Every time we come back to our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona to visit my daughter Tiffany and her family, poor Terry suffers from terrible allergies. When we lived here it wasn’t as much of a problem, but having been gone for almost eleven years, she has lost  whatever immunity she had to the local pollen. So her eyes are red and itchy, she is sneezing and coughing, and she’d surely shoot me if I tried to take her picture right now.

We’re at 6500 feet here, and a few miles up the road, Pinetop-Lakeside is over 7000 feet, so we both feel the effects of the altitude quite a bit. I keep telling Tiffany that she’d be much happier living somewhere else like, oh, say Aransas Pass or Rockport, Texas, and that we’d visit her much more often there.

Yesterday was another windy day, and since Miss Terry was feeling under the weather, we stayed home and I spent the day working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal. This will be our Eleventh Anniversary Issue, how time flies! The brainchild I conceived sitting at our kitchen table when we were trying to decide if we could earn a living on the road has grown every year, thanks to the support of so many of our loyal readers. We feel very blessed to be able to make our living in such a fun way.

Except for a potty break or two, and stepping outside to show the propane delivery guy where our LP tank is, I was at my desk all day, until it was time for dinner.

In the evening, my cousin Rocky Frees sent me a link to a newspaper obituary for my uncle Charles Saxton, who was killed in action during World War II. Rocky had found the link on a Google News Archive search, and if he wasn’t almost 1800 miles away in Muskegon, Michigan, I’d kiss Rocky right on his face! My genealogical research on my dad’s side of the family has been nearly impossible, but within just a few minutes of searching on the website, I found my grandfather’s death notice, as well as those for two of my dad’s sisters and one of my brothers, and a ton of other information. I knew I should have been working on the paper, but I couldn’t resist logging onto Ancestry.com and inputting all of this new information, which in turn led me to even more data! I could have stayed at it for hours, but I had a blog to write.

After I wrote in yesterday’s blog that I would be sponsoring people to join the Elkhart, Indiana Moose lodge during our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, I had a couple of e-mails from ladies asking if the Elks and Moose will accept women as members. Yes, I have sponsored several women to both organizations.

Today I’ll be back at it, but if Terry feels any better we may sneak away for an hour or two to go into town and visit Tiffany. I have grandkids to snuggle with, and I haven’t been near a Dairy Queen in weeks.

Thought For The Day – Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally! 

The Arizona Good Sam Rally starts today, so yesterday we spent some time checking out how they were getting everybody in off the street and parked. Since this is the first time for both us and Good Sam to have a rally at the Yuma Fairgrounds, there is a learning curve. 

32^nd Street in front of the fairgrounds is a very busy road, and it is important to get everybody into the big parking lot in front of the fairgrounds as quickly as possible so we don’t tie up traffic. We have come up with what we think is a pretty good plan, and it’s basically the same thing the Good Sam group is using. So far, so good.

Several vendors who are here for the Good Sam rally will be staying over for our event, and I chatted with several of them as they were setting up their booths yesterday. They all seemed enthusiastic, since the Good Sam rally has about 170 RVs registered, and we have about 215 registered, and quite a few more who have told us they will be here. Not to mention all of the snowbirds who are wintering locally, and will be coming in on day passes.

We are discovering that while the fairgrounds assured us they could easily provide power for over 200 RVs, that is pretty iffy. We will have limited electric for the majority of RVs, but probably not for everybody. If you have solar panels, they’ll get a good workout during the rally! Of course, rally veterans don’t worry about things like that. They come into a fairgrounds aware that they are not staying at a full service campground. After all, that’s why we have self-contained RVs, right?

Besides getting underfoot with the Good Sam crowd, yesterday I put the finishing touches on a new seminar, called Cemetery Stories, in which I will be sharing some of the interesting tales we have discovered in cemeteries during our travels around the country.

I also worked on a second new seminar, Blogging For RVers. I really wish my pals Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour were going to be on hand, because they have such an excellent presentation on blogging, but they are busy in Florida this winter. So I am cobbling together a seminar to at least give beginning bloggers and those who are just getting interested in blogging, some pointers.

Bill and Mabel Becker stopped by to say hello and visited with us for a while, and they’ll be back today to pick up the rally T-shirts once they get delivered, so they can start folding them and getting them ready to sell.

Once RV tech Phil Botnick arrived and got settled in for the Good Sam rally, he came by and checked out our Atwood water heater to see if he could find anything that may have caused our recent problems. Phil is about the best RV tech you’ll find anywhere, with years of experience, and he has handled many little problems for us over the years, and a couple of big ones too.

Phil cleaned out of some of sand the blown into the compartment by all of the wind here in Yuma, tested the pressure from our LP tank, and then adjusted the water heater’s fuel/oxygen ratio. Phil will be staying over for our rally, handling any emergency repairs necessary to keep folks up and running.

Thought For The Day – I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take something for it.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally