A lot of people have e-mailed, telling me that we have to go to Disney World and Epcot while we’re at the Clermont Thousand Trails preserve. Sorry, but it isn’t going to happen. I don’t do mice, even ones named Mickey.

When I was a kid, we spent almost a year living within a five mile drive of Disneyland in California, and I never saw the place. My parents took my sister a time or two, but I never wanted to go, and instead spent the day at a friend’s house.

I’ve just never been into theme parks. I went to high school in Toledo, Ohio, a short drive from Cedar Point, perhaps the biggest amusement park in the Midwest. I went one time with some friends, and was bored stiff. I just wasn’t interested. Does that say something about my warped psyche, even way back then?

So paying big bucks for tickets to Epcot just isn’t going to happen. Heck, I don’t even think we’d go if the tickets were free! We’re not into crowds, and we have too many other things we’d prefer to do with our time.

We much prefer simple things, like the little Historic Village that we discovered yesterday when we drove into Clermont to pick up our mail at the post office. Located near the southern shore of Lake Minneola, the village is a collection of historic buildings that include the train depot, which was built in 1925. The large round gray doors on the side of the building, in the forefront of this picture, are to the building’s old boiler.

The two story building just past the depot is the circa 1895 Townsend House, which is furnished with period items. The village also includes the Kern House, and the original Cooper Memorial Library. Tours are conducted of the buildings on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m.

Back at the Thousand Trails campground, the new seat for my Sea Eagle PaddleSki 435 kayak had arrived right on schedule, just as promised by Tim and Crystal Ryerson at Inflatable Boats 4 Less. These folks really know how to take care of their customers!

I can’t wait to get the PaddleSki back out on the water and try out the new seat, but the wind was blowing hard yesterday, and the water was pretty choppy. Hopefully it will die down today, and I can launch the boat here at the campground.

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A couple of days ago I showed you a picture of the gopher tortoise living in a burrow next to our motorhome. We have seen several of the critters in the campground, as well as a number of sand hill cranes.

These are some big, ungainly looking birds, and they have no fear of people. When I stopped to take their picture, they walked right up to the van.

I think this fellow is doing his mating dance. Or else he just put on deodorant, and is drying his wingpits. I’m not sure which.

While I was busy looking at Big Bird and his pals yesterday, Bad Nick took advantage of the time to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled This Pisses Me Off! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If all is not lost, where is it?

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Well, it’s official, we have a new daughter in our family, and what a beautiful young lady she is! This is Terry’s new daughter-in-law, Leslie Wyse. Have you ever seen a more beautiful bride?

The wedding was held at the Eagle-Vale Pavilion, and what a beautiful setting it was!

Here are twin brothers Casey and Cody a few minutes before the wedding. Aren’t they a couple of fine looking young men?

In addition to being lovely, Cody’s wife Jonna is an accomplished musician, and she performed the Wedding March for the ceremony.

A flower girl led the procession.

And then Leslie’s dad, Ron, walked her down the aisle.

Where she and Casey exchanged their wedding vows.

And sealed their union with a kiss.

I present to you, Mr. and Mrs. Casey Wyse. What a beautiful couple, and we wish them a lifetime of happiness.

Here is the traditional wedding dance. Don’t they both look happy and so much in love?

The wedding was an informal affair, with folks dressed in everything from $1,000 suits, to jeans and boots. But I really do think that they scrimped a little too much when it came to hiring the band.

I took almost 300 pictures at the wedding, and I won’t bore you with all of them.  But here is a photo of Terry’s sister, Dani, her father, Pete, Terry, and her mother, Bess Weber. I sure married into a family of good looking women, didn’t I?

These are two of the prettiest ladies I know, Miss Terry and Leslie.

Here is a photo somebody took of Terry and I. She’s the pretty one in the picture, but she said I clean up pretty good too. What do you think?

Today we’re going to catch our breath, maybe do a little bit of local sightseeing, and then get ready to hit the road for the Midwest, tomorrow morning. We had a good time at the wedding, and it was great to see everybody, but it’s time to move on.

Thought For The Day – Whoever told you that marriage is a 50/50 proposition lied. In a successful marriage, both husband and wife must give 100% of themselves to the other all of the time.

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There is a phenomenon that takes place this time of year that has mystified me ever since we became fulltime RVers over ten years ago, and that is getting income taxes filed.

No, I understand the process. What confuses me is why people would leave a place like sunny Arizona and return to cold states in the Midwest just to file their taxes. Don’t they know that they have mailboxes in Arizona too?

Yesterday I talked to two different people who are here in Arizona, one in Yuma and another in Tucson, who both said they really wanted to come to our Gypsy Gathering rally next month, but the timing was wrong because they had to go back to Iowa and Minnesota, respectively, to file their income taxes. We have heard people say this ever since we got on the road, and I just don’t understand it.

I guess if you are a snowbird and all of your records are back home, it might make sense, though not as much sense as taking the records with you when you leave for the winter. But I know fulltimers who still go back to wherever they came from to file their taxes. Why? Even the IRS doesn’t have enough clout to make me go where it is snowing!

Besides tires and house batteries, another thing we need to replace on our Winnebago are the slide toppers, which show their age and have several small tears and holes in them.

When Russ Maxwell from Carefree Awnings was visiting the other day, he took a look at them and agreed that they needed replaced, and said he’d have a fellow named Darrell Vliem from a company called Awning Man stop by and give us an estimate. Darrell came by yesterday and did some measuring, and said he would order two new slide toppers, and have them installed before we have to leave for the rally in Yuma.

Yesterday afternoon, Jim and Nancy Tidball stopped in for a visit and to pick up a copy of our RVers Guide To Fairgrounds Camping. We last saw Jim and Nancy last year when we were in Aransas Pass, Texas and they came by so Jim could test paddle the kayak I had for sale. It was nice to see them again, and we had a good visit before they had to run.

Besides all of her regular chores, and proofing the stories as I write them for the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, Miss Terry has been busy helping her mom get things prepared for her dad’s birthday party this weekend. It will be a small family gathering, just Pete’s daughters, grandkids, and their respective spouses, but a lot of time and effort still goes into getting everything arranged.

One final note before I close this blog post. I was told that Mail Call USA, a mail forwarding service in Cleveland, Tennessee has apparently gone out of business without giving their clients any notice. There is a thread about it on the Escapees forum. That can sure create a lot of problems for RVers who depend on their mail service to get their snail mail to them. 

Thought For The Day – Some marriages are made in heaven, but they all have to be maintained on earth.

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Several people have been confused by when I post the blog, because now that we are in the Midwest, it appears online before midnight out west, with the next day’s date on it. This has come up before, so hopefully I can explain it.

I try to post the blog as close to midnight as I can local time, wherever we happen to be. That means that when we were in Arizona it went online about midnight Mountain time, or 3 a.m. Eastern time. I do the same thing here in Missouri, which means that it goes online about 9 p.m. in California, but with the next day’s date on it. A couple of readers have complained about that.

What can I say? I’m a night owl and do most of my writing at night. I’m too lazy to get up at the crack of dawn to post the blog in time to please the early birds, so I do it the night before.

This area around Mark Twain Lake has a multitude of geocaches just waiting to be found. Yesterday we hunted up a couple of virtual caches, including the neat old Union Covered Bridge, located a few miles from Paris, Missouri. We love covered bridges, but this old timer, built in 1871 and restored in 1967, is in pretty sad shape. There are holes in the sides and it has been closed to vehicle traffic since an overloaded truck broke a supporting beam in 1970. There are only four covered bridges left in Missouri, so I hope they save this wonderful old structure before it is too late.   

I have good news for wannabe RVers looking for ways to make money as they travel! Workamper News, the magazine devoted to helping RVers find jobs, has launched their new Workamper Dreamers Blog to help you make your dreams come true. The blog is aimed at helping you understand the workamping lifestyle and what to expect when you get out here and start looking for jobs that will fit into your mobile lifestyle. Check out the new blog, I think you’ll be impressed.

This is our last day at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground, and we will spend it touching base with our friends Smokey and Pam Ridgely and Ron and Brenda Speidel, who are working locally. Then it’s time to fire up our old bus and hit the road once again. We have to be in Goshen, Indiana late next week for the Heartland Owners Rally, and we want to get settled in at Elkhart Campground and have time to unwind before that starts.

Except for the poor Verizon cell phone service and the slow National Access air card signal, we really like it here, and we know this is one place we’ll return to again in our travels.

Thought For The Day – Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

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I spent most of yesterday setting up my new computer, loading all of the programs I use into it, and transferring projects I had been working on from my laptop to the new desktop unit.

Even though the laptop and the desktop are both Dell computers using Windows XP, there were still enough things that were different that it took me a while to get things set up optimally for my use. It’s nice to have a full size computer to work on again.

While I was doing all of that, Miss Terry was sorting through cabinets and cubbyholes, doing some Spring cleaning and deciding what to keep and what to pitch. Even after ten years on the road fulltime, we still find things we’ve been carrying for years and have not used.

Sometime in the evening I started sniveling about being famished (and trust me, when it comes to food, I can out-snivel the best of them!). So Terry made a delicious dinner of fried chicken with a crispy coating that just melted my the mouth. It was so good that I ate until it hurt, and I still wanted more.

A couple of days ago I wrote in a blog post that Terry and I were recognized with the honor of bringing in more new members to the Escapees RV Club than anyone else. In our mail this week, we had a note from Escapees Executive Director Angie Carr telling us that two more members have joined on our referral. We’re pretty proud of that.

As I’ve written before, our travel plans are always set in jello. This summer we had planned to explore the Pacific Northwest, but now we’re looking at another plan. We want to try to put some money away to either upgrade our bus or buy a newer rig, and by aggressively working some rallies, hopefully we can do that.

We think we’ll go to Escapade in Sedalia, Missouri in May instead, and then work several RV rallies in the Midwest and East this summer.

Of course, as you well know, anything can change at a moment’s notice. But right now we’re looking at the FMCA Midwest Area Rally in Albert Lea, Minnesota in June, the FMCA International Convention in Bowling Green, Ohio in July, and the FMCA Northeast Area Rally in Essex Junction, Vermont in August. I’m also scheduled to teach at the new RVSEF RV Lifestyle, Education, & Safety Clinic in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in mid-September. Then we’ll be in Celina, Ohio for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally September 28 to October 2. And who knows, we may find a rally or two along the way to pop into.

What was that I said about slowing down? I think that was just a campaign promise.

We have been talking about getting a vendor spot at The Rally, Affinity’s big event, which will be in Albuquerque in April. But between the cost of the booth and the fee for RV parking, we’re looking at an investment of over $1,000 for the rally. We’d have to sell an awful lot of subscriptions and books to make any money at that rate.

Thought For The Day - The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is to decide what you want.

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