Being able to adapt to the challenges life throws at us are an essential part of the fulltime RVer’s psychological toolbox. They say that the only thing that stays the same is change, and that’s certainly true whether you live in a sticks and bricks house, or a home on wheels.

No matter how carefully you plan, there will be times when all of your plans go right out the window and you just have to adapt to the new situation and deal with it. If you can’t, you’re probably never going to make it as a fulltimer, because this lifestyle, as great as it is, holds a lot of surprises.

You may plan to be at a certain campground at a certain time, and bad weather, traffic delays, or a mechanical breakdown keeps you from getting there, and instead you find yourself spending the night next to a hog hauler in a truck stop parking lot. You may have registered for your favorite RV rally, expecting lots of fellowship and good times, only to arrive to find the grounds have turned into a sea of mud. You may want to see Alaska, or drive old Route 66 next summer, but an unplanned medical emergency finds you stuck in Paducah.

You can’t foresee everything that will happen to you, but you can be very sure that from time to time, something will happen to get in the way of your plans! Being able to just accept it and roll with the flow will help keep you sane, and make your RVing life much more enjoyable.

When we originally came up here to Elkhart, it was going to be a quick trip in and out – get the bus sold, get a couple of minor issues handled on the RV, make a quick stop at the VA hospital in Lexington, and head back to the warm, sunny South. As you know, those plans disappeared Friday night.

I was able to get my medical appointment rescheduled for Friday, and the folks here at Duncan RV Repair have been scrambling to get us ready to go, and have just about everything finished. But now we have this terrible winter storm tearing the country apart and making traveling unsafe.

We’ve been through more than enough the last few days to need any more challenges, so if the wind keeps blowing, and the roads stay slippery and treacherous, I’ll just call the VA hospital and either reschedule or cancel the appointment, and we’ll sit tight until it’s safe to be out on the road.

Yes, we’d love to put cold, snowy Elkhart in our rearview mirror, and we’re really looking forward to doing so as soon as we can. But being stuck here is a minor inconvenience. Wrecking our RV and injuring ourselves on a patch of icy road would be a tragedy. So we’re sitting tight, watching the weather reports, keeping our fingers crossed, and rolling with the flow. Like I said, sometimes you just have to adapt.

Thought For The Day – Better to do it than to wish it done.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Of all of the places I don’t want to be, anywhere it is cold and snowing is at the very top of my list. Stuck in a traffic jam? Mere child’s play. Sitting in a dentist’s chair getting a root canal? I can handle it. Dinner with my ex-mother-in-law? Bring it on and give me a heaping helping of seconds.

But snow and cold just do not fit into my life plan. And we are getting it here in Elkhart, Indiana! I don’t want to be an Eskimo! I belong on a beach somewhere, soaking up sunshine, listening to Jimmy Buffett, and watching the pretty girls strolling by in their skimpy bikinis. This is just wrong!

In spite of the hassle and discomfort caused by our break in, I just cannot say enough good about the folks here at Duncan RV Repair. Owners Jim and Kristy Deavers, and their entire staff, have treated us just like family. When we came in Monday morning each and every employee stopped to shake our hands, even hug us, and tell us how sorry they were for what happened, and how glad they were that we were not injured in the confrontation with the burglar.

Jim Deavers told me that he was making getting us back on the road his top priority, and their crew swarmed over our motorhome, fixing the bent door where I slammed it on the bad guy’s hand, replacing the screen on the door, measuring the door window to get replacement glass ordered, and a dozen other tasks. They replaced both of our DVD players, my netbook computer, our TV, and even ordered a replacement for my Silverleaf engine monitoring cable.

Jim even had a lady come in to clean the inside of the motorhome, wiping down any surface the burglar might have touched, vacuuming the carpet, and making our home feel “clean” again! I’m sure my lady blog readers know how much that meant to Miss Terry.

Everybody here has gone far above and beyond what was required or expected, and we appreciate it more than we can ever say. They have made a terrible time in our lives a lot easier to deal with. We don’t feel like customers experiencing some misfortune, but rather family members with a problem that the whole clan has come together to help and support.

Somebody sent me an e-mail saying that they would never come to any place to get service or repairs done where something like this could have happened. That’s nonsense. This could have happened anywhere in the country. Crime is not isolated to the big cities or the bad neighborhoods anymore. It’s everywhere.

The once charming, peaceful small Arizona mountain town where we lived for so many years before hitting the road, is now overrun with meth dealers and crime. My daughter lives within sight of the police department, and a couple of years ago one of her neighbors was busted for making meth in his apartment! She worked at a Sears store, and came out to find her brand new car stolen, and when it was later recovered, it had been vandalized. When I owned the newspaper there, we seldom had reports of robberies and burglaries. Now two of my good friends have had their businesses broken into, and the bank was just robbed this past Friday!

It is not the fault of Duncan RV that some scumbag picked our motorhome to break into while it was parked on their lot. It would have been easy for them to tell us “There’s the telephone, call your insurance company, and when they give us the okay, we’ll make an appointment to start in on your repairs.” I have met more than a few shop owners who would have done just that. But Jim and Kristy Deavers are honest, decent, hard working, wonderful people who feel a sense of responsibility to their customers, and they want to make things right. We feel very fortunate that if this had to happen to us, at least it happened here, with people who care.  We would come back here for service anytime.

Thought For The Day – An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of wit.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

It was a busy weekend, what with getting the bus sold, cleaning up the mess inside our motorhome from the burglary, and dealing with all of those issues. Then, yesterday morning we woke up to an inch or so of snow on the ground and very slick roads.

It was only ten miles from where we spent the weekend, inside the building at Phoenix Commercial Paint to be out of the weather, back to the RV repair shop where the burglary occurred, but we saw three accidents on the way there. You would think that folks who live in a place where it snows every winter wouldn’t need to learn to drive on slippery roads all over again each year, but apparently they do.

A crew went right to work on our motorhome and got a lot accomplished in a very short period of time, but there was no glass available anywhere locally to fit our door window, it needed to be shipped directly from Winnebago, in Forest City, Iowa. Since the entire country seems to be under a winter storm alert, the folks at Winnebago said they would do their very best to get it shipped overnight, but couldn’t promise anything.

It was apparent that no matter how hard they tried, there was no way our RV was gong to be ready to roll out of here in time for me to make it to my appointment at the VA hospital in Lexington, Kentucky Wednesday morning. We were faced with either rescheduling the appointment, no easy task with the VA’s heavy workload, or leaving the RV here, driving to Lexington in the van, and then back. At 350 miles each way, that wasn’t an appealing option. I called the hospital, explained my situation, and lucked out. They had an open slot on Friday morning, and I grabbed it. Now we have a little more time to work with, and hopefully the weather will cooperate just a little bit and the glass will arrive on schedule, in time to get it installed.

Rather than drive back to Phoenix Commercial Paint for the night, they moved our rig into the paint booth here, where we are nice and toasty and feel secure, away from the creeps who prowl the night looking for an easy score. It looks like this will be our home for a couple more days.

Terry and I want to thank every body who has shown their love and support in so many ways. We have so many e-mails and blog comments that we just don’t have time to reply to each one individually, but we read all of them, and you have made a very rough time in our lives a lot easier. A special thanks to our friends Rick Schafer and Marcia Gantz, who live about an hour away in Michigan. They are leaving on a trip for a week or so, and called to offer us the use of their home if we needed a place to stay. What wonderful, caring friends we have!

Thought For The Day – Experience is the mother of wisdom.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally