Yesterday morning Daryl and Judy Patterson stopped over to say hello and goodbye as we were getting ready to leave Elkhart Campground.  We only had a minute to chat before they left so we could get everything unhooked and ready to take off.

Experienced RVers like Daryl and Judy know that if you get preoccupied while doing the hooking up or unhooking chores, mistakes can easily happen. We’ve all had it happen at one time or another… somebody comes by and you get to talking, and the next thing you know, you’re pulling away from the RV site and forgot to unplug your electric power cord, or to put your tow vehicle’s transmission in neutral. Mistakes like that can be not only embarrassing, but expensive too!

After saying goodbye to Bob and Gita Patel, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, Greg and Jan White, and everybody else in sight, we pulled out of the campground a couple of minutes after 10 a.m. and headed east on Interstate 80.

Across northern Indiana, Interstates 80 and 90 run together as the Indiana Toll Road, and it’s a route we’ve been over many, many times. A little over an hour later we crossed into Ohio, after paying our $11.10 toll to the good people of Indiana, or at least to the private company that leases the toll road from the good people of Indiana.

We got onto the Ohio Turnpike, and stopped at the Fallen Timbers Service Plaza near Swanton for fuel. The price of diesel was three cents a gallon more than at the trucks stops off the turnpike, but it was easy access to the fuel pump, and I didn’t have to wait for anybody ahead of me. Since I only needed 75 gallons or so, it wasn’t worth the hassle of paying a toll, getting off, fueling up, getting a new toll ticket, and getting back on the turnpike. I like saving a buck or two just as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said for convenience too.

We made good time crossing Ohio, with a gentle tail wind helping. My Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor said we got 8.4 miles per gallon between Elkhart and the service plaza where we stopped for lunch, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. That was running at 64 miles per hour with the cruise control on. 63 to 65 seems to be the sweet spot for our Winnebago, where we get the best combination of fuel economy and power.

I like the service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike. They are clean, have lots of room to park a big rig, good restaurants, and some even have back-in RV sites with electric for a few bucks a night!

I wish I could say I liked the turnpike too. Most of it was actually pretty good, but west of Cleveland we ran into a long stretch of very rough road, and I sure appreciated the Koni shocks that Redlands Truck and RV installed on our motorhome last year! The toll all the way across Ohio on Interstate 80 for our two axle motorhome and van was $31.75. Ouch!

We crossed into Pennsylvania, and immediately the road got better, and the terrain more hilly. Pennsylvania is one of my favorite states, in terms of beauty. The interstate in western Pennsylvania is a good road, and trees crowd right down to the edge of the highway, with occasional breaks to see the pretty countryside.

We passed lots of pretty farmland as we drove east.

Before long we were in what folks back east call mountains, though my friends in Arizona might not agree. But the hills did take their toll on our mileage. We dropped down to 6.9 MPG.

Here is a nice shot of the Allegheny River that Miss Terry took as we passed over it. I didn’t even snivel about the bridge because the scenery was so pretty!

We had planned on about a 300 mile day, but that put us right at the state line, and it was still early, so we kept driving. We decided to spend the night at the Flying J in Brookville, and by the time we got there, I was getting tired. But they only have four designated RV parking sites, one of which is marked handicapped. There were big RVs in two of the other sites, with the one between them empty. But the way they were parked, it would have been a very tight squeeze to get in between them, if we could have made it at all. We checked out the truck parking area, which was about half full, but we really don’t like to use them if we can avoid it. They tend to be pretty noisy, and we don’t want to take a space that a trucker might need.

So we decided to push on another 42 miles to the WalMart SuperCenter at Clearfield, where we arrived just as the sun was starting to set. Miss Terry had called ahead to make sure RV parking was permitted, and the nice lady she talked to said no problem, just park on the outer perimeter of the parking lot.

Here is an example of what not to do when you boondock at a commercial parking lot. He had both of his slides out, his TV antenna up, and notice the leveling jacks down! 

This fifth wheel was just as bad – jacks down, slides, out TV antenna up. They look like they’re camping! In both cases, their slide rooms are extended right into the roadway where cars are passing close by.

When we are parked like we are here, with our bedroom slide facing the outer perimeter, I’ll run the slide out at bedtime to make it easier to get in and out of bed. But we wait until bedtime, and we never extend our living room slide or jacks. That’s just poor manners.

We covered 420 miles yesterday, which was quite a bit more than we had originally planned, but the good news is that today we only have about 150 miles to go to get to the Thousand Trails preserve in Hershey, thanks to a a different route that the man on duty at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center recommended. So we should arrive and be settled in fairly early in the day.

Thought For The Day – Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

This part of northern Indiana is a stronghold of the Amish people, and wherever you travel around the communities of Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, and the surrounding area, you are likely to see Amish women  in their simple handmade dresses, their heads covered in white kapps, and men wearing black straw hats or stocking caps.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Amish people, including that they will not ride in automobiles, use electricity, or telephones. Drive anywhere around here and you will encounter horse drawn buggies and wagons on the roadways.

But, while they do not drive automobiles, the Amish will ride in them, and they frequently hire a non-Amish driver to take them to restaurants, stores, or other places too far to conveniently reach by buggy.

Drive any Amish back road in this region, and you will see small white structures in some yards that look like an enclosed telephone booth, and that is exactly what they are! Their religion does not permit a telephone in the house, and the “phone haus” is built for function, not comfort. There is no heat or cooling, and usually no chair. This is a place to do business, not sit and gab! If an Amish person advertises something for sale, they will include the telephone number and instructions to “call between 7 and 8 a.m.” or whatever time suits their schedule.

Yesterday, we drove out to Nappanee to visit with our friend Carylye Lehman at Focal Wood Products. Carlyle is a fantastic craftsman who built the desk units in our Winnebago motorhome last year, and he has a fast growing reputation with RVers for top quality custom wood furniture.

The tools in Carlyle’s shop are all powered by electricity, courtesy of a huge 40 KW diesel generator.  So as you can see, while the Amish do avoid many of the “modern” conveniences of our way of life, they have embraced some technology to give them the ability to conduct business.

We have also found it interesting to see Amish buggies lined up at the drive through window at McDonald’s, or to note such goodies as Pepsi and potato chips in their shopping carts at WalMart.

All day yesterday the wind blew hard, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour. If the wind lets up a little bit, we plan to leave Elkhart Campground today and start making our way eastward toward the Hershey (Pennsylvania) Thousand Trails preserve, where we will have a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show next week.

It’s about 600 miles to our destination, and we’ll do it in two days. I have no idea where we’ll be tonight, but there is always an RV friendly WalMart, a truck stop, or someplace else to get off the road for the night.

Thought For The Day – Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after.

The strong winds that had been hammering northern Indiana Friday continued all night long, and continued through much of yesterday. There was no question about it; we were not getting out on the highway. We really, really wanted to be on the go, but we really, really didn’t want to be blown all over the road and waste a bunch of fuel fighting the wind.

So we spent the day listening to music, cruising the internet and hoping that today would bring us better weather. About noon, our friend Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint stopped by to visit, and later on we went to dinner with Greg and Jan White. We all got a laugh about the fact that this was our third “farewell dinner” in as many days.

Back at Elkhart Campground, I spent some time studying our planned route, while Miss Terry decided to try making a batch of pumpkin cheese bread in her convection oven. This would only be her second attempt at baking in the oven, as she transitions from the gas oven we had in our bus conversion.

While Terry was using her electric mixer to blend the ingredients, we suddenly lost all electrical power in the motorhome. The Progressive Industries Electrical Management System (EMS) unit I got from Lawrence RV Accessories was showing 125 volts of power coming in. I pushed the button to turn our inverter on so we had power again from the inverter and battery bank, but the battery charger was not working.

I flipped all of the breakers on and off, went out to the campground’s electrical pedestal and flipped the breaker there off and on, but we still were not getting any shore power, just the inverter feed. If I turned off the inverter, we went dead again, though the EMS still showed incoming AC power.

Having exhausted my small store of knowledge, I called Greg and he came over. We ran through all of the things I had done already, and then Greg had me turn on our Onan generator. Still no power to the inverter, except what it was drawing from the battery bank. We both agreed that the problem might well be a blown transfer switch, which automatically switched between shore power and generator power.

After studying the books that came with our motorhome, I logged onto Winnebago’s website, where owners can download electrical and plumbing schematic drawings, along with paint codes and a ton of other valuable resource information for anything Winnebago has ever built.

With still no luck solving the problem at that point, Greg checked our inverter and pressed the reset button for the incoming breaker on it, and suddenly we had AC power again!      

Apparently all incoming shore power is routed through the inverter, which really doesn’t make any sense to me, because if the inverter goes bad, we’d be stuck with no power to the motorhome at all. The way I wired our bus, the inverter was a supplementary power source, and taking it out of the line would not disrupt power to the coach. But we have to learn all about living in a factory made unit again, including engineering designs that boggle the mind.

With power restored, Miss Terry finished making her pumpkin bread, and it came out looking great. She is her own worst critic, but even she said it was pretty darned good! I thought it was delicious!  

While I was enjoying a slice of yummy hot pumpkin bread, Bad Nick was busy with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled A Campaign Ad I’d Like To See. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, and leave the rest to God. 

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

We got wrapped up in some projects that have delayed our departure for a bit, but with most of the things wrapped up that we wanted to get done before we leave northern Indiana, we hope to be on the road by the weekend. Now we just have to decide where we’re going, and how to get there.

We plan to spend November and most of December in Florida, and as I wrote here before, the plan was/is to go over to the coast someplace and go down the eastern seaboard. But since we’re getting a later start than originally planned, we’re undecided about which route to take.

We would like to go to Washington, D.C. again, and considered dropping down to Interstate 70 across Ohio and into Pennsylvania, and then dropping down to catch Interstate 68 across the northern edge of Maryland. But we may be too late in the season. Getting to warmer weather is a priority. Playing tourist is no fun when you’re chilly.

I thought about going to Lexington, Kentucky, and then taking Interstate 77 east to hook up with Interstate 64, which would take us to Norfolk, Virginia, but again, weather is a factor.

A third option was to go to Knoxville, and then take Interstate 40 east, but a major rockslide has closed the highway near the Tennessee – North Carolina border, and news reports say it could be weeks, if not months, before the road is open again.

Now we’re looking at going all the way to Atlanta, and then striking east on Interstate 20, but we’ll miss a lot of the territory we wanted to see along the coast going that way.

Then, just to muddy the waters even more, we have learned that Terry’s father has some health issues that are causing us some concern. Hopefully everything will be just fine, but we are prepared to scrap our travel plans and head for Arizona at a moment’s notice.

We have also been kicking around getting an extended warranty on our Winnebago motorhome. The Ultimate Advantage only has 34,000 miles on it and except for a contrary electrical side to our water heater, it’s in excellent condition. We’re debating whether the cost of an extended warranty is worth it.

Like any insurance policy, it’s a gamble. If we are lucky and don’t have any major breakdowns or system failures, we’d lose money on an extended warranty. However, a serious problem, such as an engine or transmission failure could easily cost much more that what we’d pay for an extended warranty. So do we bet against ourselves, or for ourselves? Why don’t some of you fulltimers and extended time RV travelers out there pitch in and share your input? Do you have an extended warranty? If so, who with, and are you glad you bought it? Is there anyone out there who decided to play the odds and lost with a major repair bill? Inquiring minds want to know.

Thought For The Day – Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

I was hoping that the cold weather here in northern Indiana may have forced the gremlins who inhabit my computer to follow the rest of the RV snowbirds south, but alas, the little buggers are still hanging on.

We use a commercial mail service for sending the Gypsy Journal to most of our subscribers, who chose the Standard Mail rate. But we also send out separate mailings to subscribers who use the Escapees Mail Service, FMCA mail service, and some of the commercial mail forwarding services such as Alternative Resources, as well as for our subscribers in Canada, and those who choose to pay an extra fee for First Class postage.

Yesterday as I was trying to print the mailing labels for those subscribers, I suddenly starting getting an error message and they would not print. This has happened before, for no apparent reason, and usually after a lot of frustration, whatever the problem is seems to clear up and they finally print. But yesterday I spent hours fighting with the mailing lists, with no success at all.

Our friends Rick Schafer and Marcia Gantz stopped over to see our new motorhome and tell us all about their summer travels in Alaska. Between the two of them, they have forgotten more about computers and computer programs than I’ll ever hope to learn, and when I mentioned the problems I was having with the mailing list, they put their heads together and tried to come up with a solution. Rick downloaded new drivers for our HP laser printer, which we hoped would do the job.

As it turns out, the problem still persisted, and I tried to get the mailing labels to print out all evening. Finally, about midnight, the gremlins must have fallen asleep, because suddenly the problem disappeared and the labels printed just fine. I didn’t do anything different, so what gives?

I think we have figured out a problem a few subscribers to the digital edition of the Gypsy Journal had with the current issue. In each case, they could not open the new issue, and by a process of elimination, I discovered that all of their computers had recently done an automatic update to Adobe Reader version 9.

Miss Terry experienced it with her laptop, which did the automatic update after she had already opened the new issue on the older version of Reader. She deleted the update and reinstalled the earlier version 8 of Reader and once again could open the file with no problems.

We have also had subscribers who use Firefox as their web browser report the same problem, but when they use , it works. Did I mention that sometimes I hate computers?

Even with all of the computer problems, it was nice to see Rick and Marcia again, and to hear about their travels since we last crossed paths. Terry and I have not made the Alaska trip yet, but it’s very high on our bucket list.

Quite a few Gypsy Journal subscribers were readers of a great little tabloid called Two Lane Roads that a fellow named Loren Eyrich published a few years back. I was a fan of Loren’s work, and when he was diagnosed with cancer and had to stop traveling and publishing, we took over the balance of his unfulfilled subscriptions.

Several people have asked me from time to time how Loren is doing, and I’m happy to report that I got an e-mail from him yesterday. Loren has been cancer free for seven years now, and he told me that while he has some long term effected from the chemo and/or radiation, he’s well and happy to be alive. Loren posts occasional updates on his website at http://www.two-lane.com/, and I know he’d be happy to have you log in and pay him a visit. 

Thought For The Day – Don’t assume malice for what stupidity can explain.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally