After reading yesterday’s Bad Nick Blog, titled Armed Citizens Fight Back, several readers e-mailed me to ask if I have a concealed weapon carry (CCW) permit, and how fulltime RVers can get a permit to carry a handgun.

I actually have two CCW permits, a non-resident from Arizona, and a permit from South Dakota, our state of domicile. Between the two of them, those permits are honored in a total of 36 states that have reciprocity agreements with the states that issued my permits. On the map below, the states in blue all honor one or both of my permits.

Getting a concealed carry permit depends on your home state. Some states require you to pass a concealed carry course and demonstrate proficiency with your weapon before you can qualify for a permit. Others simply issue a permit to people who meet the necessary requirements.

In South Dakota, it’s as simple as filling out a form and submitting it to the Sheriff in your home county. After a background check, you go to the Sheriff’s office, pay a small fee (under $20 as I recall), and your permit is issued. Check with the Sheriff in your county for specific information.

The other two states most popular with fulltime RVers also issue concealed weapons permits to their residents. For Florida residents, this link to the Florida concealed carry permit requirements will help you determine what is required. Texas residents can click this link to Texas CCW information.

Arizona, Texas, and Utah all issue concealed carry permits to non-residents who meet their requirements to obtain such a permit. Check each individual state’s website for information on non-resident permits.

At our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma, Byron Hibshman will be giving a seminar on Transporting Firearms In Your RV. Byron will also be doing an evening class to qualify for a Utah non-resident CCW permit. You can contact Byron at his Traveling CCW website for class information and fees.

A good guide to traveling with firearms is the book The Traveler’s Guide to the Gun Laws of the 50 States, which has detailed info on every state, and what is legal and not legal in that state. Another good reference is the website Handgunlaw.us. But please be aware that things can change on a daily basis, so if you have a question or concern, check with local authorities before you go.

Making the decision to own and carry a firearm is not one to be made lightly. It brings with it a very heavy responsibility to yourself, to your family, and to society. I always tell people that if they are going to have a gun, please, please, please take a firearms safety course, as well as a course on firearms use in a tactical situation. You must not only know how to shoot, you need to know when to shoot, and when not to.

And then practice regularly with your firearm. It’s one thing to punch holes in paper at a range, but in a real life situation, when the adrenalin is pumping and you’re scared to death, even trained police officers and combat veterans miss a lot more than they ever hit their targets.

Face it, most of us will never need a weapon to defend ourselves, especially in the RV lifestyle. However, the flip side of that coin is that any of us can find ourselves in a desperate situation at any minute. After all, we don’t spend all of our lives in safe, secure RV parks. We all drive down the road, eat in restaurants, and shop in stores. And we never know what the guy behind us in traffic or in the checkout line, or at the next table, will do. Having faced off with armed opponents both with and without a gun in my hand in the past, trust me, it’s much better with the gun!

Thought For The Day – Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is thick hair and a thin body. Please don’t mix them up like you did last year.

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The RV world lost an icon yesterday, when Joe Peterson, co-founder of the Escapees RV Club, passed away. I have been privileged to meet Joe many times over the years at Escapades and other RV events, and he was always a cheerful, friendly, outgoing gentleman.

When Joe and his lovely wife Kay founded the Escapees, way back in 1978, they had no idea what they had started. Over the years they nurtured and guided their little organization until it grew into one of the largest, and in my opinion the very best, RV clubs around. The legacy Joe has left is something the rest of us will enjoy and benefit from for years to come.

This is a loss for all of us, but a double hit for the family; I’m told that Joe’s son-in-law, Bud Carr, also lost his father just a week or so ago. Please keep them in your prayers.  

We had visitors yesterday! Jim and Dee Walter, who are staying at an RV park a couple of miles up the road, stopped in to say hello. We had a good time talking about the RV lifestyle, sharing a joke or two, and comparing our favorite apps on our Droid smart phones.

After Jim and Dee left, Terry and I drove a mile or so south of the campground to Pioneer Park, a county park that includes a small museum, campground, and boat launch on the Peace River. Here are a couple of pictures, one upriver and one downriver. If we get a chance to paddle our kayaks while we’re here, I think we’ll use the launch at Pioneer Park, because the one at our campground is much steeper and looks like it would be harder to use.

We booked two weeks here at Peace River, and while the campground is okay, the town doesn’t have much to offer. Yesterday we had dinner at the Panda Chinese buffet, and it being a small town, we didn’t have high expectations. As it turned out, we were still disappointed! If we could change our stay and get back into the Orlando Thousand Trails, we’d leave and head back up that way. There’s a lot more to do and see in that area. We’d like to get some paddling in while we’re here, but the weather report for next week is looking pretty grim, so I don’t know if we’ll get to do that or not.   

I mentioned smart phone apps above,and if you have an iPhone or iPad, you might be interested in a brand new app that the nice folks at Technomadia just brought out, called Coverage?. This is a simple app that lets you see where you can expect to get 3G and roaming signals in the continental U.S. for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile. Yes, you can go online to the different carriers’ websites and get the same info, but Coverage? allows you to do so offline, wherever you happen to be.

These are the same folks who put out the excellent State Lines app, which no RVer should be without. Check out Coverages?, I think you’ll find it useful. They also publish an e-book titled Answers to the Common Excuses not to Travel Full-Time that I have heard good things about. I need to order a copy and check it out.

One final thought on technical things before I close. I have been having  e-mail problems for quite a while now. Sometimes e-mails never get to me,  other times they show up, but disappear from the server before I can read them, or ones I have saved for future reference go missing. 

While we were in Fort Lauderdale last week, Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, switched me over to G-mail, but since our websites are still hosted on Yahoo for the time being, our e-mail first goes through the Yahoo servers, and that is where we seem to have the problem. So if you e-mailed me and I didn’t get back to you, please try again. Also, I lost some e-mails from folks who asked us to stop by while we were in their area, and I had no way to re-contact them. My apologies.

Bad Nick has been busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled Armed Citizens Fighting Back. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Why be difficult, when with a little bit of effort you can be impossible?

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Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I hope you are having a nice holiday, and are spending it with people you love.

We are at the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground in Bushnell, Florida, and they are having a big dinner at the activity center this afternoon, but we’re going to sit it out. Miss Terry had a nasty cold earlier in the week, and while she says she is feeling somewhat better, yesterday it hit me hard. We don’t want to spread this crud to everybody else. I’m hoping we didn’t pass it on to my nephews and niece when we visited the other day. That would be a heck of a gift to bring them after a 25 year absence, wouldn’t it? They’ll probably want me to stay away another 25 years!

We never even stepped outside yesterday. I slept late, and then took part in a Skype video conference call in the mid-afternoon. I had never used Skype before, but it’s pretty cool. With a webcam and microphone, which most laptop computers come with these days, you can have a face to face visit with any other Skype user, and it’s all free! There was some lag in the video, but still, it was a great way to communicate. I need to get my daughter Tiffany to set up a free Skype account, and then I can see those beautiful little girls of hers more often!

Being a guy, I’m much more of a wimp when I don’t feel good than Terry is. While she was the sickest, she helped load the kayaks on the roof of the Explorer, packed the motorhome for traveling, drove the Explorer from the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve to the Escapees campground, and then got our home on wheels opened up and livable again.

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I, on the other hand, am totally worthless when I don’t feel good. Except for the Skype call yesterday, and a brief visit from George and Starr Sharrer, I spent much of the day napping and feeling sorry for myself. Terry didn’t walk up to the couch and kick me in the butt, but who could have blamed her if she did?

My pal Jaimie Hall Bruzenak sent me an e-mail to tell me that she and writing partner Alice Zyetz are offering a $2 discount off any of their e-books. What a great present for RVers or wannabee RVers! To take advantage of the savings, just click the link on the right hand column of this blog for their book Retire to an RV: The Roadmap to Affordable Retirement Living, or go to their RV Lifestyle Experts website and use coupon code 20RVL.

I also got an e-mail from subscriber Trisha Schmidt, asking me to pass on the word that if anyone lost one of their DIRECTV coastal feeds for the major networks, and had that service prior to May 2010, you need to call the DIRECTV telephone number that deals with RV travelers, 800 769-4635. Trisha said she was on hold over 20 minutes before she spoke to an actual person, but then she had both coastal feeds restored within a few minutes.

Apparently there has been quite a lengthy discussion about this on the Yahoo Boomer group site, and Trisha said that even though she called DIRECTV twice to be sure that she was ‘grandfathered’ in, they still disconnected her West Coast feed the other night.

She told me that DIRECTV’s website has a section for RVers having difficulties at http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/travelers/rvs, and that she was told that if you lose one of your coastal feeds, you only have until November 28th to remedy the problem, and after that it may not be possible to get both feeds restored.

As I said, we’re having a quiet day at home, and that’s just fine with us. We have a lot to be thankful for – overall good health, a loving marriage, wonderful family and friends, and we get to enjoy the greatest lifestyle there is, in the greatest country in the world. It just doesn’t get any better than that!

How about you? Where are you, how are you spending the day, and what are you especially thankful for this holiday season?

Thought For The Day – To know when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship.

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Yesterday was another short driving day for us, just 77 miles! I could get used to this laid back lifestyle!

We left Round Top Campground in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania just before 10 a.m. , got on U.S. Highway 15 and followed it south to Frederick, Maryland. U.S. 15 is a nice, divided four lane highway that crosses through some very pretty country. At Frederick, we picked up Interstate 270 and followed it about 30 miles to Interstate 495, better known as the Beltway around the Washington, D.C. area.

I had hoped that on a Sunday morning, traffic wouldn’t be too bad, but I was wrong. It got noticeably busier from Frederick south, and as soon as we got onto the Beltway, it was petty much bumper to bumper all the way to College Park, a distance of about 9 miles. We got off in College Park, and then had just over a mile of surface streets to drive before we arrived at Cherry Hill Park, less than 90 minutes after we hit the road. Did I say I could get used to this laid back lifestyle?

Here is our Winnebago in our site at Cherry Hill, our home for the next week while we tour Washington.

Cherry Hill is the most expensive RV park we’ve ever stayed in, at $58 a night (less 10% discount for FMCA members), for a back-in, full hookup 50 amp RV site with cable TV. But, I think it’s the best location for visiting Washington. We can buy tickets for the Metro in the park office, and a city bus comes through every half hour and delivers us right to the station.

We know folks who stay at outlying county parks, private campgrounds, and Elks and Moose lodges, then drive to a Metro station and park there, but for us, the convenience is well worth the extra cost. I know my motorhome and van are in a secure place, and all I have to do is get on the bus and go.

Once we were hooked up and settled in, we drove to a nearby Five Guys for lunch, and then went in search of a Best Buy to get a spare battery for my Olympus digital camera. The GPS took us several miles to Wheaton, Maryland, and then when we returned to College Park, we saw a Best Buy just down the road from the campground! Terry got a chuckle out of that.

We stopped at a grocery store for a couple of items, then came back to the campground and spent the rest of the day at home, just relaxing before we start playing tourist again today.

We weren’t hungry when dinnertime rolled around, but about 7:30 p.m. we wanted a treat, so we walked across the road to the campground’s Conference Center, which includes a TV room, pool, hot tub, laundry, and cafe. We ordered ice cream sundaes, and were shocked at how big they were. This is a “one scoop” sundae!

Terry originally ordered a two scoop sundae, but had to cancel that after she saw how big it was! Even so, there was no way I could finish mine. It must have had a pint of ice cream in it, along with whipped cream, nuts, cherries, and sprinkles. And then we were shocked at the price – just $3.80 for two of these monster desserts!

I had several blog comments and e-mails from people wanting to see me in my new hats, so here you go. But don’t blame me if your kids get born cross eyed or something!

Just like Gettysburg, there is so much to see and do here that we know we can only scratch the surface this trip. But we’re looking forward to visiting several of the museums and monuments we missed on our last visit. It’s going to be a fun week!

Thought For The Day – I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days get together and gang up on me all at once.

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It rained all night Saturday night, and when we woke up yesterday morning, we were greeted by a gray drizzle that lasted all day long. The temperature never got over the mid-60s, and heavy clouds hung low over the rolling hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We drove back to the Giant Center and finished setting up our vendor booth for the Hershey RV Show. I wanted to check out the room where I’ll be doing my seminars, but it was locked. So we trudged all the way around the main level of the stadium to the show office to see if we could get inside. We had to wait fifteen minutes or so while the lady there tried to straighten out a problem for another vendor, and then were told to go back to the Registration Tent where we were yesterday.

There we found the person in charge of speakers and seminar rooms, who told us that the room was indeed locked, and that we couldn’t get inside to know what equipment I will need for my seminars. As far as she knew, all that the rooms had in them were screens, so I’ll have to use my own LCD projector and laptop for the seminars. I also got her to agree that during my thirteen hour seminar on Sunday, which I described in yesterday’s blog, I can get two potty breaks and a short nap.

Once we had the booth set up, we drove back to the Verizon store where we got our new phones the other day. I had not been able to get my e-mail on my Android phone and needed help. Apparently there was some glitch in our e-mail program, which originates from Yahoo, which hosts our websites, that would not let the Droid in to access my e-mail.

A very nice Verizon tech named Jaimie Zamora worked on the problem for over two hours, eventually calling Yahoo’s technical support. Between Jaimie and the Yahoo tech, they finally got the problem figured out, and now I can get my e-mail on the go. I get upwards of 200 e-mails a day, a lot of it junk that folks insist on forwarding to me, and my big reason for having a smart phone is to manage it when I’m away from my desk. Otherwise, it can pile up and backlog pretty quickly. I really appreciated all of Jaimie’s hard work!

The Giant Center is right across the street from Hersheypark, an amusement park that is popular with families from all over the east coast. My buddy Greg White would love this place, because he never quite grew up, and loves riding roller coasters. I never grew up either, but I never had the stomach for those contraptions, even as a kid. So if we’re ever here together, Greg will just have to ride alone. I’ll stay on the ground and eat all of his cotton candy!

Can you stand one more picture of the neat old buildings we keep seeing in this area? I hope so, because here you go. We spotted this handsome old farmhouse near Hershey the other, and really admired it.

There are so many beautiful old buildings around here that we are gawking like typical tourists everywhere we go. Don’t be surprised if I slip a few more pictures in the blog before we leave the area. For folks who live in the east, places like this may not be any big thing, but after spending most of our adult lives in the west, where there aren’t nearly as many structures like this to be seen, they’re pretty awesome.

After we finished at the Verizon store, we grabbed a quick dinner at a Chinese buffet we had discovered when we were in Harrisburg a few years ago, teaching at Life on Wheels. Then we made a quick stop at WalMart, and headed back to the Thousand Trails campground, where we spent the evening inside the motorhome, printing out a supply of our different camping guides to sell during the RV show.

Bad Nick doesn’t like going outside in the rain and the cold, so he stayed home yesterday to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled Screaming Kids. Check it out and leave a comment.

Hopefully, today it will clear up a bit and we’ll see some sunshine.

Thought For The Day – How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.

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