For the most part, fulltime RVers are pretty darned patriotic people. But a lot of us still dread the Independence Day holiday every year. Not because we don’t like small town parades and fireworks, but because we know that everybody with a tent, trailer, bus or motorhome will be filling up RV parks from coast to coast.

We learned during our first summer on the road that if we are not comfortably ensconced in an RV park by at least Wednesday of the weeks of the Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day holidays, chances are that we might not find a place to stay, and would be celebrating the holiday at Camp Wal-Mart.

So we’ve been comfortably parked at the Morgan Hill Thousand Trails preserve since Monday, and the place is really starting to fill up with holiday campers. In case you don’t know it yet, there is a difference between campers and RVers.

We spent most of yesterday just watching what I call the Holiday Hula. What? You’ve never heard of the Holiday Hula? That’s the dance weekend campers do as they drive through a campground looking for just the right campsite.

All day long there was an endless parade of RVs, mostly small travel trailers and fifth wheels, cruising up and down the campground’s roads, stopping here and there to scope out an RV site, and then driving on, searching for one just a little bit better.

Of course, here the sites are all basically about the same. You have two choices – in the trees or out in the open. And since it looks like all of the shaded sites have already been taken, that leaves just the sites out in the open, in the area where we are parked.

Still, we see one rig after another stopping while they check out a site, and then driving on. Sometimes they decide that what they have already seen is better than what they found next, for whatever reason, and they come back. If they’re lucky, somebody else hasn’t snatched the site already, and it’s still available.

But the fun isn’t over yet. If I had a camcorder, I could put together an entire segment of America’s Funniest Videos just filming people trying to park and hook up to the campground utilities. Oh, the things we have seen!

One guy took six or seven tries to get his trailer into a pull-through site, another tried to back in, rather than going around to pull through, and ended up almost sideways in the camp site. Where is Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School when we need him?

I walked down to the trash dumpster, and along the way I saw one travel trailer that had a spare tire under the hitch instead of a jack or stabilizer; another fellow was hooking up a green garden hose to the water bib; and another was on his roof,  with a tripod mounted portable TV dish anchored down by bungee cords, trying to find a satellite. I was tempted to ask him why he didn’t just put it on the ground like everybody else, but I was afraid he’d try to explain it to me.

And what’s a holiday at a campground without kids? LOTS of kids! Kids of every size. Small kids, big kids, loud kids, and louder kids. And even some pretty nice kids too. Or a least I thought so when a couple of boys were playing ball and stopped as I walked past, until I heard one tell the other “Hold on so you don’t hit that old guy.” Smart alec kids!

At least we shouldn’t have any smoky campfires to contend with, due the the area’s high fire danger.

But what the heck, it’s a holiday weekend. Campers have to have fun too. And by Monday night most of them will be gone, and life can return to normal.

Bad Nick wants nothing to do with the holiday crowds, so he stayed inside yesterday, writing a new Bad Nick Blog titled Justice Isn’t Just Blind, She’s Stupid Too! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If we quit voting, will they go away?

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We spent the day yesterday with our friends Jim and Shar Lewis, who had invited us to their beautiful home in Pinetop for dinner and a visit. It was a great day, with the comfort that old friends of many years just naturally share.

There are two or three men in this world that I consider to be my true brothers, and Jim is one of them. We’ve shared a lot of good times and bad over the decades, and I know there is nothing he wouldn’t do for me, or I for him.

Today Jim owns a small used book store here in the mountains, but when I met him a lifetime ago he was a guard at the Arizona State Prison. His resume also includes being a decorated Vietnam med-evac helicopter pilot, aerial surveyor, pilot for logging operations in the Pacific Northwest, fighting forest fires by helicopter, and massage therapist, of all things. Besides that, he’s a fine guitarist and cowboy singer! So he always has a lot of great tales to tell.

Jim and Shar have been talking about hitting the road, either as fulltime or extended travel RVers, so they had a lot of questions about our travels and RVing in general. We love sharing all of the great things about fulltime RVing, and they seemed to love hearing about it. Do we have some new converts to the RV lifestyle? I guess only time will tell.

We had planned on a two or three hour visit, but the time went by so fast that eight hours had passed before we finally said our goodbyes and headed home. When we arrived back at the Elks campground in Show Low, we noticed a couple more RVs had arrived in our absence.

Today we are going to spend some time with daughter Tiffany and her family, and maybe throw some steaks on the grill. I also hope to get some more work done on the schedule for our upcoming Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

I hope that whatever you are doing today, you take a few moments to remember the reason for this holiday, and the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice so that you and I can live in peace and enjoy the freedoms we have.  Our country has a lot of problems, but it’s still the greatest place on earth to live, and we can thank our veterans and those who died for all of us for that.

Thought For The Day – A veteran, whether active duty, retired, National Guard, or Reserve, is someone who, at one point in his or her life wrote a blank check made payable to The United States of America for an amount of ‘up to and including my life.’

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I hope you take a moment today to remember what this holiday is for. To me, it is one of the most sacred days of the year, because I have seen what it is about first hand.

Memorial Day is not about automobile races, or cooking hotdogs on the grill, or getting a three day weekend, or the inconvenience of the post office being closed when you want to mail a letter.

It is a day to remember the men and women who have given us the most precious gift of all, our very freedom, and who paid for it with their lives. We forget that too easily in this country. And we need to remember.

We need to remember that all of those headstones decorated with little American flags in all of those cemeteries across this great land of ours represent somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s father. Somebody who put on a uniform for you and for me, and never came home.

Men like my uncle Charles Saxton, my mother’s younger brother. I never knew him, because he was killed in action on August 7, 1943 while serving with the 9^th Infantry Division in North Africa. My uncle was just 25 years old when he died.

Men like my high school friend Larry Greene. Larry was an absolute goofball who I could always depend on to get me into trouble with some nonsense or other. He died in 1972 when his helicopter was shot out of the sky over Vietnam.

Men like my buddy Brad Pettit, who slogged through miles of rice paddies and jungle trails with me until we got in a firefight one day and a bullet hit him as he was laying beside me returning fire.

Men like a new kid who stepped on a mine on his very first day in the field with us. I held his hand and looked in his eyes and tried to tell him it was going to be okay, because I couldn’t look at what was left of his body below the waist. I hope I gave him some comfort in his last minutes, but I can still see his eyes as they went blank, and I am haunted to this day because I never knew his name. That is what this day is about.

Please remember that right now, as you are reading this with your morning coffee, or during a commercial break in your favorite television show, somebody’s son or daughter, somebody’s brother or sister, somebody’s husband or wife, is in the enemy’s gunsights. Somewhere today or tomorrow or next week, some mother or father or wife will answer a knock on their door and find solemn men in uniform there to deliver the very worst news of all. That is what this day is about.

Thought For The Day – “A veteran – whether active duty, retired, national guard, or reserve – is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to the ‘United States of America’ for an amount of ‘up to and including my life.’” (Author unknown)

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