Fortunately, most RVers we know are pretty mellow people who, aside from a heightened sense of adventure and a love for seeing what’s over the next hill and around the next bend in the road, are pretty much like anybody else you’d encounter anywhere.

Most RVers, especially fulltimers, seem to be pretty tolerant people, and accept everybody for who they are. We’ve sat around campfires where the group included everybody from retired surgeons to former schoolteachers, truck drivers, and mailmen. Nobody cares what you did in your past life, they just want to know where you were yesterday, and where you’re headed next week.

However, every once in a while we run into a snob. Such was the case recently when we had a conversation with somebody who proceeded to let us know that anyone who didn’t own the same type of upscale diesel pusher they did was certainly not on a equal level, and was probably mentally or morally suspect as well.

When talking about our Gypsy Gathering rallies, this person made the comment that they were not comfortable at our event because we let “everybody” in, even people in cheap used RVs, and that you never know what to expect from those kind of people. I was tempted to reply that until recently, Terry and I lived and traveled in a 34 year old homebuilt bus conversion. I guess that means we certainly qualified as those kind of people!

On the other end of the spectrum, I had an e-mail exchange with a fellow who wants to buy a cheap used diesel powered transit or school bus for about $3,000 to $5,000, spend a couple of thousand dollars converting it, and hit the road.

He told me that he doesn’t plan to put in a bed, just get a fold out couch from a thrift store, and that he won’t be adding a bathroom. He plans to spend a week or two at a time in different towns, staying at WalMart stores and truck stops, and that he can use their bathrooms to clean up in, when he needs to.

He went on to tell me that he won’t have to buy fuel, because restaurants are eager to give away their waste vegetable oil, and he can pour it directly into his fuel tank and go on down the road. He figures he could live easily on a couple of hundred dollars a month.

I tried to explain to him the hundred and one reasons why his plan wouldn’t work, from the fact that waste vegetable oil isn’t quite that easy to come by, and that you can’t just pour it in your tank and go, and that living in WalMart parking lots wasn’t exactly RVing. But the response was basically of the mindset of “My mind’s already made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”

So we have a prima donna who pulls up to a dump station and says “Well, ours doesn’t stink,” and somebody who basically wants to be a motorized hobo. Aren’t you glad most of the folks who park next to you at your favorite campground fall somewhere in the middle of these two? I sure am!

Thought For The Day -  Except for ending slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, war has never solved anything.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

In terms of technology, Kingman, Arizona is stuck in the Stone Age. They should call this place Bedrock and elect Fred Flintstone mayor. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops here carried big clubs instead of pistols, and answered nuisance calls for dinosaurs running at large.

We have been in truck stops in far west Texas, and boondocking out in the middle of the desert in Quartzsite, and have had better service on our Verizon cell phones and air card than we get here in Kingman. Getting online at all is a challenge, and being able to navigate to any website or open an e-mail is a crapshoot at best. While we are showing five bars of National Access signal strength, any type of data transfer is nearly impossible.

As I understand it from other RVers who have spent any time here, AT&T service is just as slow. I guess the local good old boys have their little monopoly and aren’t letting anybody else get a toehold in.

To load yesterday’s blog posts, at midnight we had to drive a couple of miles to a McDonald’s restaurant to use their free WiFi signal. Even that was pretty slow, in comparison to our normal service! But we’ll just have to do that for the time we’re here.

To repeat what I asked in yesterday’s blog, please folks, don’t send me jokes and forwards for the next week or so. It takes so long to load them, and they just fill up my inbox.

But, it’s worth the inconvenience to be able to spend a few days with my friend Mike Howard. Mike and I go so far back that I almost think Fred Flintstone may have been one of our playmates back in the day. Whenever I go to visit somebody that I have known forever, but don’t see on a daily basis, it always amazes me how old they have gotten. How can that be? I’m still only in my early 20s in my own mind. In fact, who is that old fart that keeps showing up in my mirror every morning when I brush my teeth? What’s that geezer doing there?

I have received a lot of e-mail and comments from folks about yesterday’s blog, in which I wrote about the TA truck stop here in Kingman dinging my debit card for $500 as a “security fee” when we purchased fuel on our way into town. I’ve heard from several other RVers who have experienced similar problems at different truck stops across the country.

Apparently, the folks at TA monitor such things, because I got an e-mail from a lady in their corporate office saying that a gentleman would be calling me to “correct this situation for you.” However, as of right now, that was the last I’ve heard. There was no follow-up phone call, and the money has not been put back into my bank account. The “situation” remains “uncorrected.”

Of course, maybe they’re chipping out a reply to me on a stone tablet, and that’s what is taking so long. Such is life in Bedrock.

Yabba-Dabba-Doo! 

 Thought For The Day – You can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry. – Paul Theroux  

All fulltime RVers have experienced it. We will be talking to somebody about our life on the road, and invariably they will ask us where our favorite place in the country is. We always reply that just as we could not choose which one of our children is our favorite, it would be just as impossible to choose just one favorite location. But, we sure can tell you some our least favorite places!

While this list reflects just our impression, and we know RVers that love some of the same places we dislike, here are our Top (or actually Bottom) Ten, in no particular order.

1. The Rio Grande Valley in Texas – Most RVers just refer to it as “The Valley,” a stretch of land that begins down in southwest Texas at Brownsville, and stretches north past Mission. This is a popular snowbird roost, where you can find RV parks in every price range, and with every kind (or lack of) amenity. A lot of people love it, but to us it was just crowded, lacking in scenic beauty, and unappealing in every way. What grass there is was full of thorns that stab your feet, and the general RVer population is so old that people joke that “every time you hear an ambulance siren, another RV site just became available.”  

2. West Texas – Just because you drove north out of the Rio Grande Valley doesn’t mean you’ve entered the land of milk and honey. West Texas is endless miles of boring scenery, road kill, and not much else.

3. Chicago, Illinois – We’ll drive 75 miles out of our way to avoid Interstates 80 and 90 through Chicago, and have, many times. The traffic is always hectic, and it has some of the most aggressive drivers in the world.

4. Utah – How can I dislike an entire state? Well, easy… it is Utah, after all! Yes, there are some beautiful places, such as Zion National Park, but overall, my impression of the Beehive State is pretty negative. I remember a trip to Saint George years ago, when Miss Terry cut her arm on a broken rack in a supermarket. When she went up to the Customer Service counter to get something to contain the bleeding, the manager and his staff were more worried about who was going to pay for the paper towels than they were about the woman bleeding all over their store. Things like that leave a permanent bad taste in my mouth.

5. Southern California – With the possible exception of the coastline at La Jolla, I’d have no problem if we gave the rest of California, south of Pismo Beach, back to Mexico. It truly is the land of quakes and flakes.

6. Montgomery, Alabama – When we visited Montgomery a few years ago to gather some stories for the Gypsy Journal, we were amazed at how consistently rude so many people were. At the Rosa Parks Museum and Dr. Martin Luther King’s house, now a memorial to the Civil Rights movement, the people on duty absolutely refused to allow us to even take the standard tour of their facilities once we told them that we were there to do a feature story for our publication. We managed to get a few stories in Montgomery, but we would have loved to hang around longer and cover all that the city has to offer. But, we kept hitting brick walls at too many of the places we wanted to write about.

7. El Paso, Texas – I lived in El Paso for a short time as a kid, and I didn’t like it then. Time has done nothing to change my mind. Traffic is always terrible, the city has no aesthetic charm, and I would not be comfortable staying anywherin the city overnight. However, if you like truck stops, fast food restaurants, strip clubs, and rundown strip malls, your opinion may be different than mine.

8. Billings, Montana – Even before a local campground owner convinced the city to ban overnight RV parking (a move that was quickly rescinded when RVers from across the nation let the city fathers know that we would all boycott their town), I have not liked Billings. We have stopped there several times, and received anywhere from poor to rude service in restaurants, shops, and even motels when we were traveling without our motorhome.

9. Houston, Texas – This is another big city with nothing to offer except heavy traffic and rude drivers. It’s always a pleasure to be driving away from Houston, instead of toward it, and it’s even better when we can avoid the city all together.     

10. Lewiston, Idaho – While the surrounding area is beautiful, with some of the most impressive scenery in the West, we found Lewiston to be a dumpy little town, with the nauseating smell of the local paper mill permeating the air.

Okay, that’s my list of my 10 Least Favorite Places. What about you? What are some of the places you have visited and are in no hurry to get back to, and why?

While I was working on this list, which I admit some may find to be a bit negative, Bad Nick was on a roll, putting together a fun little Bad Nick Blog post titled I Need Therapy. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Worrying works! 90 percent of the things I worry about never happen.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

How do you travel? Do you make a beeline for your destination by the quickest possible route, or do you casually meander along until you get there? Do you plan your stops ahead of time so you know where you’ll be every night, or do you worry about where you’ll spend the night when you get tired of driving for the day? Do you go from membership park to membership park, getting the most out of your annual dues?

Are you a planner who gets almost as much enjoyment in anticipation of your journeys, or do you like to be surprised by what you find along the way?

It’s only February, but we are already thinking about our summer travels. With a great big old country out there to explore, it’s hard to decide where to go next.

For several years our summer travels were dictated by our teaching schedule with Life on Wheels. We traveled a lot of miles, but it was always to the same places, and usually along the same routes. While I love teaching, the same old routine had stopped being fun. We’re ready to do something different.

Our Winnebago gives us the ability to travel some routes that we were not comfortable tackling in our bus conversion, and there are a lot of places in the Rocky Mountain west that we’d like to explore. So we may spend some time in Colorado and Wyoming. I’ve never been to Yellowstone and some of the other western National Parks.

Or we may go to the Pacific Northwest. We love the Oregon and Washington coast, and we haven’t been there in a long time. Then again, we really want to go to the big Winnebago Grand National Rally in Forest City, Iowa in July, so that would cut short a trip to the Northwest. Hmmm…. Branson? We haven’t been there in a long time. Our options are open, and our schedule is set in Jello. That’s the way we like it.

Our favorite mode of travel is to have some general idea of where we’re going, but no concrete plans on where or when we’ll be at any given time. We seldom make advance reservations, unless we’re going to be in a high traffic area where it might be hard to get a campsite otherwise.

I do a lot of internet research on areas where we’ll be traveling, and put together a list of places we’d like to see. We also get a lot of tips from our readers, and whenever we cross a state line, we try to stop at the State Welcome Center and pick up tourism brochures to give us more ideas.

When we’re going from Point A to Point B, we don’t stop in RV parks every night. I can’t see paying somebody $20 to $30 or more just for a place to park overnight. That’s why we have a self-contained RV. Between WalMarts, truck stops, city parks that allow free camping, casinos, Elks and Moose lodges, and VFW posts, we can always find a place to stop for the night. A few times we have taken readers up on their offer to park in their driveway for a night or two. If we do stop overnight at an RV park, it is usually a Passport America campground.

Once we arrive at a place where we want to spend a few days, we find a comfortable campground to settle into, and make day trips in a 75 to 100 mile radius to explore the region, in our van.

That’s the method that seems to work for us, but there is no one right way to live the RV lifestyle. It’s all abut what works best for you. So, how do you travel?

Thought For The Day – Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Terry and I both want to thank all of you who posted comments on the blog, e-mailed, or called us after reading about our encounter with an armed burglar in our RV. Your concern and support are very much appreciated.

We are okay, but both of us feel totally wiped out, I think myself more than Miss Terry. I have always been able to function during a crisis or emergency situation, but like this time, a day or so later it all hits me at once, leaving me feeling shaky, wrung out, and feeling like I am teetering on a ledge.

I only slept an hour or so Friday night, and ever since the incident, I have been going over it in my head, second guessing myself, and wondering what I could have/should have done differently. Looking back, I keep thinking that the second I realized that we had been victimized, we should have backed off and avoided the potential confrontation that followed. And I keep thinking what could have happened to Terry if he had shot me and she was left alone with him. I am mentally kicking myself over and over again for putting her into that situation. That is the worst part, the what ifs.

Rationally, I know it all happened too fast for me to have had time to think it all through and consider my options, and that I reacted the way my instincts and training told me to do. And it worked out; nobody got hurt (except maybe the intruder’s arm), and we are here to tell the story. But again, there is that nagging “what if.”

Somebody wrote to say that this could have been avoided if we had been in a campground, instead of dry camping in a parking lot. But there are no campgrounds open where we are this time of year. And while we have dry camped in everything from truck stops to rest areas, to the open desert with no problems, this was an RV repair facility’s RV parking area with hookups. The only other time we had a crime issue was in our first month on the road, when somebody tried to steal our pickup truck while were in a Coast to Coast campground in California. So much for the argument of campgrounds over other locations to spend the night.

I also had several people tell me that they would have shot the burglar and worried about whatever happened later. With all due respect, that sounds a lot better in talk than in real life. Once you pull that trigger, you can’t take that bullet back. The legal and civil ramifications that will follow will cost you much more than whatever they may have stolen, not to mention the psychological aftermath.

Taking another person’s life is about the worst experience one can ever have, no matter what the circumstances. You will relive it for the rest of your life, trust me on this one. I’ve been there and still wake up too many nights in a cold sweat.  Would I have shot the guy if he continued to be a threat to our lives? In a nanosecond. Would I regret it forever after? Yes, I would. I’m just very grateful it didn’t come to that.

On another note, our faithful old MCI bus conversion is on its way to California with its new owner, Rich Perry. Rich and his friend  Bill flew in Friday, spent most of yesterday going over the bus from stem to stern, and left about 4:30 yesterday afternoon.

Here is a picture of myself and Rich shaking hands on the deal, while Bill and Miss Terry stand beside us.

Bill has an MCI 7 of his own, and has converted several buses for friends, so I feel confident that he’ll help Rich get our beloved bus to its new home. It was really sad to see her driving away for the last time, but as the old verse says, “to everything, there is a season…”

Before all of this started with the burglary, we had planned to leave Elkhart as soon as the bus sale was wrapped up. Now I’m not sure what will happen. I have an appointment at the VA hospital in Lexington, Kentucky on Wednesday morning, and trying to cancel and reschedule it would be a real hassle. But we may have no other choice. We obviously need to spend some more time inside a repair shop before we can go anywhere. 

Thought For The Day – It is not what you are called, but what you answer to that matters.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally