I think we missed a turn somewhere along the way south, and instead of Fort Lauderdale, we ended up at the South Pole! I mean really, 33 degree overnight lows just 30 miles from Miami? Really? Isn’t that just a little bit ridiculous? Uh huh, global warming, sure. Would somebody get that damned penguin off my patio!

Yeah, I know, they are having blizzard conditions in Indiana and Michigan. I don’t care! I’m not in Indiana or Michigan! I left Indiana and Michigan and came to warm, sunny Florida!  Did I mention it was 33 degrees here overnight?

Yes, I’m sniveling. Get used to it. I intend to snivel until it hits at least 72 degrees and stays there. And don’t be surprised if I throw in a pout, a tantrum or two, and some serious bitching until it warms up!

Yesterday my friend Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, spent several hours with us, going over a lot of technical issues with our websites and e-mail. I would really like to move all of my websites off the Yahoo servers and to some other hosts. Over the years, Yahoo has messed things up so many times, and their technical support is terrible when you call with a problem. But I didn’t want to try moving to a new hosting company until Chris was available to help deal with any problems that might come up.

Chris has some concerns about moving the websites, and I’m not sure what we’ll end up doing yet. I defer to her in things like this, because that lady has more computer knowledge in her little finger than I do in my whole pasty, flabby body.  

Late in the day we went to the post office to mail out some orders, and when we came back, we stopped at J.C. and Beverly Webber’s beautiful Country Coach motorhome for a tour. Wow, what a palace on wheels!

The four of us went out to a great Chinese restaurant for dinner, called the Dragon Gourmet Buffet. The selection was huge, and everything was hot, fresh, and delicious.  

Even with the unseasonably cold weather, this is still snowbird season in Florida, and this great You Tube video pretty much sums things up. It’s just as applicable if you’re in the Rio Grande Valley; Yuma, Arizona, or any other snowbird roost. check it out, I guarantee you’ll get a giggle.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that something inside our door lock got out of synch, and we had to have a mobile tech fix it. Yesterday when we started out the door, I stuck my key in the lock to turn it, and the entire lock cylinder fell out! We can still secure the door with the deadbolt, but I think it’s time to just replace the entire thing and be done with it.

The door’s been acting flakey ever since I slammed it on the burglar’s hand last year, even though the RV repair shop took it off the Winnebago and put it in a jig to straighten it. Apparently you’re not supposed to use your door as a weapon. Who knew?

We still don’t know where we’re going when we leave here on Sunday. The weather still looks funky, so we probably won’t go down to the Keys after all. I want to spend our time there kayaking and playing in the water, not sitting inside shivering.

I had better close for now, before I launch into another rant.

Thought For The Day -The measure of a man is not whether he falls down, but whether he gets up again.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Every RVer is different. Some of us like motorhomes, and some like trailers. Some of us like to move around from place to place, seldom staying longer than a week in any location, while others like to “put down roots,” and often stay several months at a time in one place. There are those of us who always want to see new places and hate traveling the same routes, or going back to the same RV parks. Others find comfort in the familiar, and have favorite places where they go every winter or summer. Some appreciate upscale RV resorts with every amenity, while there are those of us who prefer the small mom and pop campgrounds.

I say viva la différence! Wouldn’t it be a boring world if we all enjoyed the same things and went to the same places all the time? Not to mention crowded!

Even among fulltiming couples, preferences can vary. I love to be on the go, and if we stay more than a week or two in most places, I start getting hitch itch. Miss Terry, on the other hand, likes to find a nice place to nest once in a while. She enjoys having time to bake, crochet, read, and just relax. So we compromise, which is the secret to success for any snowbird or fulltiming couple. 

In Saturday’s blog, Ten Least Favorite Places, I wrote about some of the places we have visited and didn’t care for. I expected to get comments from readers who agreed with me, as well as from those who didn’t. I wasn’t disappointed.

Several readers agreed that they also don’t like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and I heard from those who love it.

I was surprised to see that my friend Mike McFall agreed with me in his Mike and Pat’s Travels blog post yesterday, since they have a beautiful lot at Retama Village in Mission, Texas. But Mike said he’s no fan of the Valley, outside of Retama. Having visited Mike and Pat and seeing how nice Retama Village is, I have to agree that it’s the best thing we saw in the Rio Grande Valley.

The great thing about the RV lifestyle is that there is no “one size fits all.” Barring health or financial issues that might put a cramp in our traveling style, most of us are free to do it our way.

If we want to bounce around like pin balls from one corner of the country to the next, we can do it. If we like to find a comfortable place and hunker down for a season, there are plenty of RV parks offering monthly rates. If we enjoy watching the sun set over the ocean, or sunrises over the Great Lakes; if we are desert rats, or find comfort in the high mountains, we can go there. If we are history buffs, we can actually go to the places where our forefathers struggled to build this nation. If we love playing golf, what better way to enjoy our hobby than by following the sun all year long, playing in shirtsleeves from Connecticut to California?  

Don’t you love being a part of our great lifestyle, where one size does not fit all?

Heck, some of us even have alternate personalities. My alter-ego, Bad Nick, was at work yesterday putting together a Bad Nick Blog post titled Charity Begins At Home. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Never confuse a street address for where you actually live.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Yesterday we made a day trip of 90 miles to Victoria, Texas to pick up the January-February issue of the Gypsy Journal from our printer. Victoria is a bustling city of 86,000, and is popular with RV snowbirds who don’t want to go as far as the Rio Grande Valley. The city is big enough to have everything you could want, from big box retail stores to excellent medical services, and rates at the RV parks are affordable.

When we left Alabama for Texas, we were not sure where we would be staying, but we knew we’d be in Victoria to pick up the new issue, so I had our mail forwarding service send our mail there, care of General Delivery. But I made a newbie mistake and didn’t check first to see if they had more than one post office location. Sure enough, they have two.

Fortunately, all it took was one phone call to learn that all General Delivery mail in Victoria goes to the downtown post office on Main Street. In large cities with many post office locations, only one location accepts General Delivery, and one can spend a lot of time running back and forth trying to track down their mail.

With that chore out of the way, we picked up the new issue of the paper, and then stopped to do some banking.

Gypsy Journal subscribers Richard and Patsy King live in Victoria, and had invited us to stop by when we were in town. Richard and Patsy have been to our three Arizona Gypsy Gathering rallies, and are a fun couple we have enjoyed getting to know. We had a nice time visiting with them, talking about our respective adventures on the road, and comparing travel tips.

Speaking of RV rallies, at our Ohio rally in September, well known RV authors and speakers Joe and Vicki Kieva honored us by coming and presenting their last seminars before officially retiring from the speaking circuit. After a distinguished career as the premier RV seminar presenters in the nation, Joe and Vicki had decided it was time to really retire and just enjoy their RV travels, without having a speaking schedule to keep. We have known Joe and Vicki ever since we got on the road, and were honored to work with them at Life on Wheels.

Well, to quote those television infomercials, “But wait, there’s more!” Yesterday I got an e-mail from Joe, saying that they wanted to come to our Arizona rally and give a couple of their seminars! How cool is that? They will be presenting their excellent RVing Alaska seminar, as well as their Personal Security Tips For RVers. After our burglary earlier this month, that’s one seminar I don’t want to miss!  

The next couple of days will be a whirlwind of envelope stuffing to get the new issue in the mail. As soon as that’s done, we’ll head for Arizona, maybe stopping to pick up a couple of stories for future issues of the paper along the way.

Thought For The Day – Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is something very special.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Our Gypsy Gathering rally ended yesterday, and in spite of morning rain and afternoon wind, RVs departed the Mercer County Fairgrounds here in Celina, Ohio headed in every direction. The greatest majority of them are headed south.

That’s right, it’s time for the annual snowbird migration. Over the next few weeks, every highway in the United States will be carrying RVers away from the snow and cold weather that will descend on the northern portion of the country in the months ahead.

Some will be headed to Florida, others the Texas Gulf Coast or the Rio Grande Valley, while others will spend their winter in Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California.

Many RVers have a favorite campground they return to every year to spend the winter among friends, while others (Terry and I included), prefer to wander around from place to place during the winter months, stopping here and there for a few days or weeks at a time.

Our current plans (which are always chiseled in Jell-o) call for us to start the winter in Florida, where we will spend some time in Key West, and the rest just aimlessly exploring. I’m sure we’ll show up at the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground near Bushnell, and the Thousand Trails Peace River preserve in Wauchula. Our pals Jim and Chris Guld say this is one of their favorite kayaking places. We spent three weeks in Crystal River a few years ago, and may go back and see if we can spot a manatee or two.

When we leave Florida, we’d like to stop at the Escapees Plantation RV park in Summerdale, Alabama. We have always enjoyed the Alabama Gulf Coast, and we’re ready for a return visit.

We have to be in Yuma, Arizona for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in March, so we’ll probably start heading west in late January or early February to give us plenty of time to get there without being rushed, and to have some time to spend with our family there before we get too wrapped up in rally activities.

So where do you plan to spend the winter? Are you a snowbird who goes to one place and stays put, or do you flitter about like Terry and I do?

Speaking of our rallies, we have some news to share on that front. We have set the date and location for our 2010 Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally. It will be August 30 to September 2 at Elkhart Campground, in Elkhart, Indiana.

We chose these dates and location for a couple of reasons. One frequent comment on our rally feedback forms is that many attendees want full hookups with either 30 or 50 amp electricity. At Elkhart Campground we will have both partial and full hookup sites, with attendees’ choice of 30 or 50 amp power available.  This will also place rally attendees and vendors in the area in time for the Escapees Escapade rally in Goshen, Indiana two weeks later.

We have also made a change in our vendor policy for future rallies. In the past we have limited vendors to only one vendor per type of product at each rally, but starting with Yuma, we will be allowing competing vendors to register, as long as they are not selling the same name brand products.

For example, if a vendor is selling Brand A dry wash products, we will also admit a vendor selling Brand B dry wash products. This has been a frequent demand by rally attendees to give them more shopping options, and after talking to the vendors at this rally, they say they think it’s a good policy change. We do too.

Thought For The Day – I’m a walking storeroom of facts, I’ve just lost the key to the door!

I met a man at Elkhart Campground a few years ago who told me he was unhappy in the RV lifestyle because he was bored. I suggested several things he might do to keep himself busy, and he pooh poohed every one of them; visit the RV Museum? No thanks, he wasn’t interested in looking at a bunch of old junk. Play golf? Nope, that was a rich man’s sport, not for him. Go fishing? Why go to all that trouble when you can buy a nice fish dinner in a restaurant? Build houses for Habitat for Humanity? Nobody ever built him a house, so why should he build someone else one?

It didn’t take long before a light bulb went off in my head and I asked him if he had been bored before he became an RVer. He told me yes, that was why he bought the motorhome in the first place.

In talking to him, I learned that he spent part of the summer and early fall parked at his brother’s farm in Pennsylvania; then he went to the same site, which he had reserved, at the same RV park in Florida for the winter. Then in the spring he drove to Elkhart for a few days before continuing on to his niece’s home in Wisconsin, where he stayed until it was time to go to Pennsylvania again. “I tell you, I know every inch of Interstate 95 between Pennsylvania and Florida, and Interstate 65 back up to Indiana,” he told me.  

“How about just for the hell of it, you take I-75 north or south this year,” I suggested. “You could stop in Clinton, Tennessee and check out the Museum of Appalachia. It’s really cool.”

He was shaking his head before I was halfway through my sentence. “Nope, that’s not on my route,” he said stubbornly. If I go off on a different route then what I’m used to, who knows what could happen?”

I wanted to tell him that one thing that might happen was he’d see some new country. Heck, he might even make a new memory or two! But I knew I was defeated, so I just gave up, told him to have a good life, and went on about my business, leaving him to his misery.

I’ve met a lot of RVers who, while they may not be as extreme as this fellow, are still stuck in a rut. They spend their summers in the same place and their winters at the same RV park in Florida, Texas, or Arizona. They tell me they have friends in their favorite campground in the Rio Grande Valley, or wherever they hang out, and they want to get back and spend time with them. I guess that’s okay if it works for them, but that’s just too much of the same old thing for me!

It’s an easy rut to fall into. We have our favorite places we enjoy returning to again and again, but we also go out of our way to visit new places too. Or at least to take a different route to wherever we’re going. And when a place gets too comfortable, we start asking ourselves if we need to look elsewhere.

We absolutely love the area around Aransas Pass and Rockport, on the Texas Gulf Coast, and last year we came across a good deal on a couple of RV lots down there that we seriously considered. But then we realized that buying them would be the first string that would tie us down. Why have the lots if we were not going to go there? But if we went there, what were we missing someplace else?

We didn’t get into the fulltime RV lifestyle to remain static. We wanted to see and do different things, new things. The familiar is comfortable, but it can also become suffocating if you allow it to be. We’re always looking for that new route we haven’t traveled yet, that new place we haven’t seen yet, and that new adventure we haven’t experienced yet.

Remember that the only difference between a rut and a grave is the length and depth.

Thought For The Day – Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally