Friday morning we were up early again, serving coffee and donuts to our rally attendees, saying goodbye, and wishing them a safe trip to wherever they are headed next. There were lots of hugs as RVers wished us well, congratulated us on a great rally experience, and promised to see us somewhere down the road.

By noon, most of the RVs had departed from the Yuma Fairgrounds, usually after making a stop at the dump station on their way out, to empty their gray and black tanks. The place sure looked empty after being filled with motorhomes, fifth wheels, and travel trailers for two weeks, first for the Arizona Good Sam rally and then our Western Gypsy Gathering rally.

We waited until everybody else had pulled out before we made our trip to the dump station, and then we parked in the same back corner of the fairgrounds where we had been before the rally. As soon as we were situated, an installer from Redlands Truck & RV started installing a set of Koni shock absorbers on our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage. Our motorhome rides pretty good already, but the new Koni shocks should make it even better. Thanks Keith Shumaker and crew, for your great service! Redlands was one of our rally vendors, and I was really impressed with them, as were many rally attendees who kept them busy with installations.

Once Rob, the Redlands mechanic, was finished with our rig, Terry and I, Greg and Jan White, and Mike and Elaine Loscher went to an early dinner at Chretin’s, a wonderful Mexican restaurant that Miss Terry pronounced one of the best she has been to in our travels around the country. That’s saying a lot! We had a pleasant meal, just unwinding, rehashing the rally events, comparing notes on what we did right, what we did wrong, and how we can make it better next year.

Back at the fairgrounds, we said our goodbyes to Mike and Elaine, who are leaving early today, bade Greg and Jan goodnight, and headed inside for a quiet evening just trying to let the kinks and aches seep out of our bodies.

We were in bed much earlier than usual, turning off our cell phones and vowing not to open the curtains today until at least noon!

It’s been a busy week, a great rally, and we’re sure glad it’s over! Thanks to everybody who came, and especially to our hardworking volunteers!

Thought For The Day – Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

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

I’ve been pretty lazy the last couple of weeks, but it’s time to get into work mode. I have an awful lot to get done between now and our rally in Yuma, which is only five weeks away.

I’m trying to develop two new seminars for the rally, one on the interesting stories we have come across in cemeteries (it may sound strange or ghoulish to some people, but we like exploring cemeteries), and one on blogging for RVers. Our pals Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour do an excellent seminar called Every RVer Needs A Blog that gets rave reviews, but they can’t make it to the Yuma rally, and I have had so may requests for a blogging seminar that I have to come up with one, even though it won’t hold a candle to the Geeks’.

I also need to get the next issue of the Gypsy Journal ready to go to the printer. We need to have it printed and mailed in the next couple of weeks. And then, of course, there are all of the rally preparations that still need to get finished. So it’s nose to the grindstone time.

I spent a lot of time yesterday fielding e-mails and telephone calls from vendors for the rally. I know it’s human nature to put things off until the last minute, I’m guilty of it myself all too often. But, some of these folks just don’t get the big picture. A couple of vendors told us they wanted to come to the rally months ago, and we sent them vendor application forms, telling them that registration was on a first come basis.

We have followed up with them a couple of times, and they assured us they would get their registrations in, but they never did. Now that the rally is coming up fast, those same vendors are upset because their competitors got in ahead of them, or because there are no vendor seminar time slots left. It takes months to plan one of these events, and we can’t wait until the week before the rally to start on it.

Speaking of rally seminars, another request we have had a lot is for a geocaching seminar. I’ve arranged for not only a seminar on this fascinating hobby, but also a follow-up field exercise to actually go out on the fairgrounds property to look for caches we have hidden for the rally. Gene Teggatz will also be doing a seminar on Adding Solar To Your RV, which is another much requested topic.

By yesterday afternoon, I needed to get out and take a break from the rally preparations, so we dropped some bundles of sample papers off at local RV parks, and then took Terry’s mom and dad, Pete and Bess Weber, to dinner at Streets of New York, one of our favorite pizza places in this area.

As the host was showing us to our seats, Ed and Joan Mikolajczak said hello to me. They were there having dinner and looked up as we were walking past their table. They have been to our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally the last two years, and it was nice to see them again. It seems like no matter where we go in this great land of ours, we run into somebody we know.

Fulltime RVers are like the population of a small town, where everybody knows everybody. The only difference is that our “town” keeps changing location all the time!

While I was out goofing off, Bad Nick stayed home to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled A Different Standard. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

We’re on the road today, headed for Yuma to check out some things at the fairgrounds for our Gypsy Gathering rally in a few weeks. One of the buildings that we thought we would be able to use is not going to be available, but they have a couple of other ones we need to look at before we can decide which seminars will be in which locations, and where our vendors, registration, and evening events will be held.

We already have more RVs registered for the Yuma rally than we had at our Eastern rally in Ohio last fall, and every day more registrations are coming in. I think it’s going to be a big one, folks!

We have a good lineup of vendors, selling just about anything you could want to put in, on, or under your RV. Some of our latest vendor registrations include SMI Brake Controllers for towed cars, Magna Shade windshield sun screens, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Lightblasters LED lights, Phil and Ann’s RV Service, and classes to obtain a non-resident Utah concealed weapons permit, to name just a few.

We have also added several new seminars to the schedule, but I can’t put them on the website until we get back from Yuma, and know what buildings we’ll have available.

I did add a poster to our Rally Registration Page for the Michael Hargis concert Wednesday night right after our pizza party. Scroll down the page, and the poster is between the registration links and the schedule. We’re really looking forward to Michael’s show!

I’ve had a lot of folks offering to volunteer at the rally, and we appreciate it. We will need help with parking, registration, seminar room hosts, door prize runners, morning coffee and donuts, pizza party servers, and I’m sure some other stuff I’ve forgotten. We also need somebody who will be in Yuma a week or two before the rally who is willing to go out and solicit door prizes from local merchants. If you want to take on any of these chores, send me an e-mail and I’ll add you to the list.

One group we’ll really miss at this year’s rally are the Texas Trio; Richard King, Mark Didelot, and Manny Esparza, who have helped us with parking at the past two or three Arizona rallies. Those dogs are hanging out in Florida this winter, and I hope the mosquitoes bite the heck out of them! Not that I want to see them suffer, I’d just like to watch those little winged bloodsuckers try to fly a straight line after sucking down some of the 100 proof fluid those guys call blood!

Richard and Mark gave me a call from the Florida Keys yesterday, where they were dining at one of our favorite seafood restaurants on Marathon Key. They just wanted to rub it in that they were in paradise and I’m stuck in chilly Arizona, where we saw snow on the mountains, from Apache Junction yesterday!

Bad Nick was so hurt by the Texas Trio’s deserting us that he posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled So What Does Life Really Mean? Check it out and leave a comment. 

Thought For The Day – Why does a slight tax increase cost me $200, but a major tax  decrease save me thirty cents?

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

We spent most of the last couple of days wrapping up the paperwork from our recent Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, and logging in all of the subscriptions we sold there.

At each of our rallies, we ask attendees to complete a feedback form, telling us not only what we did right, but what we could improve as well. Looking over the rally feedback forms, it seems like overall folks had a good time and went away happy.

One frequent comment is that they like the small laid back feeling of the rally. This is something we strive for at all of our events, because that’s the kind of rally we enjoy ourselves. We’ve been to too many of the huge mega-rallies where there are thousands of RVs, and nobody knows anybody. A lot of folks tell us our rallies are more like a family reunion.

It also seems like people really appreciate the variety of educational seminars we offer. Mac McCoy told the audience at the rally that our events are the “new Life on Wheels,” and Joe Kieva agreed, which was a great compliment to Terry and me. As core Life on Wheels (LOW) instructors, these were the guys we looked up to when we went to LOW as new RVers ourselves. Getting to know them personally years later when we became instructors ourselves only increased our admiration for them, so their comments on our rallies are high praise.

Writing about the rally in their RV Notebook blog, Joe and Vicki Kieva said in part “The Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally is over. And it was a good one. Great location, informative seminars, relaxed, friendly atmosphere. Nick and Terry Russell know what it takes to put together a successful rally. They have experienced rallies as attendees, vendors and seminar presenters. So now, as rally producers, they understand the expectations, needs and interests of rally participants.”

Our vendors also liked our idea of having them inside, in the same building where we held registration and served morning coffee and donuts. It really helped their sales!

Of course, we can’t please everybody. One lady wrote that she did not appreciate me telling her on two different occasions that she could not bring her dog into the seminar buildings. We announced several times that only service dogs were allowed in the buildings, but some people just don’t get it.

Another complaint was that there were not enough full hookup RV sites at the fairgrounds, and that two remained unused through the rally. We reserved the few full hookup sites for handicapped attendees and those with special needs. Some folks did not show up, even though they had registered and paid, but we did not want to give their sites away and then have them arrive and not have a place to park them. There were also a few of us on full hookup sites who arrived a week before the rally began to make preparations, and who stayed after the rally ended to handle post-rally details.

And we had a couple of comments that there was not enough free time to socialize. While we usually have a lot of impromptu get togethers around the RVs during our rallies, the weather did not cooperate very well for that this year. But while we offer a lot of activities for those who want them, nobody has to attend each and every one. That’s why we had a hospitality area in the vendor building, with tables and chairs where people could just sit and visit, play cards, and get to know one another.

We keep learning with every rally, and try to implement those lessons to make future events even better.     

With this year’s Eastern rally behind us, it’s time to start focusing on our Western Gypsy Gathering, which will be March 8-12 in Yuma, Arizona. We have made a change to our vendor policy at future rallies, starting with the Yuma event. In the past, we have only allowed one vendor per type of product, but we have had so many requests for more vendors that, after talking to the vendors at Ohio, we have decided to start allowing vendors in who sell competing products by a different manufacturer. So while we may have a vendor selling PressurePro tire monitoring systems, for example, we may also have a vendor selling Doran systems.

One final word on our rallies before I close this blog. We have set the location and dates for our next Eastern rally. It will be August 30 to September 3, 2010 at Elkhart Campground in Elkhart, Indiana. This will be two weeks before the Escapees rally in Goshen, which will allow vendors and attendees to come to our rally, then have a week off before they go in to Escapade.

And for those who have complained about not having full hookups at our rallies, we will have both 50 and 30 amp full hookups available by pre-registration, as well as sites with just water and electric. This is a departure from our previous rallies, and we’re looking forward to seeing how folks like it.

Thought For The Day – Drive carefully! Remember, it’s not only a car that can be recalled by its maker.