Yesterday we made a day trip of 90 miles to Victoria, Texas to pick up the January-February issue of the Gypsy Journal from our printer. Victoria is a bustling city of 86,000, and is popular with RV snowbirds who don’t want to go as far as the Rio Grande Valley. The city is big enough to have everything you could want, from big box retail stores to excellent medical services, and rates at the RV parks are affordable.

When we left Alabama for Texas, we were not sure where we would be staying, but we knew we’d be in Victoria to pick up the new issue, so I had our mail forwarding service send our mail there, care of General Delivery. But I made a newbie mistake and didn’t check first to see if they had more than one post office location. Sure enough, they have two.

Fortunately, all it took was one phone call to learn that all General Delivery mail in Victoria goes to the downtown post office on Main Street. In large cities with many post office locations, only one location accepts General Delivery, and one can spend a lot of time running back and forth trying to track down their mail.

With that chore out of the way, we picked up the new issue of the paper, and then stopped to do some banking.

Gypsy Journal subscribers Richard and Patsy King live in Victoria, and had invited us to stop by when we were in town. Richard and Patsy have been to our three Arizona Gypsy Gathering rallies, and are a fun couple we have enjoyed getting to know. We had a nice time visiting with them, talking about our respective adventures on the road, and comparing travel tips.

Speaking of RV rallies, at our Ohio rally in September, well known RV authors and speakers Joe and Vicki Kieva honored us by coming and presenting their last seminars before officially retiring from the speaking circuit. After a distinguished career as the premier RV seminar presenters in the nation, Joe and Vicki had decided it was time to really retire and just enjoy their RV travels, without having a speaking schedule to keep. We have known Joe and Vicki ever since we got on the road, and were honored to work with them at Life on Wheels.

Well, to quote those television infomercials, “But wait, there’s more!” Yesterday I got an e-mail from Joe, saying that they wanted to come to our Arizona rally and give a couple of their seminars! How cool is that? They will be presenting their excellent RVing Alaska seminar, as well as their Personal Security Tips For RVers. After our burglary earlier this month, that’s one seminar I don’t want to miss!  

The next couple of days will be a whirlwind of envelope stuffing to get the new issue in the mail. As soon as that’s done, we’ll head for Arizona, maybe stopping to pick up a couple of stories for future issues of the paper along the way.

Thought For The Day – Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is something very special.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

I don’t know why I even try to give our readers an idea of our travel plans, because the minute I do, everything changes. I reported in yesterday’s blog that we would send the CD with the new issue to our printer, and hopefully head west by way of Livingston, Texas and across the central part of the Lone Star State. What a difference a day makes! 

When I called the printer we normally use here in this part of the country, they didn’t have us on the schedule as promised, our contact person was unavailable, and it was obvious they were neck deep in chaos due to internal problems. Now what? We’re already running late and we don’t have time to wait for them to resolve their personnel issues.

I called another newspaper printer we have used in Victoria, Texas, explained our problem, and the customer service rep we work with there promised that if I could overnight the CD to her, she’d make getting us printed a priority. So it looks like we’ll be driving across Interstate 10 counting the road kill after all.

Publishing a newspaper on the road presents these kinds of challenges all the time. It would be great to have one newspaper do all of our printing, but the cost of having them ship the finished issue to us wherever we happen to be would be prohibitive, and timing would become a real issue. Most newspapers could actually handle the mailing for us as well, but besides the papers for our subscribers, we also print several thousand extra copies of each issue to pass out at RV parks, rallies, etc, and those would have to be shipped to us, with the inherent costs mentioned above.

Anyway, with all of that worked out yesterday morning, we drove about 35 miles to Pensacola, Florida to take care of some business, and made the mistake of stopping at a couple of stores. I was quickly reminded of why I try to avoid stores from Thanksgiving until New Years Day. Crowds of shoppers, everybody in a hurry, screaming kids, and frazzled store employees are about as far from the spirit of Christmas as you can get. Bah humbug!

Today we have an appointment at Camping World in Robertsdale to get the last of the repairs done to our motorhome from our burglary and vandalism. Our appointment is for 8 a.m., and they say we’ll be out by noon.

We had expected to be here in Summerdale until after Christmas, and probably until right after New Years, but, with this change of plans in our printing schedule, we’ll be heading toward Texas no later than Wednesday morning. In fact, if they get the work finished at Camping World early enough in the day, we may even put a couple of hundred miles behind us yet today.

