We had two very special visitors to the Gypsy Gathering rally yesterday. Terry’s parents, Pete and Bess Weber, drove down from their home in east Mesa to check things out. They have never been to one of our rallies, and when we introduced them, everybody made them feel welcome.

While they were here, they spent a few minutes in one of my seminars, and when they came in, I said to the class “Act like you respect me, I want to impress my mother-in-law.” Everybody was amazed at how young they both look, and several people told Bess she could have easily passed for Terry’s sister, not her mother.

You know, I love our extended family of RVers, but sometimes they leave me feeling just a tad bit inadequate, such as the other day when I posed for this picture with my pals Ed Allard on the left and Sid Dembowski on the right. Don’t I look like a goofy little brother looking up to the big boys?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had my pal Jodie Spiller up on stage with me the other night when we were getting ready for our Cactus Queen beauty contest, and I told the ladies in the audience “My name is Nick, but you can just call me Studmuffin.” Jodie took the microphone from me and said “It looks like more muffin than stud to me!” She’s a tiny little thing, but she sure packs a verbal punch!

Of course, I’m not the only one who can have a good time playing the fool. Check out Howie Glover and Dave Ault canoeing in the “river” left over from all of the rain we had here at the fairgrounds. Hey guys, where are your Coast Guard approved personal flotation devices?

Yesterday was our last full day of the rally, and judging by the comments we have received and the rally feedback forms I have read so far, I think everybody had a good time. This morning we’ll have coffee and donuts, and then it’s hitch up and go for most of the people here. We’ll miss them, but we know we’ll see them again somewhere down the road or at our next rally.

Terry and I will be hanging around through the weekend, wrapping up the post-rally chores, settling our bill with the fairgrounds, and visiting with a few of the folks who will also be staying over for a few more days.

Then we’re headed for Tucson. We had booked a month at Tra-Tel RV Park last year when Life on Wheels ended, in anticipation of coming back for this year’s session. Of course, there is no more Life on Wheels, but we’ll still go on down there, spend some time resting up and relaxing, visiting some family I have there, and waiting for it to warm up a bit in Arizona’s high country before we head further north.

Thought For The Day - Too many of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us.

After the nasty weather we put up with the first two days of the rally, yesterday we were rewarded with a beautiful day. The sky was blue, the temperature was comfortable, and everybody was out and about, having a good time socializing, attending our seminars, and shopping with the rally vendors.

For the second year in a row, our good friends Mike and Pat McFall ran out of products to sell at their PressurePro booth and had to order more sent in by overnight shipment. Mike said that after last years experience, he ordered even more for this rally, and still sold out! Every vendor I have talked to has said it was a good rally for them, in terms of sales. If you’re a vendor and are overlooking these smaller rallies in favor of the big events, you are missing out on some great sales opportunities.

We had our pizza party yesterday evening, and I’m always amazed at how efficiently Miss Terry organizes things with her crew of volunteers. They served up over 125 pizzas to our huge crowd in record time, and everybody complimented me on how smoothly the process went.

My friends, I get an undue share of the praise when we do these rallies, because I’m the one always out front playing the fool and glad handing everybody. But I know more than anybody that the reason I get to do so is because Terry is the one quietly working nonstop in the background to keep me, our volunteers, and the rally on an even keel. Without her to carry the load, I’m just a fat, goofy guy telling stories and jokes.

The highlight of our Western Gypsy Gathering rallies is our Cactus Queen beauty contest. Every year, just about the time I think I’ve seen it all, these “ladies” amaze me because they have come up with something even gaudier. As I told the crowd when I introduced this year’s contestants, “They’re brassy and they’re sassy, but they sure ain’t classy!”

After the pizza party we had our beauty contest, and it was a hoot! Now, I tell folks before we start that if they are easily offended, they may not want to hang around. Not that there is anything obscene going on, but you’ve got to figure that it takes a lot of bribery, or alcohol, to convince six middle-aged married men to dress up in drag and strut their stuff on stage. Every year we have someone who just does not think this contest is funny, and that’s okay. To each their own. But I sure saw a lot of people laughing so hard they had tears running down their cheeks and holding their sides because it hurt.

