Did you ever have one of those days where you remember waking up and getting out of bed, and the next thing you know, you’re falling asleep and wondering where the day went? That sums up yesterday for me.

Josh Leach, from Bradd & Hall,  was knocking on our door before we were up yesterday morning, having come by to drop off some company brochures and a check to cover their sponsorship of Tuesday morning’s coffee and donuts at our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally. We jumped into some clothes and visited with Josh for a while, and by the time he left, somebody else was here asking about the rally schedule.

From there, the day was just a blur of fielding telephone calls, answering e-mails, greeting folks who arrived early at Elkhart Campground for the rally, and getting last minute chores done. Red and Beth from Too Crazy Ladies arrived in the late morning, and I spent some time helping them select a site for their motorhome and vending trailer.

About the time I was finished with that, a potential vendor showed up asking if we had any indoor booths left. I told him no, but that we could get him into an outdoor space, which he declined. A short time later, one of our vendors who had reserved a double booth came by to tell us that due to a medical issue, he had to cancel at the last minute. I sure wish I had known that an hour earlier, when I turned away the other vendor

Our close friends, and stalwart rally volunteers, Mike and Elaine Loscher arrived and got settled in, and we had a nice little visit with them in our Winnebago. Then Terry and I took off to get some things done away from the campground, including picking up the rally T-shirts from the screen printer, stopping at the bank, post office, and to fill our van’s gas tank.

Then we went by Heartland Recreational Vehicles to pick up brochures to distribute at the rally. Heartland has also agreed to be a sponsor for our coffee and donuts, on Wednesday morning. For those who are staying on at Elkhart Campground after the rally, rather than traveling on the busy Labor Day weekend, Heartland is holding a special factory tour just for our rally attendees, at 10:30 a.m. on Friday morning. It will be a great opportunity to see how the fastest growing RV company in the industry does things.

Back at the campground, a large crowd had gathered for a happy hour under the tent we rented for the rally. The crowd included several folks who are staying in Goshen working on the upcoming Escapees RV Club Escapade rally, and included Escapees head honchos Bud and Cathie Carr. We had dinner plans, but we told everybody to have fun, and they seemed to have a pretty good handle on doing just that.

Terry and I, Greg White, Mike and Elaine Loscher, and Stu and Donna McNichol had a nice dinner at North Garden Chinese Buffet, and a lot of fun joking around and enjoying the company of good friends. If there has ever been any encounter of three or more fulltime RVers that did not include food, I’ve never heard about it!

By the time we got back from dinner, visited with our friends Russ and Debbie Davis, who had arrived while we were out and were parked right behind us in their beautiful truck conversion, talked to a few other people, and Miss Terry got her bike ride and walk around the campground done, it was getting late. I wrote my blog and it was bedtime. Where did the day go?

I may not know where the day went, but Bad Nick spent part of it writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Stuck In The Dark Ages. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If you are traveling just for the fun of it, how can you be late getting anywhere?

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It is still incredibly hot here in northern Indiana, and it looks like the heat wave will hang on for several more days, at least.

I love the classic looks of Airstream travel trailers, and even though one would not work for our lifestyle, I can’t pass one without giving it a second look. We enjoyed touring the Airstream factory in Jackson Center, Ohio last year after our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally with our friends Ron and Brenda Speidel, and we were impressed with the way they build them.

Ron is also a big fan of those shiny round topped trailers, and Miss Terry and Brenda kept a careful eye on us all the while we were there to be sure we didn’t sign any purchase contracts.

So when RV Hall of Fame Museum historian Al Hesselbart called yesterday to tell me that a vintage Airstream club had caravanned from the company headquarters in Jackson Center to the museum here in Elkhart, and suggested it might be a good photo opportunity for the Gypsy Journal, I jumped all over it.

The club had originally planned to dry camp overnight in the museum’s parking lot after their tour. But Airstreams do not come with generators to run their air conditioners, and with temperatures in the 90s again they changed their plans and came over to Elkhart Campground to have hookups. So I got to take some pictures of them at the museum and again at the campground.

We drove back up to Michigan to pick up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal yesterday, and the next few days we will be busy getting it stuffed into envelopes and mailed out.

Back at the bus, I kicked off my shoes and took a quick nap. Soon after I woke up, Frank and Debbie Likert from Searcy, Arkansas stopped in to say hello. Debbie is a dedicated blog reader, and it was nice to get to know them and visit for a while.

After our guests left, I sent out the link to the new digital edition of the Gypsy Journal to the folks who subscribed to it, and a couple of e-mails bounced back, so if you subscribed and did not get the link, please contact me. I did get several e-mails from digital subscribers, and they all were very pleased with the new issue. If you have not seen a sample of our digital edition, click this link and check it out http://gypsyjournal.net/blog/digital-edition/.

A couple of readers reported that they could not open the file, and we are working to resolve those issues. In one case it was because he was using an old version of Adobe Reader, and after downloading an updated version from www.adobe.com he had no further problems.

Thought For The Day – When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

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I’ve talked about solar power before in the blog, so I apologize to those who have already read this information. But this time of year it is a subject that comes up in my e-mail often as RVers spend time boondocking in the Southwest. So here we go again – is a solar system a good investment for RVers?

In my opinion, solar is only a very expensive supplement to a generator. And if you are not going to do extensive boondocking, it is a waste of money. Even if you do a lot of boondocking, solar is still only a marginal investment.

When we designed our bus conversion, we built it for extended dry camping. We do a lot of boondocking compared to many RVers. Everything from overnighting in a WallyWorld parking lot or rest area, to weeks, even months, spent living off the grid. Our longest straight boondocking stint was over seven months, and we have done another five month stay without being hooked up anywhere, as well as many of two to three weeks at a time.

We know hardcore boondockers who go to bed as soon as it gets dark and wake up when the sun rises, to take advantage of every moment they can without having to use their lights, so they can extend their time between battery charging. Some actually live like that fulltime and never use a generator. To each his own, but it’s not for us. We want to enjoy our time boondocking, not change our lifestyle to squeak five more amp hours out of our battery bank before we need to recharge.    

We use a lot of power. We live the same way dry camping as we do plugged into a campground’s umbilical cord. Terry makes coffee in the morning, our internet system is up and running, I work for hours on my desktop computer, and we watch television for two or three hours in the evening.

Before we had solar, we ran our generator three to four hours a day. When we added three 100 watt AM Solar panels, we dropped to about 1½ hours a day, cutting our generator time in half. Since then we added two more 120 watt panels. Now we run our generator less than an hour a day. This is based on days with maximum sunshine. A cloudy day may give us very little solar input, requiring more generator use. And yes, we do get cloudy days in the desert.

During peak times, with a clear blue sky and with the sun directly overhead, we have seen over 30 amps going into our battery bank. But that does not happen 24 hours a day. It doesn’t even happen eight hours a day.

Obviously our solar panels don’t do anything overnight. But as the sun rises and begins to hit the panels at an angle, our meters will show a fraction of an amp coming in. As the sun rises higher and more sunlight hints the surface of the panels, it will rise to an amp or two. This increases over a period of a few hours until we reach maximum input. Then, as the sun begins to sink lower in the sky, the amps we are taking in start to drop off, until the sun is low on the horizon and we are down to almost no input.

Our panels are mounted flat on our roof. We could get a few more amps out of our panels if we had them on mounts that we could raise, but to be honest, I’m too lazy to mess with crawling up on the roof to elevate the panels, and I’m too cheap to buy an automatic system to raise them.

We have five solar panels, two state of the art solar charge controllers, a top of the line Magnum Energy inverter, and three of the biggest absorbed glass matt (AGM) batteries they make for RV use. In total we have between $8,000 and $10,000 worth of solar setup, inverter, and batteries, not counting installation. Even when gas was over $3 a gallon, we could buy a lifetime of generator fuel for that much money, and still have the bucks left over to replace our generator if it ever wore out.

So if you want solar and can afford it as a supplement, go for it. But just understand that solar power is not “free.” In fact, it can be darned expensive!

Thought For The Day - Whenever you see a successful business, it is because someone once made a courageous decision.

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