The folks from Grand Rental Station were supposed to be at Elkhart Campground about 10 a.m. yesterday morning to set up the tent we rented for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally. But at a little before 10, I looked across the campground and realized that there was a big tent where there hadn’t been one the night before!

I was disappointed, because I wanted to get some pictures of the process, but not to worry, my buddy Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School was there with his camera, and recorded the event for posterity.

The first step was to lay out the 50×70 foot tent. It covers the campground’s whole basketball court!

Then they set up the side posts and staked them down. The stakes go 42 inches into the ground, because if a strong wind were to come along, they don’t want the tent flying away to Toledo.

They used this nifty machine to raise the two tall center poles.

Dennis said the crew obviously had a lot of experience, because everybody knew what to do and when, and the tent went up like clockwork.

And here is the tent, all set up and ready for our rally to begin. We really appreciate the great service from Nate and the rest of the crew at  Grand Rental Station. They are real professionals.

Of course, no job like this can take place without a lot of sideline quarterbacks making sure every detail is handled just right. Fortunately, we have a lot of guys here who were willing to volunteer for that duty.

The ladies, on the other hand, preferred to spend their time line dancing. I’m not sure which group had more fun.

Speaking of having fun, the people who are already here at the campground waiting for the rally to start have been practicing hard, and they seem to have that down to a science.

Here’s my pal Frank Hinman, cooking burgers to feed the hungry masses. Frank never offered me a burger. I think either he or Dennis Hill ate mine for me because I was busy. Thanks for the help, guys.

Not everybody is a party animal. My dear friend Nancy Hazelton makes adaptive clothing for wounded service members, as part of a non-profit program called Sew Much Comfort.

With approximately 40 wounded servicemen and women returning to the United States each week, there is a real need for clothing that will accommodate patients’ medical devices, such as prosthetics, braces and casts, or for those suffering burns and nerve damage. A lot of the clothing has Velcro seams to make it easier for these brave men and women to dress, or to allow room for their special needs.

Each month, Sew Much Comfort distributes over 1,200 clothing items and comfort accessories to combat medical units, hospital wards, VA clinics, wounded warrior barracks, and military medical facilities in the United States and abroad. Without the special clothing that people like Nancy create, many of our wounded troops would have only standard hospital gowns as their only clothing.

Nancy knows all about the needs of our country’s active duty military personnel and veterans.  Before she retired and ran away to became an RV gypsy, Nancy was my Primary Care Provider at the Veterans Administration hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. She is married to a Vietnam veteran, and her two sons, David and Daniel, are both officers in the United States Army. Nancy may be retired, but she continues to serve our nation’s war veterans. Those are just some of the reasons I love and respect this special lady so much.

If you want to help with this wonderful program, either through a donation, or by helping to sew clothing for our vets, log onto the Sew Much Comfort website to learn more.

Thought For The Day – Remember the three R’s: Respect for self, Respect for others, and Responsibility for your actions.

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We left Bowling Green State University Friday morning, and though I had been worried that we might get stuck in the field where we were parked, we got out just fine. We stopped for fuel, then drove north about ten miles on Interstate 75, skirted the west edge of Toledo on Interstate 475, then picked up U.S. Highway 23 and followed it north into Michigan.

The line at the dump station in Bowling Green was really long, so we decided to stop at the Cabela’s Outfitters in Dundee, Michigan, about 45 miles north of Bowling Green, to use their dump station. Apparently quite a few other folks from the FMCA rally had the same idea, because there were several motorhomes waiting to dump. We also needed to make a bank deposit, so we unhooked the van and Miss Terry ran off to do that errand while I waited in line to dump. She needn’t have hurried, because I was still in line when she got back.

Several rigs ahead of me pulled up, dumped, and quickly went on their way, but you know there always has to be one jerk in every crowd. A guy in a big diesel pusher pulled up to the dump station, got out, didn’t like his position, got back inside his coach and maneuvered around a bit, got back out, still didn’t like where he was, and repeated the process again. Then he puttered around, opened his sewer bay, closed it, went back inside his coach, came back out, opened the sewer bay again, then opened several other bays until he found his rubber gloves and put them on.

Then he took out his sewer hose, hooked it to his tank outlet, realized that it was too short, and went to two other coaches until he could find somebody to loan him an extra length of hose and a connector, which he attached to his hose and finally dumped. That chore done, he rinsed out the hoses, unhooked the loaner hose, unhooked his sewer hose, replaced it in the bay, returned the loaner hose, went back to his rig and opened two bay doors before he decided where he wanted to put his gloves, changed his mind and got them back out and put them in a different bay, and finally got inside his coach. And sat there. And then he sat there some more. People started blowing their horns and the fellow ahead of me was ready to do him bodily harm before the fool finally drove off and the line moved forward, and eventually I was next in line to dump.

That was when an idiot in an SUV pulling an Airstream trailer came the other way through the parking lot and tried to shoehorn himself in behind the rig that was finishing dumping. No way was that going to happen, and Bad Nick went flying out of the bus to explain the facts of life to the guy behind the wheel. Meanwhile, the air was split with blaring horns as people who had waited patiently in line let the offender know that he wasn’t going to get away with that!

He decided to play dumb and said “Oh, are all of you waiting to dump? I’m sorry,” before beating a hasty retreat.

We wasted an hour at the dump station, but eventually got back onto the highway and followed it north until it joined Interstate 75. Traffic was heavy all the way from Toledo to Bay City, with some particularly bad stretches in Ann Arbor and Flint, where nobody seemed to know what a yield sign, a turn signal, or a rearview mirror was for.

By the time we turned west on U.S. Highway 10 at Bay City, I was more than ready to get on a slower paced road. An hour later we joined State Highway 115 and took it to U.S. Highway 131 near Cadillac, and with a couple more zigs and zags down two lane highways we arrived at my cousin Terry Cook’s place just south of Traverse City about 6:30 p.m., having logged just over 300 miles.

We backed into our usual spot in Terry’s driveway, received warm greetings from the entire family, and hooked up to water and electric. We’ll be here for a few days as Miss Terry has her annual visit to her oncologist, and we enjoy some time relaxing with family. After being up early every morning at the FMCA rally, the first order of business will be to turn the telephones off and sleep late every morning!

Thought For The Day – Over prepare, and then go with the flow.

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Sometimes the RV lifestyle allows us to not only go to new places, but to return to where we came from. We’re in Bowling Green, Ohio for the FMCA rally, and yesterday afternoon we drove 20 miles up to Toledo, a place with a lot of memories for me.

My father’s work kept us on the move for much of my earliest years, but when I was 13 we returned to our hometown of Toledo, and I lived there until I graduated from high school and went into the Army. I’ve only been back a couple of times since then, the last time almost ten years ago. So it was interesting to wander through the old neighborhood reliving memories from my youth.

South Toledo was a poor part of town, blue collar at best, but I never felt like we did without or were deprived. I had a loving family, good friends, and lots of good times. I would not have traded my teenage years for anything.

Yet, I knew I was not going to live there forever. When I was a teenager, everybody wanted to land a job on the Jeep assembly line or with Libby Owens Glass, or else get on the police force or fire department. A job that would “take care of you.” I didn’t want to be taken care of, thank you very much. I knew I could take care of myself, but it had to be someplace else. The first chance I got to leave, I never looked back. So why now, a lifetime later, do I feel drawn back to those narrow city streets of my youth?

The area certainly hasn’t improved. There are plenty of boarded up storefronts, yet many of the same little corner grocery stores and neighborhood taverns I remember are still open and doing business.   

Here is a picture of me at the duplex house I lived in during high school. When we moved in, we had the upstairs and my buddy Ray Pitzen’s family lived below us. His sister Rachel was my first love and my friends were all jealous because she was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Today the old house is vacant and there was an eviction notice taped to the door for the last tenants.

After Ray’s family moved away, a series of neighbors rented the bottom half of the house. One New Year’s Eve my parents and I were standing on our upstairs porch when the neighbor below, who had had a lot too much to drink, came out onto his porch and decided to celebrate by popping off a few rounds with his .38 revolver. The bullets tore through the wood at our feet, narrowly missing us, but a chunk of wood embedded itself in my mother’s leg.

My Dad was a cop at the time, and when he grabbed his gun and handcuffs and ran downstairs, I wasn’t sure if he was going to shoot the man, or arrest him. Dad administered some street justice and then a black and white came and hauled the fool away.

My first job was working at Mr. Tsakos’ corner gas station. I begged my Dad to intercede on my behalf when the old Greek businessman didn’t want to hire a kid, because kids were unreliable. Then a week or two later all of my friends were having fun on summer vacation and I decided I wanted to play too, so I told my Dad I was quitting the job. He told me that I could either go to work every day, as I had promised Mr. Tsakos, or I could spend those eight hours a day in my room (way before a kid’s room had computers and TVs), but I wasn’t going to goof off after he had given his word I’d be on the job. I earned quite a bit of money that summer, and came away with a little bit of work ethic too.

And here’s my old school, Libbey High School. Boy, I couldn’t wait to leave that place! A few years ago there was talk of tearing the old school down, and I was sure glad to see that so far, it has survived budget cuts and consolidation. Now, please don’t tell my daughter this, because I have always told her that I walked eleven miles to school in knee deep snow, barefoot, and that it was uphill both coming and going. But we checked it on our van’s odometer, and it turns out it was just 1.2 miles from my front door to the front door of the school. (And I think I remember a pair of shoes or two, to be honest.)

One of our favorite hangouts was Walbridge Park, on the banks of the wide Maumee River, and across the street from the excellent Toledo Zoo. This was where we came to smoke cigarettes, away from parent’s prying eyes, where we came to “duke it out” to settle teenaged arguments, and where we brought our girlfriends when we had our first cars, to watch the submarine races. (Yes, some of them really did fall for that!) It was also here that my family had a going away picnic for me the day before I boarded an airplane for a ride that eventually ended in a jungle halfway around the world.

Terry and I sat on a bench overlooking the old river and I told her about some of my good times at the park, and the goofy things my pals and I did there. I sure am glad I have her with me to share those memories with, instead of some of the young ladies I steamed up the windows of my old Ford with!

I know I could never live in Toledo again, and I know I made the right decision to leave so long ago to pursue my own path in life. But it was interesting to go back to see the old neighborhood once again.

It was nice to take this trip down memory lane. Thanks for indulging me and coming along for the ride. 

Thought For The Day – It was all so different before everything changed.

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