It was another chilly day here at the Orlando Thousand Trails campground, so we spent most of the day at home. The bad news is that being stuck inside too long really gives me cabin fever. But, the good news is that we’re getting a lot of things accomplished.

Yesterday I found a mail service in Orlando and made arrangements for them to handle sending out the new issue of the Gypsy Journal that is somewhere on a truck between Michigan and Florida, making it’s way south. We should have the papers in a couple of days, and then we’ll get them mailed out. Between the holiday printing schedule, which is always a hassle, bad weather, and problems with new production equipment at the printer’s, we’re running late. But as I wrote a few days ago, every December we run into something to delay us, no matter how hard we try to plan ahead.

Once that was taken care of, I uploaded the new digital issue of the paper, and sent e-mail notifications to all of our digital subscribers.

Meanwhile, Miss Terry has been busy sorting cabinets and drawers and piling stuff up on the counter. I asked her what she was up to and she said it was early spring cleaning, and anything that wasn’t useful was just taking up space and adding weight to the motorhome going to the dumpster. I was very quiet the rest of the day, just trying not to get noticed.

We have some changes coming for the new year. My pal Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour has been working on moving us to a new web server, and making some changes in our blog format.  We’ll be taking it live in the next few days, but here’s a sneak peak at the new blog format. Look it over and let me know what you think.

At first glance, it looks very similar to the present blog, but the comments will be easier to post and access, the new format automatically displays links to related blog posts, the links in the left column to the rest of our website are more contemporary, and best of all, it won’t be on the Yahoo servers, which have given us so much grief over the years. Chris still has some tweaking to do, but I think it’s a big improvement.

You may notice that there is a tab at the top to Miss Terry’s Kitchen. Don’t get too excited, Terry isn’t ready to commit to a cooking blog yet, but if we push her far enough out on that limb, she may have to. Or, she may just break that limb off and beat me with it!

In the afternoon, Denny and Cindy Henderson came by to pick us up, and we went to dinner at a nice restaurant called Oakwood Smokehouse and Grill in Clermont. Denny and I had the rib platter, Terry had chopped barbecued pork, and Cindy had a burger. Everything was delicious. At one time we were fans of Sonny’s Barbecue, which has locations all over the Southeast, but on our last few visits, we were disappointed in the food.  Given the chance, I’d opt for Oakwood Smokehouse any time.

Back at the campground, I unhooked our water hose so it would not freeze overnight, then came inside and got some writing done before it was time to go to bed.

Bad Nick did some writing too, and posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.

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Today is moving day for us. We are leaving the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve this morning, headed for Paradise Island RV Resort in Fort Lauderdale, about 220 miles south.

The “quicker” route is to get over to Interstate 95 and take the superslab south, but what fun is that? If you’ve been on one interstate highway, you’ve been on all of them. We prefer the “blue highways” that show us small town America, and where we can travel at a slower pace.

So instead, we are going to take U.S. 27 south, through Sebring and around Lake Okeechobee, hook up with Interstate 595, and take it to 95. Then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump north to the campground.

Our friends Jim and Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, are staying at Paradise Island this winter, and we’re looking forward to spending some time with them, away from all of the hectic activity of an RV rally, which is usually where we cross paths.

We have had a very good time here at the Thousand Trails, and this is one campground we’ll be returning to again. Now that we have used up our allotted 50 nights per year that we get “free” under our Thousand Trails membership, any other stays are $5/night, which is a darned good price on a full hookup RV site! We do have to come back to this area in the next few weeks to have the nice folks at Camping Connection do our latest Norcold refrigerator recall, but during the winter the Thousand Trails keeps pretty full, so I don’t know if they will have an opening for us.

A while back, a gentleman named Ladd Lougee, an outdoor and fitness enthusiast, wrote me that he came up with the idea for a better travel chair when he was camping in the Mammoth Lakes area of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains. Ladd said that after squirming around in his chair in discomfort for the hundredth time, he asked if anyone else had a sore back from using the typical camping chairs. He was very surprised to hear that nearly everyone else in his group did as well. So Ladd said he set out to build a better chair, the result being the Strongback Chair.

Okay, a lot of companies and people contact me, telling me that they have come up with the newest and best whatever, from computers to books to widgets, and I have to admit that usually I’m a skeptic. Most of these outfits simply send me an e-mail press release and expect me to publish it, but I don’t do things that way.

I write back and tell them that if they want to send me one of their products to review I’ll look at it. But, they must be willing to accept the fact that if it is good I’ll say so, and if I think it’s crap, I’ll say that too. I seldom hear back from them after that. I’m never sure if they are just looking for free publicity, or if they don’t have enough faith in their product to let me try it. But Ladd offered to send me a chair to evaluate in his first e-mail. That’s always a good sign.

The chair arrived a couple of days ago, and after sitting in it a while, folding it up and stowing it in its nylon carry bag, and pulling it out to sit on again on different types of terrain, from grass and gravel to blacktop, it is absolutely the most comfortable camp chair I have ever sat in.

The chair is big and roomy, it has solid padded arm rests, a drink holder, and can hold up to 300 pounds, and best of all, its design incorporates a frame-integrated lumbar support that gives my lower back excellent support. Strongback Chairs come in two models, the Zen for smaller people, and the big, roomy Elite model that Ladd sent me.

My only problem with the chair is that Miss Terry likes it just as much as I do, so now we have to fight over it! Or maybe there’s going to be a new chair in her Christmas stocking this year?

Thought For The Day – Stop global whining!

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I try to be a nice guy, and I think most of the time I come pretty close. But there are times when I just have to be a jerk. Or at least some people think that I’m being a jerk.

It has happened a couple of times in the last few days.

I got an e-mail from a lady who purchased our RVers Guide To Fairgrounds Camping a while back, and was upset because one of the fairgrounds had raised their rates and we didn’t have the new rate listed. She wanted to know what kind of satisfaction I was going to offer her.

I replied that while we are constantly updating our guides, it would be impossible for us visit each and every place on a repeated basis to check on any changes. But we do send out inquiries twice a year asking for any changes. If they don’t give us updated information, we can’t reflect those changes.  We have a disclaimer in the first page of the guide that we are not responsible for changes in site fees, availability, or access. I also asked her what “satisfaction “ she expected on a $7.50 guide that still lists fairgrounds with RV camping sites in states from border to border.  

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I got a second complaint on the same fairgrounds guide, this time because a gentleman stopped at a fairgrounds in Wisconsin to spend the night, and they told him that their RV sites were closed for the season and the water was turned off. He told me he expected us to not only refund his money, but also to pay him for his night at a campground he did eventually find open. Well, that’s just not going to happen. I did mention that it was Wisconsin, in December, right?

Back in August, just before our rally in Elkhart, Indiana, a vendor came by Elkhart Campground while Terry and I were laying out the vendor sales area, and demanded that we move him because he was too close to another vendor selling a similar product. We agreed to do so, and spent some time shuffling vendor spaces to make him happy.

A few minutes later I got a call from the campground’s owner because he was in the office making demands on who would be parked near him. So I had to stop what I was doing to go put that fire out, and to apologize to the campground’s owner for his rude behavior.

Then, a day before the rally started, he called me to say that he could not attend the rally because his wife had a medical emergency that required a trip back to California. He also said that his expected merchandise had not arrived, and asked for a refund, even though we don’t give refunds on last minute booth cancellations. But because of the emergency, I told him that we would refund his vendor fees, to help cover the cost of their unexpected trip back to California. Even though we had been turning away vendors because we were full, which meant we would lose money.

However, once the rally had started, this same vendor came through the campground, putting fliers on all of the RVs, advertising his products, which of course ticked off the dealers who had paid for their vendor sites. So obviously, he did not have to go back to California for a medical emergency, and he did have merchandise if he was distributing fliers trying to sell it.

I called him about it, and told him I didn’t appreciate that, and that if he wanted to sell his stuff at our rally, he needed to come and set up the booth he had reserved. He hemmed and hawed, but never came back.

So he didn’t get his refund, and yesterday he e-mailed me wanting to know why. I told him why, and that he would not be attending any of our future rallies either. I’m a pretty easygoing guy, and I believe in doing what I can to accommodate my customers.

But sometimes I have to draw a line. I don’t like being lied to, and I don’t like being taken for a fool. That’s when the jerk in me comes out.

Thought For The Day – You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

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I’ve been working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, which I will be sending off to the printer early next week, and we still had a few bundles of the November-December issue left. We needed to get them distributed so we’d have room for the new issue after it’s printed.

So yesterday, we spent the day dropping off sample bundles at RV parks along Interstate 4 between the Kissimmee area and Interstate 75, on the west side of the state.

It was interesting see how folks were bundled up, due to the cold snap that has hit the South. Everywhere we went, we saw people in jackets, scarves, hats, and even gloves! And they thought they were coming to Florida to spend the winter basking in the sunshine!

I was surprised by how many Carefree RV resorts we stopped at! They have a lot of RV parks in Florida! All of them were very nice, and I really appreciate the fact that Carefree Resorts also gives veterans a 50% discount on RV sites. That’s very nice, and I made it a point of telling their managers that, at the resorts where we stopped.

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One of the campgrounds where we stopped, Tampa East RV Resort in Dover, has a special weekly rate that is good until the end of December, so we may pop in there for a week between Christmas and New Years. It’s about a half hour away from my nephew Steve’s place in Pinellas Park, and might make a good place to stay while we visit Steve and the rest of the family in that area.

One place where we won’t be staying, or doing any business at all, is at Lazy Days, the mega-dealer just off Interstate 4 that has an RV dealership, campground, Camping World, and Cracker Barrel on the premises.

We stopped there to drop off a bundle of papers, and the manager on duty said no, because we had two ads for RVs for sale in the paper. One is a tiny little 1984 Mirage camper with an asking price of $4,000 up in northern Indiana, and the other is an eight year old Class A gas rig a couple have for sale in Texas.

The manager never actually gave me the courtesy of talking to me, the message relayed by the young lady at the counter was that since Lazy Days is a dealership, they don’t want to “encourage the competition.” Yeah, that sixteen year old $4,000 Mirage is sure some competition for the land yachts that Lazy Days sells!

I find it interesting that Lazy Days has contacted us in the past suggesting that we consider holding one of our Gypsy Gathering rallies there, and they have sent me press releases in the past when they want free publicity for something. But I guess that’s a one way street.

But that’s okay, we found another campground just down the road that was happy to get the papers, and whenever anybody is RV shopping and asks me my opinion of Lazy Days (and I get a lot of people asking for advice), I’ll be happy to share it. Did you ever notice that the little mom and pop places are so much nicer to deal with, and that the biggest outfits are the most chickensh..?

By the time we were done, we only had two or three bundles left, and I’ll get rid of them at a couple of places we’ll be stopping in the next few days. It was twilight by the time we were headed home, and I don’t see well after dark, so Miss Terry took the wheel. We stopped for dinner at the Sonny’s Barbecue in Clermont, and by the time we got back to the Thousand Trails, it was downright cold again! It sure felt good to get inside, turn up the thermostat, put on our Teepee Creepers slippers, and warm back up!

Bad Nick is no fool. He stayed inside where it was warm all day, pounding out another Bad Nick Blog titled I’m Sorry, I Just Don’t Get It. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

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Yesterday we had a quiet day at home. Sometimes we need one of those, just to get caught up on paperwork and household chores, to relax and enjoy each other’s company, and just decompress.

I updated the calendars on our RV website, motorcycle travel website, and self-publishing website, and added some events to the Small Town Festivals page on the RV website. Then I spent a couple of hours updating our mailing lists. 

I need to make some changes to Carlyle Lehman’s Focal Wood website, because several of the links are not working. I struggled with the links for over two hours, but whatever the reason, I couldn’t get them to work, no matter what I did. It’s time to call on my pal Greg White. I know it’s probably a simple thing that he can do in his sleep, because Greg’s a simple man.

I also watched one of our neighbors climb up the ladder on the back of her motorhome, wearing a pair of flip flops, and trip when the toe of one caught on the top step. She managed to catch herself, but I was afraid it was going to be time to call 911. I don’t trust RV ladders. We have had a couple of friends seriously injured using them in the past, and one friend who just bought a new high end coach discovered that at least some of the screws holding his  ladder in place were not secure. To climb up on one without proper footwear is just plain foolish!

In the late afternoon, Linda Spindle stopped by our motorhome and visited for a while. We saw Linda and her husband Dave when we were in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and now they are parked just a short distance across from us. Linda told us about a great place to buy fresh seafood in Gloucester, and we’ll definitely be stopping by there!

We spent the evening watching a movie about 1950s singer Buddy Holly, which we found interesting, because we visited the musician’s grave in Lubbock, Texas several years ago, and the site of the airplane crash that took his life a couple of months ago when we were in Iowa. Did you know that his name was actually spelled Holley, but a secretary at Decca records misspelled his name on a recording contract, and it stuck?

Today we don’t have any solid plans. We may do some exploring, taking in the local sights, and we have a couple of orders to mail out. We’re just enjoying a slow pace for a while. It’s a nice change from the hectic schedule we have kept for too long now.

Thought For The Day – Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.

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