Well, I didn’t make my goal of getting the new issue of the Gypsy Journal finished yesterday, but I’m close enough that I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unless that light is from an oncoming train, we’re still in good shape. Today I’ll put the finishing touches on the new issue, Miss Terry will proof it again, and tomorrow we’ll take it to our printer in Michigan.

With the paper about done, it’s time to start finishing things up for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, which starts in just two weeks. Greg and Jan are out soliciting door prizes from local merchants today, and will be most of the week. I need to get the artwork to the screen printer for our rally t-shirts, and finish tweaking the seminar schedule.

One new seminar being presented by Whit Reeder, a district manager for a Verizon Wireless provider, will cover smart phone such as the Droids, Blackberrys, and Palms.  Whit says the seminar will introduce folks to a lot of free applications to make life a little smoother, and will save most people up to an hour a day.

We took a short break yesterday to chat with Terry and Dale Pace, who stopped in to say hello. Terry just got out of the hospital, and it’s good to see him up and about.

Later on, we went to dinner at Texas Roadhouse with Greg and Jan, and Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum. They make an excellent steak at Texas Roadhouse, but why do they always have to have the darned music so loud? For me, when I go to dinner with people, the opportunity to talk is a big part of the experience. At Texas Roadhouse, you have to shout to be heard most the time.

Back at Elkhart Campground, our friends Susie Orr, Marlene Hinman, and Carol Hill stopped in to say hello. With that many pretty ladies in our motorhome, and Miss Terry too, I was about to overdose on cute!

I got an e-mail in response to yesterday’s blog, in which I said I raised eyebrows when I referred to Greg White as my “wife” at a local gun show, telling me that I was insensitive to gay people. No, I am just terribly politically incorrect, and I have a sense of humor.

I can’t say that “some of my best friends” are gay, but I do have several gay friends that I really care about, and I think we know each other well enough that they would have let me know if I had offended them. I won’t go into an entire Bad Nick thing here, but lighten up people. Not everything in life has to be drama. If you can’t laugh once in a while, you’re in big trouble.

But Bad Nick knows that some things are not laughing matters, as you’ll read in his new Bad Nick Blog post Ground Zero Mosque. Check it out and leave a comment.

Okay, back to work. I have a paper to finish!

Thought For The Day – When you can’t control the wind, adjust your sails.

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We pulled out of Juniper Ridge RV Resort about 9:30 yesterday morning, drove twelve miles  in to Show Low, and then followed U.S. Highway 60 south 48 miles across the White Mountain Apache Reservation to the Salt River Canyon, a dramatic chasm that folks here in Arizona refer to as the “Other Grand Canyon.”  The route took us from the high pine country of the Mogollon Rim to the fringe of the desert. The road between Show Low and the canyon is mostly two lane, with frequent passing zones.

The seven miles down to the bridge at the bottom of the canyon are a series of tight switchbacks, with more twists and turns than a politician’s biography. It can  be intimidating to a flatlander driving an RV through here for the first time, and the rule is slow and easy. I shifted our Allison automatic transmission down to third gear and let the transmission and exhaust brake hold us back.

Climbing back out of the canyon on the south side, the Cummins diesel engine did a fine job, and before long we were out of the curves and making good time rolling south. We did have to stop for a few minutes at a road construction zone that had the highway down to one lane.

In Globe, we picked up State Route 77, a narrow roadway with its own share of hills and curves, and took it south past the mining towns of Winkelman and San Manuel, then past the historic town of Oracle, and the turnoff to the Biosphere, until we eventually came to Tucson.

We pulled into Tra-Tel RV Park a little after 2 p.m. We had covered exactly 200 miles, dropping from 6500 feet elevation in Show Low to 2300 at the RV park. With that drop in elevation came a steep rise in temperature. On Sunday we had two inches of snow in Show Low, and it was 95 degrees when we stepped out of the Winnebago in Tucson!

Tra-Tel  is a small, friendly place, which is our base whenever we’re in Tucson. The RV park is less than half full, and we got a nice 50 amp full hookup pull through site. The minute I had the electric cable plugged in, Miss Terry turned on the air conditioner to cool it down inside the motorhome.

The purpose of our visit to Tucson is to spend some time with my cousin Beverly, who is one of my favorite people in the world, so once we were settled in, we drove across town to her apartment near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Along the way, we passed the Pima Air and Space Museum, with it’s impressive collection of military aircraft, and then the Davis-Monthan “bone yard,” where retired military aircraft are brought for storage and eventual dismantling. There sure are a lot of taxpayer dollars sitting behind those chain link fences!

We had a nice visit with Bev, took her out to dinner at Texas Roadhouse, and then went back to her place to chat some more. By about 8:30 I was getting droopy from our long day, so we said our goodbyes and promised to see Beverly again today. Miss Terry drove back to the RV park, and we spent the hours before bedtime catching up on e-mails that had come in during the day, and watching the Biography channel on television.

We’ll be here in Tucson a week or so, and it’s supposed to be in the mid-90s all of the time we’re here, so I expect our air conditioner will get a good workout.

Thought For The Day -  A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally! 

We are confirmed night owls, never going to bed before midnight or 1 a.m., if not later. But Friday night, after a week of getting up early and going to bed late during the rally, Terry was sound asleep by 10 p.m., and less than an hour later, I was sawing logs too. Saturday morning we slept in, and then lay in bed snuggling and talking about how nice it was to be lazy for a while.

We finally opened the shades and greeted the world sometime close to noon, just in time to say goodbye to Tom and Barbara Westerfield, who were headed to Tucson for yet another rally. Talk about gluttons for punishment!

Soon after they pulled out, Miss Terry and Jan White loaded up a week’s dirty laundry and headed for a laundromat, while Greg White and I went back to the fairgrounds main building to check out the gun show. The place was packed with display tables holding every kind of firearm and accessory you could ever want or need, and people checking out the goodies for sale.

After we had drooled over everything on display, and agreeing that while we’d love to have a few dozen new shooting irons, Greg and I decided that our budgets and vehicle carrying capacities were both too limited to allow that. So we went back to our Winnebago, where Greg installed a new Star Light 1000 motion detector light that I got from one of the vendors at our rally, in place of our motorhome’s original equipment porch light.

About the time Greg finished up with that, the ladies came back from the laundry, and the four of us drove to Texas Roadhouse to meet Stu and Donna McNicol, who had helped on our rally parking crew, and served as room hosts during the rally. The six of us had a nice dinner while we discussed the rally, talked about the way things went wrong on Sunday when the Early Birds arrived in a pouring rainstorm, and planned ahead for next year’s rally and how we can handle the crowd more efficiently.

Stu and Donna followed us back to the fairgrounds, where we spent a few more hours visiting, and solving most of the problems of the world, or at least the RV world. Stu is a retired fire chief, and we loved hearing his stories about life in the station house.

Did I mention that the airplanes fly really low overhead as they take off and land at the Marine Air Station across the street from the fairgrounds? These photos my pal Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School took show what I mean! But after a couple of weeks here, we hardly even notice them any more. Some people at the rally found the noise of the aircraft to be too intrusive, but as I said before, that’s the sound of freedom, and I appreciate the men and women in the cockpits and on the flight line.

We have a lot of paperwork to catch up on from the rally, several orders to prepare to send out in Monday’s mail, and I need to wash off a thick layer of mud and crud that accumulated on our van while I was parking RVs in the storm Sunday. Monday we’ll settle our bill with the fairgrounds, try to find somebody to wash and wax our motorhome, and continue decompressing from our busy week.

Thought For The Day – The greatest grief is that which we cause ourselves.

A few months ago I didn’t even know what a podcast was, and now we’re the topic of one! How cool is that?

For those of you who don’t know what a podcast is, basically it’s a digital media file that you can view or listen to online, or download from the internet. Kind of like a radio broadcast that you listen to on a computer, an iPod, or an MP3 player. There are millions of podcasts floating around in cyberspace, ranging from short movies (think U Tube), to talks on any subject you can think of, from technology to religion, to politics, as well as musical podcasts. Many producers have their own regular podcasts.

A while back a gentleman named John Huggins contacted me and told me that he and his wife Kathy have a website and produce a weekly podcast called Living The RV Dream, which they produce from their motorhome as they travel around the country fulltime. John asked if they could interview us, and we arranged to get together. Wednesday afternoon they arrived and we had a very nice visit, then John set up his digital recorder and we sat down for the interview.

We talked about our life as fulltime RVers, about the Gypsy Journal, and about our upcoming Gypsy Gathering rally. I’ve conducted a lot of interviews in my newspaper career, and I’ve been interviewed myself before. John and Kathy are real pros, and they kept the process flowing smoothly. Miss Terry isn’t quite as comfortable when she’s put on the spot, but she did a fine job and helped carry the conversation well. The podcast is live now, and you can listen to it here.

In previous podcasts, John and Kathy have interviewed folks like Fleetwood executives Dave Coffin and Justin Humphreys about the future of Fleetwood; Mark Nemeth from the Escapees RV Club; and Ron and Opal Erickson, a country and gospel duo who have been working the RV circuit for years. Other podcasts have covered things like the Escapees Bootcamp Program for new RVers, getting their RV’s thermo pane windows repaired at a Florida business specializing in refurbishing RV windows, RV fire safety, and their travels around the country. I’m hooked! All of their podcasts are available free online, and it’s like having an RV radio program on my computer. Check out their website and our interview, they are a great resource for both new and experienced RVers. I was so impressed with John and Kathy that I asked him to do a seminar on podcasting at our rally, and he readily agreed.

John had originally said they needed about an hour of our time, but we had such a fun visit with them that it stretched out a couple of hours, and then we piled into their car and headed to the nearby Texas Roadhouse for dinner. The time flew by, and all told, I think we were together about five hours! Isn’t the RV lifestyle wonderful? We meet new friends wherever we go!

While Terry and I were learning about podcasts, Bad Nick was busy too, writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled You’re Fired! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Live the life you love, and love the life you live.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Terry and I have spent most of our time inside the last few days, catching up on paperwork and working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal. It’s just as well, because it’s been too darned cold to do much outside. And looking at the weather forecast for the Elkhart area, it’s only going to get worse as time goes on. The highs for the next four days are only in the 40s, with overnight lows at or near freezing. Believe me, I’m working hard to get the paper finished and printed so we can hit the road!

I did take a break yesterday to go check on our bus conversion. Since it’s not plugged into power, which means the block heater isn’t on, I was worried that it might not want to start with this cold weather. But that faithful old Detroit diesel fired right up, blowing out a cloud of smoke that killed any mosquito larvae that might be hanging out waiting for next summer. In a modern coach, that much smoke on startup is a reason to worry, but not in the old diesels. It’s just how they are in cold weather, and once they warm up the smoke goes away. Bad Nick thinks it’s a great way to get even with rude campground neighbors with yappy little dogs.

The other day Al Hesselbart got the battery charged up on his vintage Newell and got it started, and as he drove past us, Terry and I grinned at each other and said “We know that brand of perfume!”

Greg and Jan White, readers from Texas who were at our rally in Ohio, are parked behind us at Elkhart Campground, and yesterday Greg invited us over for a demonstration of the Silverleaf VMSpc program for monitoring diesel engines. I was very impressed with the many options the program offers, and I’ll be adding one very soon. Fulltimer Norm Payne has a very good report on the Silverleaf that does an excellent job of explaining what it can do on his excellent  See Ya’ Down The Road website. Click the link for Silverleaf VMSpc Monitor link.

We have not had mail in a couple of weeks, and yesterday the postman brought us a big Priority Mail box from our mail service. It was late in the day by the time the mail arrived, and by the time Miss Terry got everything opened and made up a bank deposit, we knew we’d have to get every light green in time to make it to the bank before it closed. Which meant, of course, that instead, we got every red light! We made it to the bank a minute after they locked the doors! Grrrr!

Our friends Ron and Brenda Speidel have been in town getting some upgrades done to their Winnebago Journey DL motorhome, and hopefully everything will be wrapped up this morning and they’ll be on the road by noon. We wanted to get together one last time before that happened, so yesterday afternoon we had dinner at one of our favorite places, Texas Roadhouse. We’ve been together since just before we bought our Ultimate Advantage, and we are sorry to have to part company, but we know that we’ll cross paths again somewhere down the road. Hopefully someplace where it’s warmer!

Thought For The Day – To handle yourself, use your head. To handle others use your heart.

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