Yesterday was the calm before the storm in a couple of ways. After a harried week of putting the new issue of the paper together and getting it over to the printer in Flagstaff, we had a day to do absolutely nothing. And that’s just about all we did!

Miss Terry is still dealing with a combination of a cold and allergies, and her energy level is below normal. So we slept in, and then puttered around the rest of the morning, checking e-mail, cruising the internet, and watching the boob tube.

In the afternoon, we drove the twelve miles into Show Low from Juniper Ridge RV Resort to do some banking, and then stopped by my daughter’s house for a visit. Three year old Destiny and I played with the Wii, while she showed me all of her birthday presents, and brought out her pet guinea pig for me to admire. When seven year old Hailey got home from school, Grandma Terry helped her with her homework. And, of course, there was a lot of hugging and cuddling with little girls to be done.

When we left Tiffany’s, we stopped at Pizza Hut for dinner. The local franchise has a special going on, and we had their Pepperoni Lovers, which was delicious. Then it was back to the motorhome, where we had a new reservation waiting for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

I sent out the rally confirmation, as well as confirmation for our vendor booth space at the Pennsylvania RV & Camping Show in Hershey, in September.  This will be our first time to be vendors at this mega show, and we’re looking forward to it.

The rest of the evening was just as quiet. I wrote my RV blog post, and Bad Nick posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled I’m Gonna Be Rich, we watched some TV and caught up on some reading.

That was the calm, and today the storm begins. We have to drive back to Flagstaff, pick up the new issue of the paper and return to Show Low. The next few days will be a whirlwind of stuffing envelopes and getting the papers ready to mail out to our subscribers. 

I said in the first paragraph of this blog that it was the calm before the storm in a couple of ways. While the weather has been pretty nice the last few days, starting today we have a cold front coming through northern Arizona, with wind, rain, and even snow at higher elevations. It should be fun driving to Flagstaff and back.

Thought For The Day -  Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.

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We have enjoyed our time here at the Higginsville, Missouri fairgrounds. Higginsville is a friendly little town, and everybody we have met in the stores, restaurants and post office has been friendly and made it a point to welcome us to their town.

Yesterday evening we had dinner at the local Pizza Hut with Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, and when we arrived there was a big old black dog lounging in the shade by the doorway. Of course I had to stop and get my puppy fix, and I made it a point to tell Jim and Chris (who live with a poodle, of all things!) “Now, this is a dog!”

Inside, as the waitress was taking our orders, I asked her whose dog it was. We learned that it lived at a nearby farm, but spent most of its days hanging out at the town’s fast food restaurants, where everybody was always feeding it. Now that’s my kind of dog! Any mutt that hangs out at restaurants mooching free food can’t be all bad.

I mentioned that Jim and Chris have a poodle, a lovable enough mutt if you like poodles, and I do have to give Odie credit. Every time I have ever gone to their rig he comes to the door to bark a greeting at me, and every time I tell him “Hey, Odie, shut up, it’s not like you’re a real dog!”

I think Odie has decided to shun me in return. When Jim and Chris pulled into the fairgrounds the other day, I walked up to the driver’s window, and Odie was in the passenger seat looking to see who it was. Once he realized it was me, he did an about face and looked in the other direction!

The other day I went over to talk to Jim and Chris, and Odie just stayed in his chair and ignored me. But as soon as Miss Terry walked over, he came right to the door to see her. Hey, Odie, I’ve gotten the cold shoulder a lot of times in my life, it’s not gonna work!

Today we’ll leave Higginsville and go over to Sedalia to get parked and set up for Escapade. Along the way, I hope to find a truck wash to get the bus cleaned up. It is covered in oil and road grime and really needs a bath. Usually I can con my pal Smokey Ridgely from Dri Wash N Guard into cleaning my stuff at rallies to demonstrate how good his product is, but the lazy dog is workamping over near Hannibal, Missouri and won’t make it to Escapade. That’s pretty darned selfish if you ask me! What kind of friend is that? I’m seriously thinking about sending him the bill for getting the bus washed!

Thought For The Day – Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

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When last we left our erstwhile young RVers, they were in Kingman, Arizona, trying to decide whether to hang around while a windstorm came through the area, or to head over to Show Low ahead of the bad weather, so they could spoil grandkids beyond redemption.

We decided yesterday morning that we’d go ahead and hit the road. We really wanted to get settled in at our campsite in Show Low, and besides, I had drunk up all of the Pepsi in my buddy Mike’s house.

It was too brief of a visit, and if Kingman ever gets high speed EVDO wireless service, and if Mike ever restocks his refrigerator with Pepsi, I’m looking forward to going back.

Mike is a confirmed bachelor, so Miss Terry had fun making him a home cooked meal and a big batch of chocolate chip cookies while we were in town. I keep telling Mike that if he’d find a nice girl and settle down, he could have home cooking and cookies all of the time. But he’s pretty picky when it comes to women; he insists that the number of teeth they have exceed the number of tattoos. In Kingman, finding a woman who meets that strict criteria is quite a challenge.

We stopped at the Flying J for fuel, and because the RV island was backed up, and is so hard to get in and out of, I opted for the truck pumps, which ticked off one trucker. When we can use the RV islands, we do, but the layout in Kingman is terrible. On one occasion a few years ago we were struck for over an hour because someone had parked his pickup in a marked slot in front of the RV island and left in another vehicle, which made it impossible to pull a big rig out. We had to unhook our toad, and I had to maneuver our motorhome in a series of short back and forth turns to get past the truck. What a mess!

We got onto Interstate 40 just before 11 a.m. and began the long, slow crawl uphill all the way to Flagstaff, 150 miles to the east. Even with all of the work we’ve had down to our bus, it just is not suited to RVing in the West. At one point, between Seligman and Williams, our speed was down to 10 miles per hour, I was driving on the shoulder with my emergency flashers on, and even with the misters pumping water onto the radiators, our temperature gauge was flirting with trouble. We have come to realize that while our bus does okay back East and in the Midwest, it is just not suited for traveling out here in the West, where the mountains are high and the air is thin.

From Flagstaff to Holbrook is mostly downhill, and we rolled right along, even passing a slow moving eighteen wheeler now and then. When we left the interstate in Holbrook and got onto State Route 77 for the 46 mile run to Show Low, we began a series of long, shallow upgrades that again had us slowing down some, and the headwind didn’t help much. But within an hour or so we reached Show Low Lake Campground, a nice little city-owned campground where we usually stay when we’re in our old hometown. We had covered almost 300 miles since we left Kingman, most of it uphill.

We got the bus backed into our site, hooked up the 30 amp electric, (no water or sewer hookups here, just a dump station and several hose bibs scattered around), and then met my daughter Tiffany, her hubby Jim, and our granddaughters, Hailey and Destiny, for dinner at Pizza Hut. I swear those girls have grown a couple of inches since we saw them a few weeks ago at Sea World!

We’re going to be here a while enjoying family time, visiting with some old friends, and just relaxing in Arizona’s beautiful high country.

Thought For The Day – Seat belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.

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