Yesterday we drove a few miles to Britt, Iowa to check out the Hobo Museum, and instead found ourselves caught up in a wild crowd of bikers who had taken over this tiny farming community.

But don’t worry, these weren’t outlaw motorcycle gangs on a rampage, but rather bicyclists participating in the Des Moines Register newspaper’s annual bicycling event, the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI, for short.

Each year thousands of bicycle enthusiasts participate in the seven day long event, which takes a different route across the state each time.  This year the ride began in Sioux City and will end in Dubuque. Now in its 38th year, RAGBRAI is the oldest, largest and longest bicycle touring event in the world. The route follows the back roads all of the way, and stops for the night at selected small towns along the way.

RAGBRAI is a bicycle ride, not a race, and the route is laid out with an average of 68 miles per day. RAGBRAI is limited to 8,500 week-long riders and 1,500 day riders, who participate in a lottery to be included. But the ride has few rules, and thousands more unofficial riders, who call themselves “pirates,” also participate. Some ride the entire route, and many more ride just short sections. Riders range in age from 10 years to over 80 years old,

This year, the number of riders we heard about in Britt ranged from 15,000 to 17,000. and that doesn’t include the thousands of support personnel who travel the route in cars, pickups, vans, converted school buses, and RVs, carrying tents, bicycle parts, supplies, clothing, and food.

One might think that Iowa’s small towns would would cringe at the thought of hordes of riders and support teams descending on them, but quite the contrary, towns bid for the opportunity to be included in the route. These riders bring a lot of money to town. In addition to filling local motels and restaurants, every night is  a party. We were told that during their stay in one town this week, they spent over $50,000 for beer alone! In one town! I don’t know how accurate that figure is, but from what we saw, this is definitely a group that rides hard and parties harder, and some folks looked like they were sweating more than water and salt as they passed by us!

In addition to the riders and their support teams, the sidewalks were filled and the streets lined with vendors selling everything from cookies to t-shirts, and people who just came to see all of the activity and watch the parade of riders go by.

One lady even brought her goat to town for all of the festivities. After all, it is Iowa!

We watched the riders for a while, visited the Hobo Museum, where Miss Terry took my picture with a gentleman named Todd “Ad Man” Walters, who was crowned King of the Hoboes at Britt’s annual National Hobo Convention in 2005. I’ll have a feature story on the Hobo Museum in the next issue of he Gypsy Journal.

Back at Forest City, we had hoped that the work on our motorhome would be finished yesterday, but they still have a couple of hours left before everything is done. Hopefully, we’ll be on the road by noon today.

We’re looking forward to getting up to Traverse City and settling in for a few days, while we get Miss Terry’s annual medical checkup out of the way, and visit my cousin Terry Cook and his family, and our friends there.

And after days of getting up so early, I plan to sleep very late, then open my eyes, take a look at the world, and then roll over and go back to sleep again!

Thought For The Day – An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

Except for a brief visit from my daughter Tiffany yesterday, and a break to go to dinner with Greg and Jan White, I spent most of the day at my desk working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal.

Since I am in the process of switching production from our antiquated Adobe PageMaker computer page layout program to the current InDesign program that most of the newspaper industry uses these days, there is a learning curve that I am trying to master.

That being said, I really don’t have much to write about for today’s blog, so instead, I thought that I’d post a blog on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Gypsy Journal. We get some questions over and over about how we produce the paper, and why we do things the way we do. Here are some of our most often asked questions, and an explanation of the whys and wherefores of how we do what we do.

Q. How do I know when my subscription is due to expire?

A. We send out a renewal notice with your paper two issues before it is due to expire, and again with the last issue before expiration. For subscribers to our digital issue, we send an e-mail alerting them when it is time to renew. There is also a number on the top line of your address on the envelope the paper arrives in. That number is the issue your subscription expires with. The issue number is always in our masthead, at the bottom right of Page 2. For example, I am working on issue 67, so if the number on the top line of your address block is 70, you have three more issues to go before you are due to renew.

Q. What does the letter C, G or R after my expiration number mean?

A. The C is a code we use to tell us you have a courtesy subscription (usually given away as a door prize at a rally). G means you have a gift subscription. R means you are a customer that has renewed in the past. You may also see a series of letters after the expiration number. LOW means you first subscribed at Life on Wheels, OW means you came to us from the old Out West newspaper, and TLR means you were a subscriber to Two Lanes Roads before that publication shut down.

Q. Why do you use different printers and mail houses around the country, instead of just having one place you use to print and mail each issue?

A. Because we travel all of the time, and because we always print several thousand extra copies to pass out at rallies and RV parks, shipping those extra papers to wherever we may be would be both expensive, and cause travel delays that we can’t afford.

Q. Why don’t you just go to an all electronic format instead of a printed publication?

A. While we do have a digital issue available, the great majority of our readers tell us they want the printed format. I’m a dinosaur who loves the feel and smell of ink and newsprint. Besides, it’s too hard to carry your laptop computer to the bathroom.

Q. Why don’t you have very much outside advertising in the Gypsy Journal?

A. I have sold millions of dollars worth of advertising in my newspaper career, and even though I’m pretty good at it, I hate sales. I’d much rather spend my time searching out new things to write about. Also, when you have advertisers, they sometimes want to dictate what a publication can say. I’m too stubborn for that. If I think a particular product is junk, I say so. Not many companies want to spend their advertising dollars with a publication that may tell the truth about their products. If we could find an experienced, energetic salesperson, we would probably let them try to build up our ad count a bit, but we’re not trying to make a fortune, just get by, and our business model has worked so far for us.

Q. Why isn’t your telephone number included on your masthead on Page 2 so I can call you if I want to?

A. We do not have an established office; we run our business from the road. We check our e-mail several times a day, and we usually receive snail mail every week. Those are the best ways to reach us. At one time we did publish our telephone number, and it became a problem. We got calls at midnight when we were on the East coast from people on the West coast who were looking for a campground for the night and wanted recommendations. When we were on the West coast, we got calls at 6 a.m. from people on the East coast wanting to tell us about a funny sign they had seen and should include in the paper. It just became too much of a problem.

Q. Why do you have other websites, such as your Honor A Veteran or the Bad Nick Blog?

A. We have several websites, GypsyJournal.net, MotorcycleTravelOnline.com, Publishing4Profit.com, HonorAVeteran.com, and the Bad Nick Blog. I started them partly because they cover topics I am interested in and saw a need for, and partly for economic reasons. Each time someone clicks the ad links on our websites, we make a small commission. It all adds up to help us make a profit.

Q. What happened to your Today’s Hero Blog?

A. While I really enjoyed Today’s Hero, and it is still online, though I haven’t updated it in months. People just stopped sending in new nominations and I ran out of heroes to write about. I’d like to revive it someday if there is enough interest.

Q. Why is your main website GypsyJournal.net instead of .com?

A. The .com suffix was already taken when I started our Gypsy Journal website and the .net was the next best thing available.

Q. You seem to be going in a dozen different directions at once, between the paper, your rallies, speaking at RV events, and your websites. Where do you find the time for everything?

A. Everything in life takes some sacrifice, and one has to set priorities. In my case, I have given up dieting and exercise to squeeze in the extra time I need. Seriously, I’m pretty much a Type A person and I thrive on all of this. After a lifetime of publishing daily and weekly newspapers, having a deadline come around every two months is like a permanent vacation, and I need to fill the time.

Q. You do an Eastern and a Western rally every year. How about a third, floater rally, maybe in the Pacific Northwest one time, in the south another time?

A. This has come up before, and Miss Terry assures me that if I add one more event, she’ll be sitting under a palm tree on a beach somewhere when it happens. We can only stretch ourselves so far.

Q. I have all of your books. Are you going to bring out any more?

A. I have a couple written now that still need to be proofed and formatted. I hope to be able to announce them very soon. And there are several other writing projects I am also working on.

Q. What do you see in the future for the Gypsy Journal and for yourselves? Any long term plans to settle down someplace in the future?

A. Terry and I are both in agreement that we’ll continue to do just what we are doing for as long as we possibly can. We’re both in pretty good health, we’re having fun, and we’re happy. Why would we want to do anything else? As long as we can physically continue, and as long as our readers keep on wanting what we produce, we’ll be out here exploring America’s small towns and back roads, and writing about our travels.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

After spending five nights at the Elks lodge in Morehead City, North Carolina, we were ready for a change of scenery. So Saturday morning we hit the road and drove east forty miles on State Route 24 to Jacksonville, where we hooked up with U.S. Highway 17.

We followed that route another 100 miles south to the South Carolina state line, passing by the sprawling Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base along the way. As we passed the base, chain link fences on both sides of the highway were adorned with signs written on bed sheets welcoming home units and individual Marines that had been deployed overseas.

Most of our route was good four lane highway with light to moderate traffic, except right around Camp Lejeune, where it was heavier. There were quite a few traffic lights to deal with in the small towns along the way, but we made good time.

At Wilmington, we bypassed the city on Interstate 40, passing by the battleship USS North Carolina, a proud old warrior from World War II that has been converted into a floating museum. I really think I’m getting over the worst of my bridge phobia. Crossing over the Cape Fear River, I wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable. I’m not ready to take on the big boys like the Tampa Bay Bridge or the Chesapeake Bay Bridge yet, but at least I don’t snivel as much as I used to on other bridges.

U.S. 17 became a four lane surface route again south of Wilmington, but there wasn’t much traffic. We pulled into the South Carolina Welcome Center at the state line for a potty break, and a half hour later we arrived at the Moose lodge in Myrtle Beach. We had covered 170 miles, an easy day of driving. Most of the day had been gray and dreary, but about the time we crossed into South Carolina, we suddenly broke out into blue sky. After a week of stormy weather, that sure was a welcome sight!

The RV parking here at the Myrtle Beach Moose lodge consists of several back-in sites on the edge of a big blacktopped parking lot, with 30 amp electric and water hookups. The only other RV here is a nice looking Winnebago Ultimate Freedom, so we don’t feel crowded at all. At $10 a night, it’s a heck of a bargain in expensive Myrtle Beach, and one more example of the savings on overnight parking that Elks and Moose lodges offer to traveling members.

The only drawbacks here are that there is no dump station, and even though we have three bars of EVDO signal with our Verizon air card, the internet is really slow. I did a speed check and we were only getting download speeds of 369 kbps, as opposed to the 1100 kbps we were getting in Morehead City. We’ll need to find a dump station pretty soon, the tanks on our Winnebago motorhome are not as large as we had on our MCI bus conversion, and we’re getting close to being full.

Though we love the ocean and the beach, Myrtle Beach just doesn’t appeal to either of us. It just feels too upscale touristy. So I don’t think we’ll linger here very long. This morning we have a couple of stops to make, and then we may just head on down the road.

We have a good friend who lives in Florida whose health isn’t doing very well, and we want to get down to the Titusville area to see him before he has some major surgery in a week or two. So after playing tourist the last couple of weeks, we’ll probably switch into our “go fast” mode and put some miles behind us in the next couple of days. 

Thought For The Day – Treat every day as a new opportunity to be happy.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Interstate highways are great for RV travel if you are just going from Point A to Point B. They are usually the quickest way to get where you’re going, but they lack any charm or character, so whenever possible, we love to travel the back roads, those two lane highways that take you through the small towns where you can see the real America.

Of course, some of the best adventures are found on back roads where an RV isn’t the most practical form of transportation. When we find a nice place to park for a few days, we leave the motorhome and go exploring in our van.

Mayberry Campground here in Mount Airy makes an excellent base for doing just that. The campground is very clean, has roomy full hookup pull-through and back-in sites with cable TV and WiFi, and the folks who run it are very friendly.

The campground’s owner, Benny East, is a great great grandson of Eng Bunker, one of the famous Siamese Twins, who settled in this area after a career touring in vaudeville. The twins died in 1874 and are buried a mile away, and yesterday we paid a visit to their gravesite.

Since we had played tourist in town on Tuesday, we wanted a change of pace yesterday. We set off down some narrow back roads where I’d never take an RV larger than a Class B van.

At the tiny village of Rockford, we stopped to check out the Rockford General Store, which has been serving the community since 1890. What a neat place! This cigar store Indian greeted us at the front door, and inside the owner welcomed us like long lost family members.

We loved looking at all of the things on display, from bulk candy to gourds, and after poking around in every corner of the store we had worked up an appetite. The store serves up delicious sandwiches that you’ll never find at McDonald’s or Burger King. I had the fried country ham and egg, and Miss Terry tried the thick cut pan fried bologna and cheese. Both were wonderful! We sat on rocking chairs on the front porch and passed the time of day with a local gentleman as we ate our lunches.

When we left Rockford, we meandered down a series of roads that crossed the Yadkin River several times, and eventually brought us to the Horne Creek Living Historical Farm, which was farmed by the Hauser family for nearly 200 years.

Since we visited in the off season, there were no costumed interpreters working on the farm, as there are other times of year, depicting farm life in rural North Carolina circa 1900.

We still had a good time wandering around the farm and the handsome two story house where several generations of Hausers lived and died. Terry and I always say that if we did not have to work, we’d love to spend some time volunteering as costumed interpreters at historic sites. Even adults like to play dress up!
Pilot Mountain, rising 1,400 feet above the surrounding countryside, is a major landmark in this region, and long before we had highways and GPS systems, explorers and settlers used it to navigate their way through the wilderness.

We have had a fantastic time exploring the upper Piedmont plateau of North Carolina, and we could easily spend a couple more weeks here. But we have lots more to see and do, and today we’ll be on the road again, heading for new territory in search of new adventures.

Thought For The Day – If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?

After getting a clean bill of health from my new doctor at the V.A. hospital in Lexington, Kentucky on Monday morning, we returned to the Mercer County Fairgrounds that afternoon to wrap up some business and do some exploring in the area.

We love small towns, and Ohio has many charming little communities to choose from. Greenville, located about 30 miles south of Celina on U.S. Highway 127, is a friendly community with a lot of history, and one of the best small town museums we have ever found.

Midway between the two towns, the small hamlet of North Star consists of a post office, a couple of stores, a farm implement dealer, and a smattering of houses.

But North Star has a special claim to fame; Annie Oakley. America’s most celebrated female marksman was raised here, and learned to handle a rifle shooting small game to help feed her impoverished family. By the time she was seven years old, she was an accomplished hunter and trapper, even selling her excess game to a store in Greenville. A small roadside monument honors the girl sharpshooter at the site of the home she lived in. Annie Oakley is buried in a small cemetery just off Highway 127, a couple of miles from her girlhood home.

Greenville remembers Darke County’s favorite daughter with a statue of Annie Oakley downtown, as well as a two room exhibit in the fabulous Garst Museum.

We have visited many small town museums over the years, and I can’t remember one that impressed us more than the Garst Museum. Besides Annie Oakley, the museum has an extensive exhibit on another local celebrity, Lowell Thomas, one of the best known writers and filmmakers of the 20^th Century. Other exhibits include Native Americans, military history, a re-created small town made up of storefronts from everything from a dentist’s office to a toy store, and an outstanding display of Currier and Ives prints.

Greenville is also the home of the Kitchen Aid company, and visitors can tour their factory on the north side of town. On the town’s main street, the Kitchen Aid Experience Center is housed in an old department store, and visitors can see and try out a nice selection of small appliances, and shop for bargains on mixers, toasters, blenders, and accessories. Being an accomplished chef, Miss Terry loves this place, and whenever we’re in the area she stops in to drool over the goodies.

Besides lots to see and do, Greenville has some of the friendliest people we’ve met anywhere. Everybody we talked to treated us like next door neighbors and friends. When you get away from the big cities and the Interstate highways, and get out on the two lanes roads, you’ll discover the real America, in places like Greenville, where the heart and soul of our country lives.

We had originally planned to cover some stories in eastern Ohio in the next few days, but the weather is not cooperating, so we are undecided about our next move. We need to get back to Elkhart to get the new issue of the Gypsy Journal in production, so we may head in that direction and hit some locations between here and there instead.

We’re enjoying the fact that we don’t have to be anyplace and have no commitments until our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in March! We’re finally getting some of that freedom that the fulltime RV lifestyle is all about!

Quite a few people have written to ask when Bad Nick will be posting a new blog. The little imp has been taking a hiatus while all of the Ohio rally activities were going on, but I have it on good authority that he’ll be posting something any day now, and he’s got lots to say!

Thought For The Day – If a turtle doesn’t have a shell, is he homeless or naked?