When I first heard about Apple’s new tablet computer, I have to admit that my first reaction was “So what? I already have a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and a netbook computer. What can the iPad do that they can’t?” Then I saw my first iPad, and my immediate reaction was “I want one!” 

As it turns out, there is not much you can do on an iPad that you can’t do with another type of computer, but there is a lot that I can do with an iPad that I don’t do on my other computers. Things like relaxing on the couch and surfing the web at the same time, or checking my e-mail while visiting the in-laws, or reading USA Today for free while waiting in the van while my wife is in the bank or grocery store.

The iPad comes in two versions, either a WiFi only version, or a 3G model (capable of accessing the internet via AT&T) which also is WiFi capable if you are near a WiFi hotspot. Both versions come with either 16, 32 or 64 gig of storage. I wanted the 64 gig 3G model, because one of my big reasons for wanting an iPad was for internet access away from our motorhome. Getting one proved to be a challenge, because every store I contacted was sold out. I finally put my name on the list to reserve one at the Apple Store in Tucson, and less than a week later it arrived.

I am no fan of AT&T, and I really wish the iPad was available on the Verizon network, but so far there is no verifiable indication that will happen anytime soon. So it is what it is. AT&T offers two different monthly pricing plans for the iPad, either 250 MB for $14.99 or $29.99 for unlimited data. You can change your plan at any time, but forget the cheaper plan. It’s a joke. I signed up for it, and in less than 24 hours I was at my limit, with no movies or music downloaded, just web surfing and checking e-mail. 

I was disappointed to discover that my iPad would not work with our Cradlepoint MBR1000 router right out of the box. So much for Apple’s “just turn it on and it works, first time, every time” reputation. I called the Apple Store, and they asked me to bring it in to see if they could figure it out. As it turns out, there is a setting on the Cradlepoint that I need to change, which the Apple tech assures me will remedy the problem. Since I switched to the unlimited plan, the conflict with my router is no big hassle, so I’ll wait and have one of my tech buddies talk me through changing the router’s settings, so I don’t mess up and lose Miss Terry’s WiFi access in the process. On AT&T, here in Apache Junction, the iPad works quickly, and I have no complaints.

UPDATE: After I originally posted this blog, my friend Greg White talked me through resetting the router, and now the iPad works fine on WiFi.

The first thing one has to understand about the iPad is that it is not a replacement to a computer, if you need all of the things a computer can do. I see it as a supplement. If I am at my desk, I may pop onto Facebook to see what’s happening, or answer an e-mail, or look around the internet, but to me, my desk is where I work, so I find myself feeling guilty if I goof off too much, and before long I’m writing a blog or a story for the next issue of the Gypsy Journal. With the iPad, I can park myself on the couch and play.

So if an iPad isn’t a computer, what is it? Well, it’s a great e-book reader, for one thing. I had an Amazon Kindle, and though I loved the concept, most of what I wanted it for were reference books. I discovered that photographs and charts look terrible, and are hard to see on a Kindle. On the iPad, they look great. I was also thrilled to learn that, besides Apple’s online book store, there is a free Kindle app, and once I downloaded it, all of the books I had purchased for my Kindle were still in my Amazon library, and I downloaded them to the iPad. Cool!

Being a career newspaper man, I am a news junkie. So I love the free USA Today app, which allows me to read my newspaper on the iPad. I can also read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a ton of magazines on it.

The iPad comes with a great street map, and the 3G model has a GPS chip built in. I can view maps in traditional street view, or Google satellite view, and the GPS feature allows me to find local businesses wherever I am. When I click on a business, I get the address, phone number, and other info, along with turn by turn directions.

We love music, and our iPod has thousands of songs on it. I can download those same songs to my iPad, and buy more from the iTunes Store.

For gaming, the graphics are fantastic, but I doubt that I’ll be playing games in the iPad. I have also seen movies on iPads on display at stores, and the picture is great. There is a Netflix app that allows you to download all the movies you could ever want to watch.

I could go on and on about all you can do with an iPad, but you can get most of that info online with a quick Goggle search. So instead, I’ll tell you a little about the features I like and don’t like, from a user standpoint.

First, the iPad is heavier than a Kindle, and your hands get tired pretty quickly if you are holding it like a paperback book. But if I prop it up on my chest while laying down, or on my stomach while sitting in a chair, it’s fine. (I knew I grew that stomach for something!) In the van, I prop it on the steering wheel and again, no problems.

I have heard that because the iPad doesn’t support Flash, some websites will not load right, or won’t come up at all. So far that has not been a problem, and I have been able to access and view every website I wanted to, including my own websites, the Escapees forum, Ancestry.com and many others. I can also follow links in websites with no problem

The glossy screen is also a fingerprint magnet, and in direct sunlight, the screen will give a lot of glare. There are screen protectors one can buy to remedy those problems.

I like the touch screen, and being able to make type and photos larger whenever I need to. For these old eyes, that’s a real plus. I am also very impressed with the iPad’s battery life. Apple claims 9+ hours of constant use on the 3G models, and 10 hours on the WiFi only models. I have found that to be true so far. I charged the unit up when I brought it home, and have about 40% of battery power left 36 hours later.

The speaker is so so at best, and while there is a jack for earphones, I don’t know how much I’ll use the music feature, since I can just slip my much smaller, lighter iPod into my shirt when I go for a walk.

I downloaded the free Weather Bug app, and I am very impressed with it. The graphics are excellent, and the GPS tells Weather Bug my location for up to the minute local weather info. One reader e-mailed me that they found its live weather radar very handy a few days ago when they were on the road and dodging thunderstorms and tornados in Oklahoma.

Other standard iPad features I really like are the notepad and calendar. Yes, I have both on my Blackberry, but my eyes older really need a bigger screen.  I also appreciate the fact that, unlike a laptop computer, the iPad does not get hot, no matter how long you use it.

There are other features, and thousands of apps that I am looking forward to exploring further, but based on what I have seen so far, I am even more impressed with the iPad than I was at first glance. I see it becoming my primary tool for media consumption, information access, and  web surfing. Like an American Express card, I won’t leave home without it.

So, is the iPad the newest must have gadget for every RVer? I don’t know, but it sure meets the needs of this RVer, and I’m glad I have it!

Thought For The Day – Suburbia: Where they cut down all the trees, and then name streets after them.

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What better way to start the New Year than spending it with good friends? Yesterday Greg and Jan White drove over from Friendswood, Texas, south of Houston, to spend the day with us. What a treat!

We last saw this fun couple exactly two months ago, when we left Elkhart Campground on November 1^st. Greg and Jan are fulltimers who are spending a few weeks in their old hometown for some family time, but Jan admitted yesterday that hitch itch is really setting in, and they’re really looking forward to getting back on the road. We know that feeling all too well.

Greg is one of those techie guys who can fix anything, from a stubborn generator to a cantankerous computer, so once the greeting hugs were out of the way, and we had some of Miss Terry’s delicious homemade cinnamon rolls, I put him to work hooking my new netbook computer to the Silverleaf engine monitoring system. I was just getting hooked on this great addition to our Winnebago motorhome when the burglar(s) who broke into our rig stole it, and I missed it in our most recent trips.

Jan loves animals, and she was looking forward to seeing some of the deer who live here at the Thousand Trails campground that I had written about. Though there is a huge herd of deer on the grounds, when Greg and Jan first arrived, they were off hiding somewhere, maybe sleeping off deer hangovers from whatever deer do on New Years Eve.

But, a couple of hours later a lone deer stepped out of the trees across the field from us, followed soon after by a second, and then a third. Before long we had a dozen or more grazing their way toward our campsite. I guarantee you that by the time the afternoon was over, Jan saw plenty of deer! They were munching away right outside our windows, and we enjoyed watching them from such a close vantage point.  

