We are fast running out of time here in Apache Junction, and we still have a lot to get done before we head to Yuma for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in March. We still need to replace the tires on or motorhome, replace the house batteries, I’m working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and once it is printed, we need to get it mailed out. And, of course, there are still a few dozen rally details and chores that need completed too.

Aside from work related tasks, we still have some folks who want to get together for lunch or dinner, I want to get down to Tucson to visit my cousin Beverly, and I’d like to spend a few hours at the Family History Center of the LDS Church in Mesa. I’m not a Mormon, but their genealogy research facilities are open to anyone, and I’m running into a brick wall on my father’s side of my family tree.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Miss Terry a new Bernina Bernette sewing machine, and while I was working on the new issue of the paper yesterday, she went to a class at Quilter’s Ranch in Tempe to learn about all of the new machine’s bells and whistles. What, you say? A class to learn how to operate a sewing machine? No, Terry has been sewing since she was a youngster, this class was just to learn all about the features of her new machine and its many capabilities.

What the heck, when I got my Blackberry Storm last summer, Verizon had a free class to learn to use it! Of course, I still can’t do much more than make a call or answer e-mails on it.

Yesterday, my friend Sharon Del Rosario sent me an e-mail to tell me about a great country singer and yodeler named David Bradley that she and hubby Don met in Quartzsite, and she suggested that I contact David and talk to him about performing at our Yuma rally. Since I value Sharon’s opinion, I called David and we worked out an arrangement for him to come to the rally and perform a concert on Monday evening.

David is the son of world champion yodeler Gene Bradley, and has been performing since he was five years old. He performed with the famous Sons of the Pioneers for five years, and was a featured solo artist at the popular Country Tonite Theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he won the Featured Entertainer of the Year award. You can hear some sound bites of David’s music on his Born To Yodel website. Check it out, and make plans now to attend his concert at the rally. Between David and the Michael Hargis’ concert, we’ll have plenty of reasons to tap our toes at the rally, won’t we?

Besides great entertainment and a full line of seminars at the rally, you will also have the opportunity to take advantage of some extra activities, including getting your RV weighed by Rick and Joyce Lang from RVSEF; taking behind the wheel RV driving classes from the RV School, and taking a class to obtain a non-resident Utah or Florida concealed weapons permit from Traveling CCW.

There is a separate fee for any of these valuable extras, and you should make arrangements before the rally if you can, because they all fill up fast. For RV weighing, contact Rick Lang at ricklang46@hotmail.com; for the RV School, contact Dennis Hill at rvschool@wizwire.com; and for the CCW classes, visit the Traveling CCW website.

News out of Elkhart, Indiana is that Heartland Recreational Vehicles LLC., builders of what I consider some of the finest fifth wheel trailers on the market, has purchased the rights to the brand names Prowler, Mallard, Pioneer, Wilderness, and other Fleetwood towable products, and will begin to build their own line of trailer models under those names. A company press release says they plan to begin manufacturing RVs under the acquired names in the next year. Given my personal opinion of Fleetwood products, I’m not sure this is a move I would have made, but if anyone can build something worthwhile under those brand names, I think it would be Heartland.

As busy as we are, Bad Nick still found time to write a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Dying With Dignity. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.

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The worst of the storm was gone by the time we woke up yesterday morning, but heavy clouds hung overhead all day long, and it rained most of the day. Not a heavy rain like we had been experiencing, just showers. At least the wind was gone, and that alone was a blessing.

From the blogs I’ve read and the e-mails I received from our RVing friends who are in Quartzsite, it looks like everybody came through the bad weather okay, but they all agree that it is an experience they never want to repeat, and that they will remember for a long, long time.

My daughter called from Show Low to say she had about 30 inches of snow at her house, and it was still coming down hard. She said that a few miles further up the mountain, in Pinetop-Lakeside, the snow accumulation was estimated to be four to five feet high by the time the storm moves out. News reports later in the day said that the roof of the Pinetop fire department building had collapsed under the weight of the snow. In Flagstaff, the roofs at the giant Bookman’s Bookstore and neighboring fabric store, as well as several other businesses, had  had also caved in.

A little after noon, Terry’s cousin Carolyn Henley and her husband Mel stopped over for a visit. Mel and Carolyn have been fulltiming for several months now, and it was interesting to hear about their transition to their new lifestyle, and the places they have visited. Whenever we talk to newbie RVers, it reminds us of our first months on the road, with so much to learn, and guess what? We’re still learning!

For 35 years or more, Miss Terry has had a big, bulky Pfaff sewing machine, and it gave her very good service. But eventually the old machine wore out, and when we took it into a shop for a tune-up and adjustment a while back, they told Terry it needed some parts that were no longer available, and they couldn’t guarantee that it would last much longer.

Since then, Terry has talked about getting a new sewing machine, but she had not seen anything that really appealed to her. The other day, while out with her sister Dani, Terry came across the Bernina Bernette line of machines, and decided that she liked the Model 66.

Now, I’m always finding some new toy that I just have to have, but it’s very seldom that Terry says she wants anything, so when she does, I try to make it happen. The original store, where she had seen a different model, did not have the machine Terry wanted, so while she was busy doing something else, I snuck around and made some calls and found one at a quilting shop in Tempe.

After Mel and Carolyn left, we drove to Tempe and bought the Bernina, and Terry is looking forward to getting familiar with it. In fact, the shop even has a day long class to teach customers how to use all of the features on their new sewing machines. I can see why, it’s got almost as many bells and whistles as the dashboard of our Winnebago!

We were supposed to have dinner with Terry’s sister Lisa and her husband Jim, and by the time we got finished at the quilt shop, we had about twenty minutes to get across town. Terry called Lisa to tell her we’d be a few minutes late, but we hoped it wouldn’t be long. When we got on the Superstition Freeway (U.S. Highway 60), it looked like traffic was going to be bad, but I managed to get across to the car pool lane, and we zipped across town with no delays, arriving at the restaurant only ten minutes late.

We never get to spend enough time with Jim and Lisa, and they are a fun couple that we always enjoy. Dinner was delicious, and afterwards we went back to their house to continue our conversation for an hour or so before we headed back home.   

By then I was happy to just log onto the internet, check my e-mail, and read a few of my favorite blogs. But Terry never slows down, and before long she was baking some wonderful peanut butter cookies. The perfect dessert after our dinner out!

Thought For The Day – Enthusiasm is contagious. You can start an epidemic.

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The weather forecast has been for rain all week, though it seemed to come in spurts, with periods of blue sky in between. But Wednesday night it began to rain in earnest, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

The rain was accompanied with high winds that whipped the palm trees in our park, and about 4:30 p.m., the National Weather Service issued tornado watches for southwest Arizona, including Yuma, Quartzsite, and Phoenix! That almost never happens. Up in the high country, heavy snow was falling, with accumulations measured in feet.

There were flash flood warnings for the entire state, and weather reports said that Oak Creek, near Sedona, could crest at 20 feet above normal. Yuma got its normal entire year’s rain accumulation in just one day! It was not a good time to be traveling, and while I was glad we were safely parked with full hookups, I was worried about the many friends we have who are boondocking in the desert at Quartzsite.

Since we get the east and west coast network feeds out of New York and San Francisco, I cranked up the rooftop Winegard batwing antenna, and was grateful to Mark Didelot for setting up our converter box so we could tune in the local channels and get more direct weather reports.

Unexpected bad weather is why we always keep our fresh water tank at least half full, and have enough fuel on board to run our generator, even when we are going to be parked for an extended period of time with full hookups. In fact, when we are going to be sitting still for a while, I always fill our fuel tank. I’m not sure about more modern rigs like our Winnebago, but in our old MCI bus conversion, condensation could accumulate in our diesel fuel tank if it was low and we were parked for several weeks. Having had to deal with that once, I don’t want it to happen again.

Because we lived in snow country in northern Arizona (yes, it snows in Arizona), Terry and I always kept enough provisions on hand to last us for a few days if we got snowed in. As RVers, we can’t carry a fully stocked pantry, but we always have food and fresh water on hand, just in case. There are times when living in a self-contained RV can be very nice.

Bad weather is not the only reason to be prepared. A few summers ago we were at the Thousand Trails preserve near Hershey, Pennsylvania for two weeks. During that time it was pretty hot, and they were having power problems. A transformer had to be replaced twice, leaving the campground without electricity.

No problem, we just opened our windows and ran our Fantastic roof vents to create an air flow, and if it got too hot, we buttoned the bus up and fired up our generator to run the rooftop air conditioner. Several of our neighbors came in with nearly empty tanks, and ran so low on fuel that their generators would not work. Most RV generators are set up so that they will stop drawing fuel from the RV’s tank when it drops below a certain level, to prevent you from running out and being stuck somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I was a Boy Scout, but that motto “Be prepared” still comes in handy.

Thought For The Day – If you don’t pick up the bat, you’ll never hit the ball.

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Through a herculean effort on the part of Miss Terry, we got the new issue of the Gypsy Journal mailed out, and now we can take a deep breath and relax. At least until next time.

In yesterday’s blog, I wrote about how Cheryl Howarth from Miller Insurance helped us get the ball rolling with National Interstate following our burglary, and I mentioned that another agent, from a different agency, also intervened on our behalf.

At that time I did not have her name available, but I do now. It was Gina Shaver, from Epic Insurance in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Gina’s office phone number is 605-271-8100, and her company website is http://www.epic-ins.com/.  She is another agent whom I highly recommend. I like supporting the people who support me. Of course, that’s a two way street, as some other people are now well aware of.

As I wrote when I first reported on our crime, RVing is a safe activity overall. But, as I also stated, crime can and does happen anywhere. Most of the crimes suffered by RVers are petty. Unsecured bicycles and coolers have a way of walking off in campgrounds, if their owners go away and leave them. Most of the reports of this activity we have heard about occurred in state parks.

A couple of years ago in Quartzsite, there was a rash of thefts of portable generators. Some were stolen even when chained to the owners’ RVs. The thieves cut the cables with bolt cutters and carried them off. Bicycles also were disappearing in Quartzsite about the same time.   

But crimes of violence, while uncommon in the RV world, do happen, as our experience, as well as this story in the Bandera County Courier show http://www.bccourier.com/Archives/News_detail.php?recordID=091210N5.

According to the news story, a couple camping at the Medina Lake Thousand Trails in Lakehills, Texas were accosted by two teenagers wearing ski masks who pointed a gun at them and said “Give me all your money or I’ll kill you.” As it turns out, the gun was a BB gun, and the boys were at the campground with their grandparents.

These two punks were damned lucky. If they had pointed a BB gun at somebody else, they may have found out their victim was carrying a real gun. Just because their gun wasn’t real doesn’t mean a victim wouldn’t have been justified in blowing them away. In the dark, who can tell?

As I also reported earlier, our only other crime related incident happened in our first months on the road, when somebody tried to steal our pickup while we were in a Coast to Coast campground in California. So much for the “security” of campgrounds, even membership campgrounds!

Still, you have to keep in mind that in over ten years of fulltime RVing, including hundreds of nights spent dry camping in every corner of the nation, those were the only criminals we have come into contact with. Most folks living in even a medium sized city rub shoulders with all kinds of thugs every day, and never know when they might become a victim.

By using common sense, choosing a well lighted area when spending a night in a parking lot, keeping your doors locked and your valuables out of sight, and by being aware of your surroundings, you will go a long way toward avoiding becoming a victim of crime. Remember, the most effective weapon you own is right between your ears, and you don’t need special training or a permit to possess it. So use it.

Thought For The Day – It’s never too late to be what you might have been.

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We all want to get the most bang for our buck when we make a purchase. Whether you’re buying a pair of blue jeans, a television set, or an RV, you want to get your money’s worth, right?

I don’t think anybody I’ve ever met has managed to make a better deal than longtime Gypsy Journal subscriber John Culp, who is here at our rally in the 1947 Westwood West Craft Coronado travel trailer that he bought brand new, and still travels with 62 years later! Yes, you read that right. John has had his RV for over six decades, and the octogenarian and his old rig are still going strong!

John said he lived in the trailer fulltime before he got married, calling it his “bachelor pad,” but when he and his wife got married, they decided after a couple of months that it was too cramped for both of them. Alone now, John pulls the trailer behind a van, and brings it to a lot of the Tin Can Tourists events. I never met anybody whose RV is old enough to draw Social Security!

The wind finally died down yesterday, and by late afternoon we even had blue sky overhead. But it was cold! The thermometer dipped into the mid-30s overnight, and a lot of folks said that as soon as the rally ends Friday, they’re headed south.     

Yesterday evening we had our pizza party, and it always amazes me how fast Miss Terry and her volunteer crew can serve over 90 pizzas to a crowd of hungry RVers. Everybody complimented me on their efficiency.

After we all finished stuffing ourselves on pizza, Melissa and Larry Beahm, who perform as One More Time, entertained us with a wonderful concert that had everybody tapping their toes and singing along to the music.

Melissa and Larry are fulltime RVers, who make their living traveling the country performing at RV rallies, nursing homes, and other events. They will be performing for us again tonight, and have promised a lot of “belt buckle rubbing” slow songs to dance to.

We tried something different with this rally; moving our vendors inside, in the same building where we have the morning coffee and donuts, and where the vendors present their seminars. It has worked out very well, and several of the vendors said it has been an excellent show for them. In fact, Ben and Gay Miller from Coyote Sales sold so many of their Wilson cellular phone antennas and accessories that they had to have more merchandise sent in by overnight delivery!

We did some shopping ourselves here at the rally. One piece of equipment I consider critical in an RV is an Electrical Management System (EMS) from Progressive Industries. The unit is designed to shut down incoming power to an RV if it detects high or low voltage, an open ground or neutral, or other problems that could cause serious damage to the RV and its electrical systems.

The EMS in or bus conversion saved us from damage several times over the years, and as impressed as I was with the unit itself, I was even more impressed with the service from Progressive Industries and their vendor, Daryl Lawrence, from Lawrence RV Accessories.

Two years ago while we were in Quartzsite, a board went out in our EMS, and even though it had been out for warranty for years, someone from the company drove several miles from town to where we were parked in the middle of the desert and replaced it for us! So yesterday we had Daryl install an EMS in our Winnebago, and now I’ll feel a lot more comfortable when I plug into a campground’s electric pedestal. Thanks for the great service and peace of mind, Daryl.  

Thought For The Day – The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat sensibly, and lie about your age.