right after New Years, but, with this change of plans in our printing schedule, we’ll be heading toward Texas no later than Wednesday morning. In fact, if they get the work finished at Camping World early enough in the day, we may even put a couple of hundred miles behind us yet today.

We know we are disappointing some folks who wanted to get together with us while we were here, but we really have no choice. Unfortunately, we are not retired and we don’t always have the luxury of the relaxed schedule we like to have. It’s a lot better than our old workaholic lifestyle, but sometimes when duty calls, we just have to answer.

Tune in tomorrow and find out where we are. And if you find out before I do, send me an e-mail and let me know!       

Thought For The Day – I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

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I wrapped up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal late in the afternoon yesterday, Miss Terry got it proofed, and today we’ll send it over to our printer for final tweaking and printing. If all goes according to plan and if the angels are smiling on us, we’ll get it back and mailed by the end of the year. Still late, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances.

With the paper finished, we needed a break, so we went out to Foley to a Chinese buffet for dinner, and by the time we got back to the campground it was cold! I am so tired of being cold, I just want to be someplace where we can sleep with the windows open, and not have to shiver every time we step out the door.

Back at the motorhome, I wrote a blog entry about my thoughts on some of the electronic gadgets I’ve experimented with over the last few months and my impressions looking back, then decided I didn’t really want to post it, and saved it for a day when I’m running late and have nothing to write about. Writers call that “banking” stories – saving a few in reserve for when they have a deadline and their brain turns to pudding and they need to fill a column or blog quickly. I don’t believe in such a thing as writer’s block, because I can always find something to write about. As I wrote in an article on my Publishing4Profit website, writer’s block is a crock. Anyone who has made their living in the daily or weekly newspaper business will tell you that. But sometimes it’s nice to have that extra cushion, just in case I get lazy, if nothing else.

I’ve been looking at our trip west, and though the easiest route would be to get on Interstate 10 and take it all the way into Arizona, I really don’t like that route. I-10 across Texas is long, boring, and we’ve done it too many times. I mean, how many dead armadillo, coyote, and deer can you stand to look at?

If the weather cooperates we may go up to Livingston, Texas for a couple of days, and then take U.S. Highways through Waco, Gatesville, Goldwaithe, Brownwood, Ballinger, and San Angelo before we eventually hook up with I-10 somewhere in west Texas. There are a couple of stories up in that area I’d like to stop and research for future issues of the paper. But as always, we never know exactly where we’ll be and which route we’ll take until after we’ve been there.

We may find something that catches our interest, and hang out somewhere or take a side trip along the way, and we may just as easily fall into “go fast” mode and just decide to get there and get settled in. We don’t have to be anyplace until early February, when we’ll be in Apache Junction, Arizona to help Terry’s parents celebrate their birthdays. That’s the great thing about the fulltime RV lifestyle, we have plenty of options and the freedom to exercise them at our whim. 

Thought For The Day – The future will be either what you make it to be or what you allow it to be.

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We met a very nice couple at the Escapees Rainbow’s End campground in Livingston, Texas during our first year on the road and really hit it off with them. They were about our age, had retired early, and were ready to see America. They lasted about a year on the road, because they found the fulltime RV lifestyle too stressful.

Stressful? Isn’t one of the great things about fulltime RVing the lack of stress? Not for these folks.

Early in our friendship, I noticed a trait in the husband that made me wonder just how well he would be able to make the transition from the working world to RVing; he was just too regimented. He needed a schedule for every day of his life, and whenever something happened to mess up that schedule, he went into a mental tizzy.

One day they were going to have dinner at a restaurant in Livingston, and asked us to join them. We agreed they’d pick us up at about 5 p.m., as I recall. He called me a couple of hours before the appointed time to tell me that we were going to have to reschedule, because they were getting an oil change in town, and the shop was running late. I said we could wait until they got back to Rainbow’s End and then go to dinner, but he said no, their whole schedule was shot for the day. As it turned out, they were back in the campground by 4:30, but they could not go to dinner with only 30 minutes to prepare, so they cancelled.

Another time, we ran into them at the Escapees Rainbow Plantation campground in Alabama, and a couple of days later they left because they had reservations in a campground in the Florida Panhandle. Two days later, the husband called me to say that their new “campground” was actually a redneck trailer park, with long term units up on blocks, Rebel flags in the windows, and pit bulls chained to the porches. They hated the place.

I suggested that they leave and come back to Alabama, or go on down the road to some other place in Florida. “We can’t,” my friend replied, “we have a schedule to keep. If we leave here now, it throws it all out of kilter.” So they stayed in a place they didn’t like, with neighbors they didn’t like, just to maintain their “schedule.” As it turns out, as I learned in later conversations, at any give time, they had one year’s reservations made and paid for in advance. Their schedule called for them to drive no more than 300 miles in a day, and then stay put in an RV park where they had a reservation in place. When the week was up, they went to the next place on their schedule, and stayed there a week.

Any experienced RVer will tell you that sometimes things happen we don’t plan for. RVs break down and need to go into a shop for repairs. Bad weather can keep us off the road. Maybe we get sick and are not well enough to travel. If we do have plans, we change those plans to fit the new situation. Not our friends! If they had a breakdown and were stuck someplace for two days waiting for parts or repairs, they could not just go to the next RV park on their list and stay five days instead of seven. No, he had to cancel all of his future reservations, and then remake them again, one week at a time!

I tried to tell him that he needed to relax and just take life as it comes, but his mind was not programmed that way, and he just couldn’t do it. It didn’t take long for the stress of his self-imposed schedule to get to our friend; he started having stomach terrible pains, he couldn’t sleep, and he was miserable. His poor wife was just as miserable because she was witness to his stress and could not change him. They decided that the fulltime RV lifestyle was not for them. It’s probably for the best, because otherwise I think he’d have had a massive coronary.

We learned early on in this lifestyle that anything can happen, and often will, so we roll with the punches. It’s a lot easier that way. We seldom make reservations, and we try not to have a tight schedule. We may have a breakdown. We may find an interesting small town festival to take part in, or a historical site to explore. We may run into friends unexpectedly and want to spend time with them. So we take life not just one day at a time, but one mile at a time.

For example, we know that we’ll be in Florida sometime in the next few weeks, but we have no idea just when we’ll get there, where we’ll go when we get there, or which route we’ll take to get there! We may drive straight through, stopping only to sleep and eat along the way, but more likely, we may take a meandering route, and discover interesting places to distract for an hour or a day along whichever route we decide to take. It’s a lot more fun and a lot less stressful that way!

Thought For The Day – Can an atheist get insurance against acts of  God?

After reading yesterday’s blog, longtime reader Gene Teggatz suggested that maybe I need to consider having a sign made that says “Visitors Welcome Today” and a second sign that says “Visitors Not Welcome Today,” or perhaps a more diplomatic one saying “Please let me get some work done today.” Really, we don’t mind visitors dropping in, we’re pretty spontaneous and love to visit with folks most of the time.

Of course, there are those occasional few who would abuse even Saint Peter’s hospitality, and there has been a time or two, after somebody sat here for hours droning on and on, where I wished I had a sign that just said “Go Away!” But that doesn’t happen very often.

Yesterday morning started with an interesting e-mail seeking advice from a couple who will become fulltime RVers very soon. I get a lot of e-mails like this, and I’m always happy to offer whatever insight I can. But I had to demur on this one.

They plan to leave Chadron, Nebraska September 15^th, and head directly for Livingston, Texas to become official Texans. From there they want to go to New Orleans to see the French Quarter, and then on to Florida, where they hope to bounce around for the winter. They included an itinerary by date of where they hope to be and wanted me to tell them which RV parks to stay at for every stop, where were the best places to eat, what to see and do, and where to buy fuel along their route between now and next April.

I wrote back to tell them that while we have done a lot of traveling in our ten years as fulltime RVers, we haven’t been everywhere yet, so there was no way I could plan their entire lives for eight months! Heck, I most of the time I don’t even know where I’ll be next week myself!

By the time I finished with that e-mail, Dan and Karen Silverwood were at our door for a visit before they pulled out of Elkhart Campground headed for Ohio. They left about noon, and I decided to walk over to the campground office to see if any mail had arrived for us yet. There was a package from our mail service, along with a package for Ron and Brenda Speidel that they had asked me to watch out for, so I took it to keep at the bus until they arrive next week sometime.

On my way back to our bus conversion, I saw John and Alice Clark, the visitors whose names I could not remember in yesterday’s blog. They were very gracious about my social faux pas, and John even gave me a tour of their absolutely beautiful Newmar Ventana motorhome. I was so impressed with the coach that I went right back to the bus and brought Miss Terry back to see it for herself. Wow, what a rig!

Back at our bus, while Terry was doing bookwork, I worked on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal for a few hours, and then waded through a bunch of e-mails that had come in. No, I don’t want to meet hot college coeds; yes, we still have vendor openings for our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally; no, I don’t want to send my banking information to that nice man in Nigeria who wants to deposit $10 million in my bank account; yes, we’re still looking for a motorhome, but not a two year old Prevost, thank you very much; no, I don’t want to meet any bored and lonely housewives; yes, the price of the vendor spaces at the Ohio rally includes all camping and rally fees; no, I already have a good watch and I’m not interested in quality replica timepieces; no, I don’t want to correspond with beautiful Russian girls seeking permanent relationships; no, I… well, you get the idea.

About 5:30 we walked down to the site where Bill Joyce and Diane Melde are parked in their nice Dutch Star motorhome and piled into the backseat of their car to go and meet our friends Terry and Dale Pace for dinner at their favorite restaurant here in Elkhart, a place called Heinnie’s Back Barn. This was out first time there, and we were impressed. The food was excellent, our waitress was a lot of fun, and we had a good time chatting over dinner.

Back at Elkhart Campground, someone pointed out this neat old homemade camper trailer, and though the light was fading fast, I managed to get a couple of photographs. That bright glow you see at the front of the rig is my camera’s flash reflecting off the red and white safety tape the owner applied to the trailer’s tongue.

We got back to the bus just as darkness fell, and I still had a few hours to work before bedtime. I wrote the blog, edited the Todays Hero Blog offering for today, and handled even more e-mails while Terry filled a bunch of orders that had come in the new mail delivery. Our life is never dull. 

Thought For The Day – Save the planet, have fewer kids.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally