Labor Day weekend. The last big hurrah of the summer traveling and camping season for most people.

It’s going to be a busy weekend here at Elkhart Campground. Already RVs of every size and description are pulling in, and campground owner Bobby Patel tells me they have a lot of camping sites reserved for the entire weekend.

For fulltime RVers like ourselves, most holiday weekends don’t matter much, except for the fact that we have to plan ahead and get a place to park before every campground and RV park fills up with weekend campers. Most fulltimers we know try to get into a park by Wednesday or Thursday before the holiday weekend, and sit tight until about Tuesday of the next week, staying off the highway until things settle down and everybody gets back home.

Besides all of the weekend campers, we have quite a few folks we know here at the campground. Ron and Brenda Speidel have been parked next to us for a couple of weeks now, helping us get moved and settled into our new motorhome. What would we do without these two? Dale and Terry pace have been here for several weeks now, and we have visited with them several times.

Howie and Norah Glover arrived a few days ago, and yesterday Ken and Billie Barker arrived from their home in Missouri, and yesterday Dave and Linda Sand arrived, though we have not had a chance to talk to them yet. Linda is very good about sending me many of the little Thought For The Day sayings I use at the bottom of this blog.

With most of the move completed from the bus, I have turned my attention to creating a website for Carlyle Lehman, the owner of Focal Wood Products in nearby Nappanee, Indiana. Carlyle, an accomplished Amish craftsman, is famous in RV circles for his excellent custom furniture, and he is building a custom desk for me and a desk/workstation for Miss Terry, along with a bookcase, for the Winnebago. If you have had Carlyle build anything for your RV, I would really appreciate any digital photos you might be willing to share for use in Carlyle’s website.

Because I don’t have enough irons in the fire, between publishing the Gypsy Journal, four websites, writing for the RV.Net Blog, and now three blogs of my own, I also get to brag about a new book that I co-authored with Christy Pinheiro titled The Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit!

The book was published this week and is available on Amazon.com. Here is a link to the book’s website, for anyone interested in checking it out. If there is a book inside of you, get yourself a copy of our new book, and check out my self-publishing website, Publishing4Profit. I’ve supported myself by crunching words for most of my adult life, and it’s a lot more fun than working for a living.

But Bad Nick has been busy too. He just put up a new blog post titled Stick A Label On It. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

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In a blog post titled Am I a Full-timer? I think so… on the RV.Net Blog, Tony Cornett, known as Firedude to his many followers, writes about going to visit family in his old hometown over Easter, and realizing he is indeed a fulltime RVer, not just a weekend warrior.

Some of the clues were subtle, such as wandering through his brother’s home and being amazed at how much “stuff” they have, or that his brother has more stuff crammed into his garage than Tony has in his entire RV.

Other clues were more obvious and we’ve experienced them ourselves when visiting family and friends. Have you ever tried to flush the toilet in somebody’s house with your foot? If you have, you might be a fulltimer! Been there, done that. How about staying at a friend’s house, and turning the water off in the shower while you lather up? My friend Terry Simpson says that when he returns to his home in Mitchell, Indiana after a winter on the road in his bus conversion, he does the same thing.

Tony’s column hit home with me because we are currently visiting our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona. We’ve enjoyed visiting with my daughter and her family, and our friends here, but I’m amazed at how much space they take up and how much stuff they have to fill that space. My daughter and son-in-law live in a rather small two bedroom apartment, which gets cramped with two little girls growing up fast in it, but their place seems huge to us.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he said he envied the fact that we have escaped the rat race. He knew us back in the days when we worked 60, 70 or more hours a week. He had just returned from a visit to his wife’s family, down in the Phoenix area, and said it was sad how her kids and grandkids were fixated on having the newest electronic gadgets, or the latest and greatest hybrid yuppie-mobile. Terry and I don’t need much more in life than each other, a gentle tailwind when we’re going down the highway, and a level, quiet place to park for the night.

Unlike Tony, we have not driven by our old house while we’ve been in town. The place holds no special significance for us. It was just a place to eat and sleep in between our workaholic days. When we left, we put that part of our lives behind us.

But we’ve felt at home all over this country, whether we’re parked in a nice campground on the Texas Gulf Coast, boondocking under a starry desert sky, or grabbing a few hours’ sleep in a highway rest area or Wally World parking lot. We could never go back to our old lives.

In yesterday’s blog I mentioned the fishing opportunities here in Arizona’s White Mountains. While trout, bass, and walleye are the big three for anglers who fish our local waters, one often overlooked species are catfish. But there are some real lunkers waiting for the lucky fisherman (or fisherwoman) who knows how to hook them.

Here is one my son-in-law, Jim, caught yesterday evening at Fool Hollow Lake here in Show Low. The 150 acre lake is part of Fool Hollow Recreation Area, an Arizona State Park that includes 92 RV sites, many with full hookups, as well as 31 primitive sites. Fool Hollow got its name when an early settler began to farm the land now covered by the lake’s waters, and his neighbors joked that “Only a fool would plow that hollow.”

The lake is also popular with bird watchers, who come to spot a wide range of species, including Mallard and Canada geese, Great Blue Heron, Snowy Egret, American Egret, White-faced Ibis, Stellar’s Jay, Lesser Goldfinch, Blue Birds, Acorn Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, and Red-shafted Flicker. Raptors commonly seen are Bald Eagles in the winter, Osprey in the summer, American Kestrel, Northern Harrier and Goshawk. It’s one of our favorite places to stay when visiting our old hometown.

Thought For The Day – Cleaning your house while the kids are still living at home is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

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The Rally, Affinity’s annual big blowout RV event ends today, and not a moment too soon for us. While we have really enjoyed being with so many of our RV friends, the rally itself hasn’t been much fun at all, and sales were very poor for so large a gathering.

We may attend another one of these events someday, but it won’t be at the New Mexico State Fairgrounds, or anywhere else where the rally attendees are not parked on the rally grounds. Yesterday the vending buildings closed at 5 p.m., but from about 2 p.m. on I don’t think we had more than one or two people stop by the booth. That makes it darned hard for a vendor who is paying over $1,000 for a rally booth and camping, not to mention the cost of traveling to Albuquerque.

Still, there have been some positive things happen to us while we’ve been here. We’ve made some very good contacts among the other vendors, and we’ve introduced a lot of new people to the Gypsy Journal. Hopefully some of them will turn into subscribers in the future.

One good thing that has happened while we were here, thanks to my good friend Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour recommending me, is that I have been asked to write a blog for the RV.net blog network. This is something I have been interested in for a long time.

It will be a separate blog from this one or my Todays Hero Blog, and I won’t be posting on a daily basis like I do here. I’ll probably be posting a lot of travel stories we have used in the Gypsy Journal in the past, as well as some new RV lifestyle pieces.  

I can hear a lot of you asking why I’d take on another obligation, with so much already on my plate. It all comes down to selfishness on my part. I have found that blogging is an excellent tool to market the Gypsy Journal and the books, camping guides, and CDs we produce. With hundreds of thousands of readers a month, the exposure from being associated with RV.net is tremendous, and hopefully it will bring us a new reader now and then.

On another topic, have you ever heard that old saying that timing is everything? Well, it’s true. As you probably already know, we are looking for a new rig, and wondering how we can make that happen. One problem is that to help pay for a new (to us) RV, we need to sell our MCI bus conversion. Yesterday a couple here at the rally took a tour of the bus and wanted to buy it, for a price we were comfortable with, right now. The only problem is that we’d still have a shortfall between what we’d get from the bus and what we have put away, and the price of an RV to replace it with.

If it were a few months down the road, after we had a few more rallies under our belt and a little more in the bank, we’d have accepted their offer. But they came here to buy a bus, and they (understandably) don’t want to wait to get into one.

As they say, timing is everything, and the timing just was not right.

Thought For The Day – Illegal aliens have always been a problem in this country.  Just ask any Indian.

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