We know we are disappointing some folks who wanted to get together with us while we were here, but we really have no choice. Unfortunately, we are not retired and we don’t always have the luxury of the relaxed schedule we like to have. It’s a lot better than our old workaholic lifestyle, but sometimes when duty calls, we just have to answer.

Tune in tomorrow and find out where we are. And if you find out before I do, send me an e-mail and let me know!       

Thought For The Day – I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

I want to wish a belated Happy Anniversary to Terry’s parents, Pete and Bess Weber, who celebrated their 58^th wedding anniversary yesterday. Here’s hoping you have many, many more together.

My in-laws are very healthy, active senior citizens who are always busy. Apparently walking four miles a day, being involved in his church, helping his daughters with home improvement projects, and doing small repairs for the neighbors wasn’t enough to keep him busy, so at 79 years old Pete got a job as a Wal-Mart greeter! Bess is always finding a new recipe, working with her genealogy projects, taking part in church activities, and a hundred and one other things that fill her days. They’re just too darned busy to get old!

Unfortunately, as our generation’s parents age, not every family is as blessed as Terry’s. Diminished physical or mental capacity can impact every member of the family. Last night ABC aired a Primetime special on aging parents that showed some of the problems that come up.

Sometimes the fulltime RV lifestyle can be an asset to a family with aging parents, and other times it adds to the problems. We know several RVers who return to their hometowns to give other family members who are caregivers a respite, sometimes staying for several weeks at a time.

We have also known RVers who take elderly parents on the road with them for short trips, and even one or two who travel fulltime with an elderly parent. Just last week our friends Richard and Patsy King stopped at Elkhart Campground with Richard’s 91 year old mother, Dorothy, who is still as sharp as a tack and absolutely beautiful. They had been showing Dorothy the sites around Ohio’s Amish country and then Indiana before taking her back to their hometown of Victoria, Texas.

Some RVers we know have had to get off the road to care for parents whose health is failing, either because other family members refuse to do so, or because there is nobody else to take on the responsibility. One lady told me that she loves her father, but she felt guilty because she also resented having to give up the lifestyle she had dreamed of for years to care for him. I told her not to beat herself up, that her feelings were only natural. But I secretly thanked my lucky stars that my in-laws are so healthy, and that Terry and I are able to continue enjoying the freedom of life on the road.

Thought For The Day – A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

If you don’t like the weather in the Midwest, wait ten minutes and it will probably change. A few days ago I was complaining in the blog that it looked and felt like winter, and yesterday it was so hot and humid, it felt like we were in the Amazon.

Finally, the new issue of the Gypsy Journal is finished and today we’ll drive up to Michigan and drop it off at the printer. It feels good to get that out of the way.

Of course, while my work is out of the way, Terry’s will start once we pick up the finished papers from the printer in a few days. Then she’ll go into high gear getting thousands of envelopes stuffed and ready to mail out. Each envelope has a distinctive bar code, and if even one of them gets out of order, everything comes to a screeching halt when they reach the post office, so Terry has her own method of doing the job and will not allow me or anyone else to help her. Each time she has, it has taken longer to get things sorted out again than if she did it herself.

Her job will be a little bit easier this time, because quite a few readers have switched over to our new digital edition, so she’s got 100 or so less envelopes to deal with. Once the printer approves the job and lets us know it’s good to go, I’ll be uploading the new issue, and sending out an e-mail with a link and password to our digital subscribers. I’m a bit nervous, just because this is the first time we will officially do the digital edition, but I think it will be okay, and I have Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, my technical wizard, on speed dial.

Today is Miss Terry’s birthday, and once we get the paper to the printer, we plan to drive over to Muskegon and visit with Berni and Rocky Frees. We’ll take Terry out for a nice dinner, and probably go back to Berni and Rocky’s place for a rousing game of Mexican Train. Happy birthday, Terry! You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, baby, and I love you more every day.

Yesterday afternoon, Richard and Patsy King arrived at Elkhart Campground in their beautiful Allegro Bus. Richard has helped us with parking RVs at our Arizona rally the last three years, and Patsy, his long suffering wife, is always a joy to be around.

Richard’s mother, Dorothy King, is with them on this trip. Dorothy will be 91 years young in September, and is an absolutely beautiful lady. She still lives on her own, and while she’s entertaining the kids by playing gypsy right now, she can’t wait to get home to Victoria, Texas because she is missing her weekly bingo game with her cronies. Richard took a picture of Miss Terry and me with Dorothy, and I sure look happy with those two pretty ladies, don’t I? I hope I’m half as spry as Dorothy is when I’m her age. Heck, I wish I was that spry now!

Thought For The Day – Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally