Yesterday morning Daryl and Judy Patterson stopped over to say hello and goodbye as we were getting ready to leave Elkhart Campground.  We only had a minute to chat before they left so we could get everything unhooked and ready to take off.

Experienced RVers like Daryl and Judy know that if you get preoccupied while doing the hooking up or unhooking chores, mistakes can easily happen. We’ve all had it happen at one time or another… somebody comes by and you get to talking, and the next thing you know, you’re pulling away from the RV site and forgot to unplug your electric power cord, or to put your tow vehicle’s transmission in neutral. Mistakes like that can be not only embarrassing, but expensive too!

After saying goodbye to Bob and Gita Patel, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, Greg and Jan White, and everybody else in sight, we pulled out of the campground a couple of minutes after 10 a.m. and headed east on Interstate 80.

Across northern Indiana, Interstates 80 and 90 run together as the Indiana Toll Road, and it’s a route we’ve been over many, many times. A little over an hour later we crossed into Ohio, after paying our $11.10 toll to the good people of Indiana, or at least to the private company that leases the toll road from the good people of Indiana.

We got onto the Ohio Turnpike, and stopped at the Fallen Timbers Service Plaza near Swanton for fuel. The price of diesel was three cents a gallon more than at the trucks stops off the turnpike, but it was easy access to the fuel pump, and I didn’t have to wait for anybody ahead of me. Since I only needed 75 gallons or so, it wasn’t worth the hassle of paying a toll, getting off, fueling up, getting a new toll ticket, and getting back on the turnpike. I like saving a buck or two just as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said for convenience too.

We made good time crossing Ohio, with a gentle tail wind helping. My Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor said we got 8.4 miles per gallon between Elkhart and the service plaza where we stopped for lunch, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. That was running at 64 miles per hour with the cruise control on. 63 to 65 seems to be the sweet spot for our Winnebago, where we get the best combination of fuel economy and power.

I like the service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike. They are clean, have lots of room to park a big rig, good restaurants, and some even have back-in RV sites with electric for a few bucks a night!

I wish I could say I liked the turnpike too. Most of it was actually pretty good, but west of Cleveland we ran into a long stretch of very rough road, and I sure appreciated the Koni shocks that Redlands Truck and RV installed on our motorhome last year! The toll all the way across Ohio on Interstate 80 for our two axle motorhome and van was $31.75. Ouch!

We crossed into Pennsylvania, and immediately the road got better, and the terrain more hilly. Pennsylvania is one of my favorite states, in terms of beauty. The interstate in western Pennsylvania is a good road, and trees crowd right down to the edge of the highway, with occasional breaks to see the pretty countryside.

We passed lots of pretty farmland as we drove east.

Before long we were in what folks back east call mountains, though my friends in Arizona might not agree. But the hills did take their toll on our mileage. We dropped down to 6.9 MPG.

Here is a nice shot of the Allegheny River that Miss Terry took as we passed over it. I didn’t even snivel about the bridge because the scenery was so pretty!

We had planned on about a 300 mile day, but that put us right at the state line, and it was still early, so we kept driving. We decided to spend the night at the Flying J in Brookville, and by the time we got there, I was getting tired. But they only have four designated RV parking sites, one of which is marked handicapped. There were big RVs in two of the other sites, with the one between them empty. But the way they were parked, it would have been a very tight squeeze to get in between them, if we could have made it at all. We checked out the truck parking area, which was about half full, but we really don’t like to use them if we can avoid it. They tend to be pretty noisy, and we don’t want to take a space that a trucker might need.

So we decided to push on another 42 miles to the WalMart SuperCenter at Clearfield, where we arrived just as the sun was starting to set. Miss Terry had called ahead to make sure RV parking was permitted, and the nice lady she talked to said no problem, just park on the outer perimeter of the parking lot.

Here is an example of what not to do when you boondock at a commercial parking lot. He had both of his slides out, his TV antenna up, and notice the leveling jacks down! 

This fifth wheel was just as bad – jacks down, slides, out TV antenna up. They look like they’re camping! In both cases, their slide rooms are extended right into the roadway where cars are passing close by.

When we are parked like we are here, with our bedroom slide facing the outer perimeter, I’ll run the slide out at bedtime to make it easier to get in and out of bed. But we wait until bedtime, and we never extend our living room slide or jacks. That’s just poor manners.

We covered 420 miles yesterday, which was quite a bit more than we had originally planned, but the good news is that today we only have about 150 miles to go to get to the Thousand Trails preserve in Hershey, thanks to a a different route that the man on duty at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center recommended. So we should arrive and be settled in fairly early in the day.

Thought For The Day – Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

I got a rude awakening early yesterday morning, when my dream about having my very own harem was interrupted by a large, cold drop of water plopping down onto my forehead. Instantly, Brittany, Bambi, Tabitha, Tanya, and the rest of my “girls” disappeared and I bolted upright in bed, just in time for another dollop of water to hit the top of my head! What the heck was that!

It had rained all night long, but it wasn’t a hard driving rain, more just a gentle rain that tapped on the roof of our motorhome and lulled us to sleep. By now Terry was also awake, because who can sleep with all of those gorgeous dream girls scampering around, and a groggy, naked, chubby hubby flailing around and splashing water everywhere?

Investigation showed that the water was dripping from the top of our bedroom slide, which really ticked us off, because we had brand new slide topper awnings installed in Arizona in February, and the Winnebago factory in Forest City, Iowa installed new seals around both the bedroom and living room slides less than a a month ago.

We ran the bedroom slide in and Terry found that the top of the slide had a lot of gunk like mud, wet leaves, and this used rivet that had apparently been left there by the techs at Winnebago. And to think, we went to the factory because we wanted the professionals to do the job!

It appears that this stuff was pressing against the slide seal and channeling the water inside, because once it was cleaned up and the top of the slide wiped dry, we put it back out and there was no more leaking. I’ll be calling the folks at Winnebago Monday morning to report the problem, because the new seals are covered by warranty, just in case of a repeat performance. 

In Friday’s blog on Michigan Back Roads, I wrote that we were not able to take a picture of the vintage police car at the courthouse in Paw Paw, Michigan. Blog reader Terry McKnight e-mailed me a picture of the car, with it’s huge fender mounted red light, and old style blue “bubble gum” light on the roof. Thanks Terry!

I have a couple of rally updates for those of you who are coming to our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally next week.

As I reported a few days ago, I really goofed on the space we would need for our vendors and seminars, and believed the buildings here at Elkhart Campground were big enough. However, I was counting the number of vendors we had registered, and overlooked the fact that several of those vendors needed two or even three booth spaces. I should have been keeping better track of things and cut off vendor registrations before we had so many, but I dropped the ball.  I have to talk to some of the vendors and see if any of them are willing to work with us, either in taking a smaller space, or possibly becoming an outside vendor.  

Even so, there won’t be enough room for all of the seminars, and our evening entertainment. So we are renting a huge tent used for special events, similar to what they use at the big show in Quartzsite, or at the Winnebago Grand National really in Iowa. These are not ideal solutions, and I really feel terrible for messing up so badly, and I’ve lost sleep over it, but we’ll make the best of a bad situation, and hope folks will understand. What else can we do?

We have also had to cancel our Wednesday night pizza party, which is a mainstay of all of our rallies. The local Domino’s Pizza has closed its doors, and none of the other pizza shops in town (or a combination of them) can handle an order the size of ours for the rally and assure us that the pizzas will arrive on time, hot and fresh. Dominos has delivery down to to a science and has always come through for us, but the other shops in town get a deer in the headlights look when we tell them that we need 125+ pizzas, all delivered at the same time, and all hot and ready to eat. If we can’t do it right, we won’t do it. Our attendees deserve better than that.

For those coming to the rally who want to join the Moose, I picked up a big stack of applications Friday at the Elkhart lodge, and I will be happy to sponsor you. The cost is reasonable, and Moose members can take advantage of overnight parking opportunities at lodges coast to coast. And the Moose is a wonderful organization that does a lot of great community work, and yes, ladies are welcome to join too!

The dues at the local Elks lodge are very high, and for anyone wanting to join that fine organization, I’d recommended the lodges in Gila Bend and Ajo, Arizona, which are much more reasonable.

While I was fretting over leaking slide rooms and RV rallies, Bad Nick was busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled Potpourri. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are too busy living our fears.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

When they stopped working for the day on Tuesday, Chris, the tech assigned to our motorhome, told us that he had a couple of hours left on it, but he hoped to have us out by about 9 a.m. the next morning. So once again we rolled out of bed yesterday morning before the chickens, and at 7 sharp he came knocking on the door to pull the coach inside.

Well, we all know that nothing goes according to plan, and 9 came and went, as did 10. Finally, at 11:30 he came out to tell us that he had the new springs installed for our HWH leveling jacks, but there was still a very tiny leak in one spot in the bedroom slide that he was trying to resolve. No problem, we went into town and dropped off some things at the post office, then grabbed a quick lunch and headed back to the service facility.

More time came and went, and finally, a little before 1 p.m. Chris came out and took us back into the shop to show us where he was at. There is one spot on the bedroom slide that, when run through the high pressure water test bay that Winnebago uses, allows a drop or two of water to get inside. But if he just touched that spot on the gasket with his finger, it stopped. Since the amount of water pressure they use to test with is much more than any kind of a rainstorm outside of a hurricane, and it comes from several directions at once, I really don’t think it will be a problem, and I told Chris that.

He agreed, but Chris and Mike, the service advisor, wanted to be sure, so they called in their supervisor, who thought that as soon as the stiff new rubber gasket relaxes a bit, it will probably seal completely. They also made a notation on our records, so if it does ever becomes a problem, we’re covered under their parts and service warranty.

Terry and I were dreading the bill, because they worked on our rig for two half days, and two full days, at $100 an hour shop rate, plus parts. In all, we had new slide seals installed on both slide-outs, both slide-outs adjusted, the fiberglass roof inspected and resealed, our air compressor manifold adjusted, the small floor slide over the stepwell in front of the passenger seat fixed, the front door adjusted (it’s amazing how much you can mess up a door when you use it to break a burglar’s wrist!), the springs in all four of our jacks replaced, and several other adjustments to different things. They also tried to determine why our big power awning is so slow, and deduced that the motor is weak, but that part is obsolete, and no replacement motor is available.

To be honest, we expected to have to fork out somewhere between $4,000 and $4,500, based upon our experience with other RV repair shops. So we were delighted to be handed a bill for $3340. And that also included six nights of free camping at Camp Winnebago!

We are very pleased with Winnebago’s factory service. When you consider the fact that we showed up at the tail end of Grand National Rally week with no appointment, and had a long list of things that needed done, while they had all of those rigs in for service during and after rally, we felt that they did an excellent job of getting us in and taken care of.

And yes, it sounds like we have been spending a lot of money on the RV, but as I said before, a lot of that is because the original owner neglected maintenance so badly. If he would have been taking care of things as needed, a lot of this wouldn’t have been necessary. Like the old mechanic used to say, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.” Still, we bought the coach for something like $30,000 less than any comparable one on the market that we saw, and we still feel that we got a very good deal.

We pulled out of Forest City about 1:30 and drove north into Minnesota on Interstate 35, then hooked up with Interstate 90 and took it east into Wisconsin. We jumped around on a couple of doglegs and eventually got onto State Route 21 eastbound to Interstate 39. Once on I-39, we took it north to Wausau, where we dry camped for the night at a Gander Mountain store, having covered 320 miles.

Today we’ll head over to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and follow U.S. 2 along the Lake Michigan shoreline to the Mackinac Bridge. That is one structure that has really scared me in the past, so I’m not sure if I’ll be driving across, or hiding in the bedroom sniveling, while Miss Terry does the driving. Time will tell.

Thought For The Day – Blessed are the flexible for they will not be bent out of shape.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Wednesday was a long, hard day on the road. We covered over 440 miles, and some of those roads were narrow, rough, and uncomfortable.

Then we had a hard day’s night at the city owned Leach Park Campground in Spencer, Iowa. It was humid and sticky hot, and the electric power was terrible, cutting out every few minutes. We finally decided to heck with it, turned off just about everything electrical in the motorhome, opened up our windows, and put our three roof vent fans on high sped, just to move some air.

About midnight it began to rain, and a few minutes later a strong thunderstorm hit us. We have been in some really nasty storms in our lives, and I even survived a tornado once, but this one was probably the worst storm either of us could remember. All night long the thunder boomed, lighting was hitting close all around us, and the rain just poured down. We had to close all of the windows and the roof vents, because rain was blowing in from every direction, which turned the motorhome into a sauna.

We also discovered that the leak around our living room slide, which Duncan RV in Elkhart had said was fixed, is still leaking, along with several new leaks that came from the driving rain. To be honest, it was coming down so hard, I think it would have even gotten wet inside a bank vault. We brought in the living room slide, both to try to minimize the leaking, and to present a smoother profile to the wind.

We were up most of the night, because it was impossible to sleep. Since we were parked on grass, near a river, we debated whether we should just unhook and drive to the nearby WalMart, where we’d at least be parked on pavement. But with so much lighting all around us, we were worried about going out to unhook the water and electrical connections.

We debated firing up the generator so we’d at least be able to run our air conditioner, but since we were plugged into shore power, I wasn’t sure if the automatic transfer switch would allow us to get power from the generator. At one point, I told Miss Terry that I had had worse nights in my life, but back then people were shooting at me!

Finally, dawn broke, and the rain stopped for a few minutes. I looked outside and we were surrounded by pools of water. I knew that every minute we stayed on the grass brought us closer to sinking, as more rain was on the way.

I started the Winnebago to let it air up, then went outside to unhook the water and electric connections, slogging through water over the tops of my shoes. While I was waiting for the leveling jacks to come up, I tried to move the van out of the way, and the rear wheels promptly sunk. Hmm… that’s not a good sign. If the van got stuck, I knew that there was no way our heavy diesel coach was going to get through the soft ground in front of us, to make it to the road.

The ground seemed a bit firmer behind the rig, so I had  Terry guide me as I very carefully backed across the grass to a gravel roadway. Once I got the RV moving, there was no way I was going to stop until I was on something solid. I left some deep ruts in the grass, but I made it, and I sure felt better once I had that hard packed road under me!

Then it was time to get the van free. With me pushing, and Terry gingerly using the throttle and transmission to rock it, we managed to get it moving and back onto firm ground.

We were lucky. These folks were parked in an RV site right in front of us, and this huge tree limb came down, narrowly missing their trailer, but taking the side view mirror off their truck! I guess they were lucky too, it could have been much worse!

We hooked the van up to our Blue Ox tow bar as it started to rain again, and set out eastward on U.S. Highway 18. We ran in scattered rain showers all the way to Forest City, 91 miles away, but at least the wind had died down.

We arrived at the Winnebago Visitors Center and were assigned a back-in site with good, reliable 30 amp electric, and then walked down the hill to the Customer Service building to put our name on the list for a time slot. It looks like our fast trip across the country will pay off, because we were given an 11:30 a.m. standby time for today. That means that as soon as another job gets finished, we’ll get called in. If we don’t get in today, I’m sure we will on Monday. Since we were originally told it might be Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before we got on the list, we’re glad we rushed to get here.

Once we were we parked and hooked up, our pals Ron and Brenda Speidel came by to give us much needed hugs, and to show us around the grounds. The annual Winnebago-Itasca Grand National Rally ends today, and they have 1,750 Winnebagos and Itascas of every model here for all of the fun. We have never seen so many Winnies, all in one place!

We even saw a rare vintage Winnebago fifth wheel!

Mike and Elaine Loscher, wonderful friends who have helped us so much with our Gypsy Gathering rallies over the years, are also here, and later in the afternoon we went to dinner with them. It was a treat to have some quiet time with this sweet couple, away from all the hustle and bustle of a rally.

Terry and I were worn out from the fast trip across the country, 950 miles in 2 1/2 days, combined with our long, scary night. Back at the motorhome, we felt like zombies. I wrote my blog post, downloaded some photos from our digital cameras, and Terry caught up on e-mail. We sure were looking forward to getting into that bed and getting some sleep!

Thought For The Day – Daughters hold your hand for a little while, but they hold your heart for a lifetime.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

It’s entertaining just to look around you in Las Vegas. Not just for the fancy casinos, but some of the people you see on the sidewalks and in the restaurants seem to be from some other world. And not one I’d want to visit!

I’m not sure which it was, but I saw either a six foot tall peacock strolling down the Strip the other day, or the best reason to outlaw the Mohawk hairdo that ever existed.

Okay, I know that I’m a fat guy.  I’m not proud of that, but I have reached that stage in my life where I accept myself as I am. So I don’t wear clothing like wife beater T-shirts, or go around without a shirt on at all. I just can’t subject the general public to that kind of visual abuse.

But here in Vegas I’ve seen both men and women who make me look anorexic wearing less clothing than you’ll see on college kids on Spring Break! There should be a rule that if you have more square inches of skin showing than you do square inches of fabric covering it, said skin should be able to defy the laws of gravity! If you have more belly hanging out under your shirt than what the shirt covers, just stay inside, okay?

Maybe just as interesting are the women we’ve seen here who are on the far side of middle age, but who run around in slinky clothes, wearing enough makeup to camouflage a Winnebago, trying to compete with their granddaughters for attention. Ladies, take a hint – if your varicose veins clash with your fishnet stockings, it’s time to reevaluate your wardrobe.

People aren’t the only things that will make you take a second glance around here. Yesterday we spotted this truck at a Lowes store. Now there’s a guy who can probably fix your leaky faucet!

When we went to brunch yesterday, we spotted this pickup and camper that have seen better days, but the owner obviously has a good sense of humor. Check out the sign in the windshield.

Another sign, which I missed, but my friend Joe Long sent me from a recent visit he made to Las Vegas, is the kind of place where I’d like to hang out.

Even the names of some of the businesses here are memorable. Greg White found this ad in a tourist guide he picked up somewhere while we were running around.   I guess there are some serious pet lovers in Las Vegas!

Some folks come to Las Vegas to gamble, some come to see the shows, some come to people watch,  and some come to get married. My pal Greg White, on the other hand, apparently came to Las Vegas just to work on my vehicles!

After spending hours changing out the motor for our jacks and slide rooms a couple of days ago, yesterday Greg was back at it. The original 40 amp fuse for the slide motor had burned out when the motor started failing, and since I couldn’t find a replacement fuse, we stuck a 30 amp in as a temporary fix. Since then I got the proper fuse, and Greg crawled under the Winnebago to put it in.

Then he swapped out the air chuck for the air compressor under the front end of the motorhome for one that will work with a tow truck if we ever need to release the air brakes to be towed.

We have had a problem several times with the battery in our van going dead while we were towing it behind the RV. Greg installed a plug-in charge line from the motorhome’s batteries to the van’s battery, which will alleviate that issue.

Another thing that has been a constant irritation is that before we bought our van, the previous owner had installed a cheap security system that never worked right, and we didn’t have the remote control for it. After two years of trying to find a replacement remote control at several Ford dealers and aftermarket shops, we gave up. The doors lock automatically when we start the engine, and unlock when we turn the engine off. That’s fine when Terry and I are both in the van, but if there was just one of us, we were constantly laying across the passenger seat reaching to lock or unlock the door. Greg tracked down the wire that powers the passenger door lock and disabled it, which will make life a lot easier for us in the future. 

I hope Greg never discovers the slot machines and buffet dinners here in town, or he’ll disappear and I’ll never get anything else done! 

Bad Nick didn’t want anything to do with all of that work, so he stayed inside and posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled The Happy Pauper. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich – Napoleon