This year’s crop of “girls” really knew how to work a crowd, and judging from the cheers, laughter, and catcalls, they were a hit. Here’s a picture of them backstage while they were getting ready for the contest. Have you ever seen such a group of hotties?

I always have a hard time getting these contestants to act like ladies on stage. I mean, how hard can it be to keep your knees together when sitting in front of a crowd? Apparently, very hard. They all need to spend some time in a finishing school.

This year’s Cactus Queen, as determined by the applause from the crowd, was Jolene Jellybutt, from beautiful downtown Gumdrop, Arkansas, as played by Joel Bucham. And what a queen she was! Here is a picture of myself and Terry posing with Queen Jolene.

Thanks to all six of our contestants. We appreciate you guys, I mean girls, I mean…..  

Thought For The Day - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.

Well, first we had rain, and then we had mud. That was followed by gale force winds and plummeting temperatures. What else could God throw at us for this rally? As it turns out, the Big Guy has quite the sense of humor.

By yesterday morning the wind had died down, and though it was still pretty chilly, at least we had blue sky overhead. I was just starting my Meandering Down The Highway seminar in the early afternoon when there were two loud popping noises outside that gave everyone in the room a start, and about the time I could say “What the hell was that?” there was a terrific boom, more than a couple of people screamed, and the power went out. I wasn’t sure if lightning had struck or if somebody’s propane tank had exploded.

As it turns out, a kid’s mylar balloon had come floating by and gotten itself tangled into the power lines in front of the fairgrounds. It shorted out the fuses on two different transformers, and the third transformer in line completely exploded.

Miss Terry and several other people who were outside when it happened said it created quite a light show for a few seconds there.

Here is a photo Terry took of what was left of the red balloon entangled in the wires, and a shot of the pole where the transformer blew. Note that the top of the pole is charred from the explosion. 

Fortunately, there was a road crew from the local electric utility on the fairgrounds property at the time this happened, and in no time at all they had repaired the problem and restored power.

When this all happened I had my laptop computer and LCD projector running, and I was afraid they might have gotten fried, but we dodged that bullet and everything was okay. Once the power was back on and everybody was back in their seats I said to my audience “We’ve had rain, mud, wind and now transformers blowing up around us. What’s next, a plague of locusts?”

The good news is that while it is supposed to be chilly for the next couple of days, we should see clear skies for the rest of the rally. Terry and I spent some time wandering around the vendor area, and all of our vendors seem to be having a pretty good show in spite of everything that has happened. 

We have every kind of RV you could imagine here, from tiny Class B vans to huge land yachts, and even a couple of unique rigs you’ll never see anywhere else. I took these photos of a custom trailer and the vintage truck that tows it while we were in Aransas Pass, Texas a while back. We met the owners while we were all out kayaking, and gave them a copy of the Gypsy Journal. They liked it and came to the rally.

Another one of a kind rig here for the rally is this unit, which was built in a boatyard down south. It looks part bus conversion, part boat, and part spaceship. I have not been inside either rig yet, but I sure hope to get to see them before the rally ends.

After the day’s seminars are over today, we’ll have our pizza party, and then our Cactus Queen beauty contest. This is a big hit every year. Norah Glover, who is organizing the event, promises me that she’s got some real cuties lined up for us. Look for photos in tomorrow’s blog.

Thought For The Day - Good judgment comes from experience, and much of that comes from bad judgment.

Anyone who knows me is well aware of the fact that I’m a night owl. Unless I’m up against a deadline, I usually don’t start writing until about 9 p.m., and I seldom get to bed before 1:30 or 2 a.m. So all of that early bird gets the worm stuff just doesn’t work for me. I don’t like worms. I like pizza. Pizza is something you eat at night.

I really enjoyed my time in the Army, except for some very rude people with guns and bombs and things that used to shoot at me once in a while. Aside from that, it was a great experience. I even considered making it my career. But every darned morning some idiot played a bugle and woke me up.

What’s with that, anyway? Why does the Army insist that soldiers get up so early in the morning? They’re going to feel really dumb someday when somebody attacks us at night and everybody’s in their bunks. If I was still in uniform, I could have worked the night shift and been on the lookout for those commies or whoever it is we hate these days. 

That being said, I was up and outside of the bus by the crack of dawn yesterday. Trust me, if you haven’t seen it, dawn isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be! There has never been a sunrise yet that will compare to a great Arizona sunset, but just to record the event for posterity, I took a photograph of the sunrise. Now I’m done for the year. No more of this dawn nonsense. 

We only had a little bit of rain yesterday, just a scattered shower or two that lasted no longer than a minute or so. But the wind came up and the temperature dropped, making for an all around miserable day and evening. Our parking crew just kept right on keeping on, and worked all day getting the last of the rally attendees in and parked. I just can’t thank those guys enough.

Our attendance numbers are down quite a bit from last year. Part of that is the economy, to be sure. But we also had several people who cancelled due to the weather. One of our vendors called from Quartzsite to report being stuck in the mud somewhere over in that direction. A couple called from Tucson to say that they left Benson, got that far, and were turning around and going back because the wind was so terrible. Murphy’s Law has really been in effect for this rally so far.

But everybody is parked now, and we’re going to have fun, even if it kills us. We’ve got a great lineup of seminars starting today. The folks who are here are all fine people who came to learn and have a good time, and sooner or later the weatherman has to give us a break. So we’re going to focus on the positive and enjoy our week here in Mud City.

Thought For The Day - Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.

And then the rains came.

What fun would an RV rally be without rain? Just as there seems to be an unwritten law that says every RV park in the United States must be located within a stone’s throw of a railroad track, that same governing body has apparently decreed that there can be no RV rally without precipitation.

We have been here in Casa Grande for almost a month, and I don’t think we’ve seen more than two or three raindrops in all of that time. But Saturday night it began to rain. And then it rained some more. And some more.

By the time our hardworking parking crew was ready to start work at 8 a.m., the grounds was getting pretty muddy. Bringing in 95 heavy RVs sure didn’t help matters any. The hard rain stopped, but we had several brief showers during the day just to remind us that we were not in the clear yet.

I have to give Don Hankins and our parking crew some well deserved praise here. They slogged around in the mud for hours, getting RVs parked, listening to the occasional cranky RVer who didn’t want to park anyplace wet (I think the closest dry place is San Antonio right now), and they just kept on smiling and working all thorough it. 

The Gourd Festival was still going on Sunday, so our people had to work around what we have come to call the gourdheads. I never knew there were so many kinds of gourds in the world, and so many creative things people could do with them. But I have to be honest, anyone who is so fanatical about gourds that they would have personalized gourd license plates, or have “Gourd Princess” tattooed on their boob (don’t ask my how I know this, but it wasn’t a pretty sight), has to be, well, out of their gourd!

While the parking crew was busy outside, the registration crew was working just as hard inside, getting folks signed in. Because the fairgrounds had double booked the day, the gourd folks still had all of the main buildings, but we got a little quarter size Quonset hut to use for registration. It was amazing to me how many people they were able to move through there in such a short time.

By the end of the day we had 95 RVs here for the rally, and many more scheduled to arrive today. Unfortunately, due to the double booking, there are still a lot of Gourd Festival RVs on the fairgrounds, most of them parked smack in the center of our vendor area. And they have shown no indication of moving anytime soon. This makes it very frustrating for our parking crew and vendors. I will be having yet another visit with the fairgrounds staff this morning to try and get that issue resolved.  

This is our third year here at the Pinal County Fairgrounds, and while the new manager is trying very hard, we have begun to doubt that the ongoing problems will ever be corrected. There just seems to be too many people “in charge” of something but not willing to stand up on their hind legs and take responsibility for actually doing anything. For example, even though we are here and the rally is happening, we still do not have the contract that we were promised when we paid our deposit a year ago.

We have been talking to the manager of the fairgrounds in Yuma, Arizona as a possible location for our next rally, and looking at other options as well. While we’ve been to Yuma many times in the past, we have never actually visited the fairgrounds. We plan to do that once we wrap things up here. If you have been to any RV events at the Yuma fairgrounds, I’d appreciate your input on the facilities there.

Thought For The Day - Every path has a few puddles.