About 6 pm. We drove into Columbus for dinner at Nancy’s Seafood Grill, and the restaurant changed my mind about there being no place decent to eat in this little town. Everything was delicious, and the service was very good. About the time we finished our meal, we had some excitement when one of the portable buffet tables collapsed with a huge clatter. We all looked to see what had happened, and saw flames as several of the little Sterno cans used to keep the food hot rolled around on the floor. Greg and I hurried over to see what we could do to prevent the fire from spreading, but a couple of restaurant employees poured water on them and quenched the fire before it could get out of hand. Once everything was under control, I couldn’t help but quip to the other diners “The good news is, the buffet is now half off!”

It was great to see our friends, and we said our goodbyes with promises to see them again in Arizona in a few weeks. Thanks for driving so far to visit with us, Greg and Jan. We had a great time!

We have hitch itch too, and today we plan to hit the road, headed west. We’ll stop for a night or two along the way to visit our friends Mike and Pam Steffen at their place in Salt Flat, Texas, but we won’t tarry long. We’re eager to get to Arizona to see our family, and there are some grandkids that need spoiling! Depending on where we’re at, we may or may not have internet access the next couple of nights. West Texas is one of the few places in the country where we have had problems getting online with our Verizon air card. So if I miss a blog entry or two, don’t worry, as soon as we get a signal I’ll be back.

Thought For The Day – Life is a grindstone…it can polish you up or wear you down…what’s it gonna’ be?

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Of all of the places I don’t want to be, anywhere it is cold and snowing is at the very top of my list. Stuck in a traffic jam? Mere child’s play. Sitting in a dentist’s chair getting a root canal? I can handle it. Dinner with my ex-mother-in-law? Bring it on and give me a heaping helping of seconds.

But snow and cold just do not fit into my life plan. And we are getting it here in Elkhart, Indiana! I don’t want to be an Eskimo! I belong on a beach somewhere, soaking up sunshine, listening to Jimmy Buffett, and watching the pretty girls strolling by in their skimpy bikinis. This is just wrong!

In spite of the hassle and discomfort caused by our break in, I just cannot say enough good about the folks here at Duncan RV Repair. Owners Jim and Kristy Deavers, and their entire staff, have treated us just like family. When we came in Monday morning each and every employee stopped to shake our hands, even hug us, and tell us how sorry they were for what happened, and how glad they were that we were not injured in the confrontation with the burglar.

Jim Deavers told me that he was making getting us back on the road his top priority, and their crew swarmed over our motorhome, fixing the bent door where I slammed it on the bad guy’s hand, replacing the screen on the door, measuring the door window to get replacement glass ordered, and a dozen other tasks. They replaced both of our DVD players, my netbook computer, our TV, and even ordered a replacement for my Silverleaf engine monitoring cable.

Jim even had a lady come in to clean the inside of the motorhome, wiping down any surface the burglar might have touched, vacuuming the carpet, and making our home feel “clean” again! I’m sure my lady blog readers know how much that meant to Miss Terry.

Everybody here has gone far above and beyond what was required or expected, and we appreciate it more than we can ever say. They have made a terrible time in our lives a lot easier to deal with. We don’t feel like customers experiencing some misfortune, but rather family members with a problem that the whole clan has come together to help and support.

Somebody sent me an e-mail saying that they would never come to any place to get service or repairs done where something like this could have happened. That’s nonsense. This could have happened anywhere in the country. Crime is not isolated to the big cities or the bad neighborhoods anymore. It’s everywhere.

The once charming, peaceful small Arizona mountain town where we lived for so many years before hitting the road, is now overrun with meth dealers and crime. My daughter lives within sight of the police department, and a couple of years ago one of her neighbors was busted for making meth in his apartment! She worked at a Sears store, and came out to find her brand new car stolen, and when it was later recovered, it had been vandalized. When I owned the newspaper there, we seldom had reports of robberies and burglaries. Now two of my good friends have had their businesses broken into, and the bank was just robbed this past Friday!

It is not the fault of Duncan RV that some scumbag picked our motorhome to break into while it was parked on their lot. It would have been easy for them to tell us “There’s the telephone, call your insurance company, and when they give us the okay, we’ll make an appointment to start in on your repairs.” I have met more than a few shop owners who would have done just that. But Jim and Kristy Deavers are honest, decent, hard working, wonderful people who feel a sense of responsibility to their customers, and they want to make things right. We feel very fortunate that if this had to happen to us, at least it happened here, with people who care.  We would come back here for service anytime.

Thought For The Day – An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of wit.

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I talked to the owner of the RV shop where our burglary and vandalism took place over the weekend, and he told us to be there when they opened this morning, and he and his crew would do whatever needs to be done to get us back on the road in time to get to my medical appointment at the VA hospital in Lexington, Kentucky Wednesday morning.

Now that we have the mess cleaned up, things look a lot better inside our motorhome. If they can get the glass for the side door and get it installed today, we could leave tomorrow and get to Lexington in time. The day/night blinds also should not take too long to replace, assuming they have or can get them today.

Since Elkhart is the RV Capital of the World, at least we’re in a good place to get the parts needed fast. The slashed seat is another matter; I don’t see how that can be repaired that quickly, so we’ll see what happens with that.

There are things about this crime that just do not make sense to us. For example, they took my netbook computer and the attached cable to our Silverleaf engine monitoring system, which entailed crawling under the Winnebago’s dashboard and cutting the straps that held it in place, and reaching an almost inaccessible plug under the driver’s footrest to unplug it. It would have been much easier to just unplug the cable from the USB port of the computer, or to cut it. My iPod was lying next to the netbook computer and they ignored it. In the bedroom, they took a cheap DVD player, but left a shotgun and expensive camera. They left one rather expensive handgun in a dresser drawer, and took a cheaper Glock that was laying under it. Why? They carried away a 19 inch LCD TV, but left other smaller, more expensive, more portable items where they tossed them. We can’t understand their thinking, but being scumbag thieves, they probably are not Rhodes scholars anyway.

You just knew that Bad Nick had to wade in on this one, and he did with today’s Bad Nick Blog, titled Sometimes You Just Want To Kill Something. Check it out and leave a comment.

The date for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally is coming up fast, and new reservations are coming in every day. Terry and I have been forced to reevaluate and change our position on rally vendors.

When we started holding rallies, we had a policy of only one vendor per each type of product, to give our vendors the maximum opportunity to make a profit. That became a problem because rally attendees wanted more shopping opportunities, and then we were threatened with legal action for “restraining trade” because we would not allow one vendor to come because someone had already registered selling a similar product. We may have prevailed in court, but I don’t need the expense or the hassle.

My attorney advised us to drop that restriction, so we decided that we would allow vendors who sold similar products made by different companies. That opened an entire new can of worms. These days there are a lot of vendors selling three, four, five or more different products, and if they can’t display and sell all of their products, they won’t come. Everybody wants to sell everything, and nobody wants any competition. I tell you, it’s like herding cats trying to keep up with all of them. How can we win?

We have also had several vendors assure us in the past that they plan to attend, and then cancel at the last minute. Meanwhile, we have turned other potential vendors away who sell similar products. In our mail this week we received a registration for a Passport America vendor who had told us in August he wanted to come to the rally, but did not pay a deposit. Meanwhile, weeks later, another Passport America vendor registered and paid. Now the first guy is upset because he feels we sold his space out from under him.

So the new policy, after the Arizona rally, is that any vendor can come to future rallies, no matter what he or she is selling. No matter what we do, we can’t please everybody, and I’m tired of pulling out what little hair I have left trying to do so.

Before I end this blog, I hope you will take a few moments to remember that today is Pearl Harbor Day, and to remember those who lost their lives on that terrible day in 1941. That seems like a lifetime ago for many of us, but to them and their families, it was the end of their lifetime.

Thought For The Day – It is never too late to mend a broken friendship.

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For the most part the RV lifestyle is extremely safe, especially in terms of personal safety. I have always told new RVers that they have more to fear from an RV fire, or the idiot coming at them at 60 miles an hour riding three tons of steel, than they do from a criminal. An incident last night has proven to me just how wrong I have been.

We have been parked at an RV repair facility in Elkhart, Indiana having some repairs and upgrades done to our motorhome. Yesterday afternoon we picked up the fellow who flew in from California to buy our bus, and a friend who came to help him drive it back, at the airport in South Bend.

By the time we drove back to Elkhart, showed them the bus, got them checked into a hotel, and took them to dinner, it was almost 9 p.m. when we drove back to the repair shop, where our motorhome was parked in their small camping area. It’s a pretty dark place, and ours was the only occupied RV there. As we arrived, Terry said “Someone broke into our rig!” Sure enough, there was a softball sized hole in the door window. As I got out of the van and went up to the RV, Terry yelled “He’s still inside!” and I found myself face to face with a husky young black man coming out the door.

Now, I have been in the military, saw combat, I was a firearms instructor, have owned and carried a handgun most of my adult life, and have concealed weapons permits from two different states. But this lifestyle has made me complacent, and I seldom carry on a regular basis. And, when going to an airport, that is a big No No. So I wasn’t armed.

Our burglar, on the other hand, was armed with one of my own handguns, and as I yelled at him to show me his hands, he raised one of my Glock 9mm pistols toward us. The smart thing to do when we first spotted the broken window was to back off and call the police, but this all happened in a matter of seconds.

When I saw the gun in his hand, my only thought was to keep him from using it, so I slammed the door shut on his hand, with him inside the RV and me outside, and then slammed it a second (and maybe third time), shattering the rest of the glass in the door. He dropped the gun, then ran past me to get away as I recovered the weapon. My first thought was to shoot him as he fled, but I’m not going to kill anybody for a few material possessions, and the threat to us was over.

Meanwhile, Terry was in the van and on the phone talking to the 911 operator, and I stayed outside, because I didn’t know if there was anybody else inside the RV, and I have other firearms on board. Terry handed the phone out the window to me because the operator wanted to talk to me, and about then I saw the same guy poking his head around the corner of the building. Not knowing if he was armed, I pointed my pistol at him and told him if he took one step toward us I was going to kill him. Fortunately for both of us, he backed off and ran away.

The police used a dog to track him from the RV around the building to where he came back, and then off to a service road, where the scent disappeared. He must have had an accomplice who fled when we pulled into the parking lot, because he appeared empty handed when he ran, but we are missing a flat screen LCD TV, netbook computer, my Seiko wristwatch, the cable for my Silverleaf engine monitor (which was plugged into the computer), and we won’t know what else until we take a total inventory.

Inside, the motorhome, there was a big pile of things in the entryway, including a couple of handguns, our Wii, DVD player, digital SLR camera and other stuff he had ready to take when we interrupted him.

He, or they, also trashed our RV. There is broken glass everywhere, they cut a big triangle into the driver’s seat and pulled out part of the stuffing, ripped down the day/night shades in the bedroom, and threw stuff everywhere as they ransacked the place. The police dusted for fingerprints, and left a mess of stubborn black powder that is almost impossible to clean up.

But at least nobody got hurt. We are shaken, we feel totally violated, and I’m pissed off, both at the thief or thieves, and at myself. If they had to steal something because they are too damned lazy to work, okay, do it. But why vandalize our home in the process?

As for myself, I have become complacent in this lifestyle, and I let my guard down. Getting ripped off is one thing; almost getting shot with my own gun is unacceptable. You can bet that the next time I leave my motorhome, I’ll have more than my empty hand to point at whomever might be waiting for me when I come back home!

With the window busted out and temperatures down in the 20s overnight, there was no way we could stay there, and we were not about to anyway, in case they came back. I called our friend Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint and explained our plight, and even though it was late at night, Michele came back to the shop and opened it up so we could pull the motorhome inside and stay out of the worst of the weather until we can start dealing with things Monday morning. In the meantime, we are safe, and just coming down off the adrenalin high the incident gave us.

Thought For The Day – Count not what is lost, but what is left.

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