Our month in Tucson has gone by much too quickly, and we have not had the time to do half of what we had hoped to while we were here.

We did get the chance to stop and visit with my uncle, Jack Compau, who is 84 and still holding his own. He’s slowed down a bit, but looks good, and we enjoyed our visit.

We also visited with my cousin Beverly McKiddy several times. Bev has a special place in my heart, and she’s one of my favorite people in this world. We’ve had a close relationship since we were youngsters, and when we were both single parents raising our kids, we leaned on each other a lot. We never miss an opportunity to get together.

Yesterday Bev drug a dozen or more old photo albums out of her closet and we spent some time reminiscing. I love looking at old family photographs. They are a tie to my history. It was amazing to look back over 50 or more years of pictures and remember cars my Dad owned, or see my parents and uncles and aunts as young adults just starting their own families.

Looking at those old pictures brought our youth back to life. Christmas mornings, summer vacations, and high school heartthrobs preserved forever in Kodachrome. Were any of us really ever that young and slender? And what’s with those wide lapels and sideburns anyway? Whose idea was that?

It was interesting to see old World War II photographs of my father and uncles, younger men than my own son is today, going off to fight the Nazis and Japanese to bring peace back to the world. Some of them landed at Omaha Beach on D Day, others island hopped across the Pacific from one bloody beachhead to the next, while others did their fighting in the sky over Europe. One of those uncles never made it back, dying on a battlefield in North Africa.

Another album held photographs of my generation going off to fight our own war. Bev’s brothers Bob and Sonny looked like little boys playing soldier in their uniforms, as I do in the pictures of myself in those days. But those boys both distinguished themselves in combat and made it back home a bit banged up, but ready to get on with their lives. Now there’s a new generation, and a new war, and somebody will be adding new photographs of little boys in uniform.

I think you could look at any family’s old photo albums and trace our society’s history. It’s an interesting trip down memory lane.

Today we’ll fire up our old bus and say goodbye to Tucson. We’re headed for Apache Junction and some more family time, with Terry’s parents and sisters. We’re playing a waiting game, biding our time until it warms up a bit more in Arizona’s high country, so we can get up to Show Low and spend some time with my daughter Tiffany and her family.

Thought For The Day - The only true measure of success is happiness.

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We’ll be celebrating a major milestone with the next issue of the Gypsy Journal, which will mark ten years of fulltiming and publishing the world’s only nationwide RV publication produced and distributed entirely on the road. We’re pretty darned proud of that.

Looking back, I can still remember the moment the Gypsy Journal was born in my mind. We were sitting at our kitchen table, back home in Show Low, Arizona, brainstorming ideas to make a living in this new mobile lifestyle that we wanted to become a part of.

We discussed several options, when a light suddenly went off in my head, and I told Miss Terry “We’re going to publish an RV newspaper, and it’s not going to be like any other RV publication out there. No slick pages full of ads, no columns written by outsiders, just a folksy little rag about the things we see on the back roads, and the folks we meet along the way. We’ll call it the Gypsy Journal!”

And that was that! A few weeks later we had produced our very first issue and hit the road. You can read about how this all came about on our website at the page titled And So We Hit the Road.

We’ve seen a lot of changes in ten years. When we started out, digital cameras were in their infancy. We mostly used 35mm film cameras, and if we shot a roll of film for a story, we might be hundreds of miles away before we got it developed. If those photos turned out bad, we were really in a bind! Now we use digital cameras, and can see the pictures instantly to know if we have the shot we want.

For the first four years, we produced the Gypsy Journal the old fashioned way, printing things off on a laser printer, laying every page out manually on large grid sheets, affixing the photos and stories to the grid sheets with hot wax, and using a portable drafting table and a T-square to make sure everything was straight. Then we took those grid sheets to a newspaper printer to be photographed and have the plates made to run the job. These days we lay the entire edition out on a computer screen, save it to a CD, and send that to the printer. As frustrating as computers and their programs can be, they have made our work much easier.

We’ve been very blessed. That flash of inspiration all those years ago has turned into a successful little business that has allowed us to live this wonderful lifestyle for years, and even though we’ll never get rich from it, if you measure riches in terms of money in the bank, we wouldn’t trade what we have for a million bucks.

And we know that we could never have done it without your support, in subscribing to the Gypsy Journal, buying the books and RVing guides we produce, clicking those little ads on our websites, and coming to our rallies. Thank you for helping make our dream come true.

Thought For The Day - There is only one success – to be able to live your life in your own way.

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My dad never read the newspaper’s obituary column. “I’d rather think that my friends don’t like me anymore and just stopped coming around than to find out that they’re dead,” he’d say.

Sometimes I feel that way when I hear about another fulltime RVer who has come off the road and hung up the keys.

Not that there isn’t life after fulltiming. We’ll all have to hang up the keys someday. But Terry and I just hope that for us, it’s a long, long way down the road. We have too much left that we want to see and do.

The fulltime RV lifestyle isn’t for everyone. We’ve seen a lot of new fulltimers come and go in our many years of traveling. Some tried it for a while, then found some place they fell in love with and settled down there. Others were forced off the road by death or illness. Finances made some RVers come off the road. We’ve known people who have tried fulltiming and discovered that it’s just not for them, and took another direction in life. There’s nothing wrong with that, everybody has to do what’s right for themselves. But I sure miss pulling into a campsite next to them someplace, or sharing a campfire with them.

We’ve also met fulltimers who still live the RV lifestyle, but who have purchased a lot someplace and use it for a base from which they do their traveling, and then return to.

A couple of months ago, Terry and I were very tempted by a lot we found for sale close to the water in Aransas Pass, Texas, a friendly small town we dearly love. But we realized (or feared) that if we had a lot, we’d feel obligated to return to it on a regular basis, if for no other reason than to justify the small expense of the annual property taxes. Would it become the first strand of strings that would eventually tie us down? We mentioned the property to friends, who may purchase it for their own use. Again, to each their own. It’s all about the choices we each make for our own lives. There is no right or wrong answer, no one way of doing it.

We’ve enjoyed the RVing friends we’ve made, those who have settled down someplace, and those who are still out here making the wheels turn. They have become a part of our extended family.

Yesterday two of those friends left us to continue on down the road. Orv and Nancy Hazelton had been parked next to us here at Tra-Tel RV Park for a couple of days, and they left in search of new adventures.

After we saw Orv and Nancy off, Terry and I drove down to Benson and dropped off sample bundles of papers at the local RV parks in that area. As we were leaving the Escapees park, we spotted Rick and Terry Traver pulling in, so we made a U-turn and followed them back to their fifth wheel on a rented lot in the park. Rick and Terry are a neat couple, and it was fun to have some time to visit with them before we made the drive back to Tucson.

That’s one of the great things about this lifestyle, we never know what old (or new) friends await us around the next corner.

Thought For The Day - The most precious thing we have is life, yet it has absolutely no trade-in value.

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Wow, I announced in yesterday’s blog that registration was open for our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally, and e-mails starting pouring in! We must be doing something right, because we already have both returning vendors and attendees registering already.

If you are a member of the Escapees internet forum and find an e-mail in your in box saying you have a new private message, delete it. Just about anybody who is registered with the forum got the same e-mail, and it’s spam that will take you to a Russian teen sex website.

Don’t blame the Escapees. They are victims too. The sleazebag who launched the e-mails registered with the Escapees forum, jumped through all of the hoops necessary to get an account, and then sent out his garbage.

Someone asked me why a person would go to all of that trouble, and the answer is, obviously, money. You say that you’d never subscribe to a pornographic website? The creeps doing this don’t care if you do or don’t. They make money either way.

Just as we have Google ads on our websites and the blog, and we make a small commission every time a reader clicks on one of those ad links, these guys have set up a code that shows the clicks they set up are coming from them, not a legitimate website. So when you click on their “private message” link, you are really clicking on a link to a website that pays them a commission for every visitor. They can make a lot of money very fast doing this, and as soon as one victimized website discovers their intrusion and blocks them, they move on to the next one.  

This was a real problem a few years ago, and several good websites eventually shut down because they grew tired of constantly fighting this kind of trash.

How can you protect yourself from scams like this? It’s simple, but you have to be alert all of the time. Don’t click on links sent to you in any unsolicited e-mail. In the case of one like this, go to the actual website (Escapees, in this case) and check your messages there.

Also, read the URL address where an e-mail comes from. Is it something you recognize? Read carefully, is it similar, but not exact? When in doubt, don’t click.

A good virus program and a spam filter, such as AVG and Ad Aware can catch a lot of what comes to your inbox. Run them religiously. But remember, there are all kinds of jerks out there creating malicious crap to send out, and as soon as the good guys find a way to stop one, fifty more come up with something new to make internet users’ lives miserable. It’s just one of the woes of life in our high tech world.

Thought For The Day - The person who goes the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare; the “sure thing” boat never gets far from shore.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

Well, it just wasn’t our time to buy a new motorhome. The diesel pusher we have been looking at has sold, and someone is going down the road in an excellent coach. We’re disappointed, but we know that when the time is right, we’ll find the right deal that will work for us.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and we’ve been very busy. We have been here in Tucson almost a month, and we haven’t had the time to do half of what we had hoped to get done. Where does the time go?

A nice couple named Ted and Donna Wallin had volunteered at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally last year, and a while back they dropped by while we were gone and left their business card. As it turns out, they are staying at Prince of Tucson, the RV park right next door to us here at Tra-Tel.

Yesterday, Terry and I stopped by Prince of Tucson to drop off a sample bundle of the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and I asked the two women working in the office what site our friends were in.

It took me a while to ask my question, because they were involved in a lengthy conversation based upon “You think your surgery was terrible? Wait until I tell you about mine!” Somewhere between an inflamed gall bladder and a complicated hysterectomy, I interrupted, only to be told that Ted and Donna had already moved on.

Back at the bus, I called the Wallins to tell them I was sorry we had been so busy and did not have the chance to connect. As it turns out, they were still at Prince of Tucson, and they came over for a short visit. I’m sure that the two ladies working at the RV park didn’t mean to give me false information. It’s probably all of those lingering effects from the anesthesia.

Speaking of the Ohio Gypsy Gathering, we have opened registration for this year’s rally, which will be September 28 through October 2 at the Mercer County Fairgrounds in Celina. Click this registration link and reserve your site now!

In mid-afternoon, our dear friends Orv and Nancy Hazelton arrived here at Tra-Tel RV Park, in preparation for an appointment with a nearby RV shop to have a new refrigerator installed today. Once they were parked and hooked up, they came by to visit for a while, and then we all piled into our van and had a nice dinner at Terry’s favorite Mexican restaurant, La Fuente. It’s always fun to have time to spend with Orv and Nancy, and to hear about their RV travels.

Back at the bus, I sorted through submissions to our new Todays Hero Blog and selected one to run for today. I have had several people write to tell me that they have someone they wish to nominate for the honor, but they don’t think they are very good writers. No problem, I will try to work with you to edit and rewrite your submission if necessary. Don’t let the heroes in your life miss out on the recognition they deserve because you don’t think you can write. Between the two of us, we can get the job done.

Thought For The Day - A friend is a person who tells you all the nice things about you that you didn’t even know yourself.

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