I believe in karma; the concept that whatever we do has an affect on our future. Simplified, it means what goes around, comes around. While karma is a tenet of the Hindu and Buddhist religions, I really think it applies to all of us.

We saw a good example of that yesterday. Elkhart Campground has a resident population of little ground squirrels or chipmunks or some sort of cute little critters, and we have enjoyed watching them pop up out of their holes and scamper around.

Yesterday, a couple in a fifth wheel pulled in next to Ron and Brenda Speidel’s Winnebago Journey motorhome, and the man managed to drop his keys right down one of the little ground squirrel holes. They fell down a good twelve to eighteen inches, and the hole was much too small to stick his hand into to retrieve them.

Miss Terry, our own little MacGyver, came to the rescue, digging into her stock of tools and gadgets to come up with one of those little metal claws on a flexible shaft, but it was too short to reach the keys. No problem, she also had a magnetic rod used to retrieve nuts and bolts that fall into inaccessible places. They taped that to the claw, and the fellow was able to get his keys back. (I’d have grabbed a shovel and dug them out, but apparently remodeling ground squirrel homes requires a different college degree than I have.)

Okay, so Terry built us up a little good karma there. It wasn’t but a couple of hours later that Ron noticed that somehow we had lost one of the safety pins that is used to attach our Blue Ox tow bar to our van. Since we planned on leaving for the Mercer County Fairgrounds in Celina, Ohio today to get set up for our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally, that was not a good thing.

Al Hesselbart, from the RV Hall of Fame Museum was visiting, and even though it was after 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, we jumped in his Jeep and went looking for any place that might still be open where I could get a replacement pin.

Dan’s Service Center, just a few blocks from the campground, closes at noon on Saturday, but I suggested we drive by, in the hope that somebody might be there who could help us out. Sure enough, owner Dan Miller was there washing his motorhome, and he took us into the shop and rummaged around until he found a replacement pin. That was karma coming back to reward us for Terry’s good deed earlier in the day.

Of course, you can only push karma so far. Just to be safe, I bought two pins, so I’ll be prepared the next time I lose one.

We’re leaving Elkhart this morning, traveling the 140 miles or so to Celina. This will be our first trip in our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles on the open road.

While I’m on the road, Bad Nick didn’t want you to get bored, so he has a new Bad Nick Blog entry titled The Bad Guy Bus.

Thought For The Day – The main reason that Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

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As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint peeled the faded, chipped up graphic stripe off of our Winnebago motorhome and repainted it in the original color.

After getting the old stripe off, Michele and her crew moved the RV into their paint booth and masked off the area to be painted to protect it from overspray. It looked even larger all covered up in paper! 

I picked the motorhome up yesterday afternoon, and it looks great! We are very pleased with the results of Michele’s work. It really sets the RV off, and everybody who has seen it has been impressed. Now you can count us among the many satisfied customers of Phoenix Commercial Paint! 

Today is going to be a busy day for us. We have to pick up the T-shirts for our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally, which I got busy and forgot to do yesterday. Then Miss Terry has some laundry to take care of, and I need to get the motorhome’s propane tank filled, and then air up all of the tires to accommodate the weight of everything we now have in it. After that, we need to load our bicycles into the van so we’ll be ready to leave for Ohio Sunday morning.

I also need to move our bus conversion to the storage area here at Elkhart Campground. Owners Bob and Gita Patel have been gracious in allowing us to leave it parked next to our regular site while we moved everything out and into the Winnebago and then stayed in it last night while the motorhome was in the paint shop. We are disappointed that the bus has not sold yet, but we know the right buyer is out there somewhere.

Several people asked if we are going to take the bus with us when we leave for the winter. Probably not, because it gets awfully expensive driving two RVs around the country. We’ll either store it here at the campground, or at my pal Butch Williams’ place at Twelve Mile, Indiana. Or, you could just buy it for a really good price and save me the hassle of draining the tanks and winterizing it.

That reminds me of a funny story from when we first bought the bus, and still had our original RV, the Motorhome From Hell. We were taking the bus to Michigan, where we spent the summer at my cousin Terry Cook’s place getting the first steps of the conversion project finished.

I was driving the bus and Terry was driving the RV, and we pulled into a Flying J for fuel. The RV island was empty, so I stopped at one pump and stuck a diesel hose in the bus tank, then a gasoline hose in the RV, and gave Terry a kiss as she walked inside to pay. A fellow in a Class C had pulled in behind us, and as I was pumping the fuel, he came up and said “I couldn’t help but notice that you and your lady there travel in two RVs.  Doesn’t that get expensive?”

Well, you know Bad Nick wasn’t going to pass up an opening like that, so I looked him right in the eye and said “Well, that’s my wife, and I love her, but we just don’t get along well enough to spend that much time together. So yeah, it’s expensive this way, but it’s still a lot cheaper than a divorce!”

I mentioned weight above, but I don’t mean we are overweight. The Winnebago has a cargo capacity of 3451 pounds, and I don’t think we’re near that. I’ll know for sure once we get to Celina, because we are the first on the list to have Rick and Joyce Lang from RVSEF weigh us at the rally.

If you have not had your RV weighed yet, be sure to print out the Motorhome Work Sheet or Trailer Work Sheet from these links and fill them out so you can have your rig weighed at our rally. The small fee is well worth the investment in your safety and in avoiding breakdowns caused by overstressing your RV’s components with excess weight. For weighing fees and information, or any questions, call Rick Lang at (207) 522-3336, or e-mail him at ricklang46@hotmail.com.

Thought For The Day – Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

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My friend Jan Chilson had a post in her Wanderings and Side Trips blog yesterday about playing games, from Wahoo to bowling on the Wii, that I found timely because Ron Speidel just introduced us to a new game called Bongo (sometimes called Ladder Golf).

You may have seen this played at RV parks before. Ron made the components of the game, two “ladders” and the balls out of plastic PVC pipe, golf balls, and cord. Basically, the object of the game is to throw two golf balls, linked by a cord, at the ladder, hoping to wrap the cord around one of the three horizontal ladders. It’s a lot harder than it sounds!

We played in three husband and wife teams; Ron and Brenda, Ken and Billie Barker, and Miss Terry and myself. Being newbies at this, Terry and I came in last every game, but we sure had fun, and I can see that we’re going to have to get in some serious practice to redeem our reputation! We don’t have time for Ron to build any more sets before our Ohio Rally, but maybe in the future we’ll have some championship playoffs at a Gypsy Gathering rally.

RVers enjoy a lot of games, from cards to cribbage to Pegs and Jokers, to our personal favorite, Mexican Train. We also got a Wii last winter and have enjoyed bowling and playing tennis on it. With the extra room we have in the Winnebago, we plan to get a lot more use out of the Wii in the future.

What are some of your favorite games?

Speaking of the Ohio Rally, we’ll be leaving Elkhart Campground Sunday, headed for the fairgrounds in Celina, to get set up for the rally. Yesterday we stopped at RV Surplus Salvage, where owner Trina Ambris gave us several very nice door prizes for the rally. Every year Trina has faithfully stepped up to the plate and generously donated door prizes to support both the Ohio rally and the Western Gypsy Gathering in Arizona. We sure appreciate you, Trina!

We’re looking forward to getting our Winnebago back today from Phoenix Commercial Paint. Yesterday Michele Henry painted a new stripe on the motorhome to replace the chipped up one that was on it, and kept it overnight to finish the job this morning. We stopped in yesterday evening and the rig was still covered in masking paper, and Michele had a crew hard at work on it. I’ll have pictures in tomorrow’s blog!

I’ve sure had a lot of responses to yesterday’s Bad Nick Blog post! I’m all for give and take, and I certainly support anyone’s right to speak their mind, even when they disagree with me, but I find it interesting that some people can get so bent out of shape when something doesn’t agree with their way of thinking. It’s all about dialogue folks! About a free exchange of opinions. We don’t have to agree 100% of the time. What fun is that?  

Thought For The Day – America is the land of the free, because it is the home of the brave.

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With only 33,000 miles on it, our 2002 Winnebago diesel pusher is like new in many ways. The previous owner kept in inside a heated barn most of the time, and only used it for vacations and short trips with the grandkids. Miss Terry and the other ladies who have seen it all agreed that the stove had probably never been used, for example.

But the motorhome did have one noticeable flaw; one of the decorative stripes was chipped up in several places for some reason. So yesterday Michele Henry, from Phoenix Commercial Paint, spent several hours with a heat gun removing the old stripe, and this morning we are taking the Winnebago to her shop, where she will repaint the stripe in the original color.

We’d love to have one of Michele’s custom full body paint jobs, but there is just no room in the budget for it right now. Still, she can work wonders, and while the motorhome looked nice before, we know it will be even more attractive after Michele gets the new stripe on.

She will need to keep the motorhome overnight, so we are going to be back in the bus for one more night. I told Terry it’s sort of like having a weekend getaway place until we sell the bus.

Several fulltimers who have been RV shopping have written to tell me that they have been having trouble getting bank financing, and asking me who financed our rig. Over the years, I have had several fulltimers tell me they have experienced problems getting financing, even though they had very good credit.

We worked with Eileen Gilmore, an assistant branch manager with Alliant Credit Union in Chicago. We joined Alliant after meeting Eileen at Escapade in May, and she worked with us to get things set up to be sure we qualified. She has done everything she said she would do, and we are very pleased with our experience working with her. If you are shopping for a new or late model RV, I suggest you give Eileen a call at (773) 462-9642 or e-mail her at egilmore@alliantcreditunion.com, and tell her I sent you.

At the same time we joined Alliant, we also joined Community Resource Credit Union, which is based in Texas, and also had a booth at Escapade. One of the reasons we joined Community Resource is that they are part of the Shared Network, which in theory gave us the convenience of access to hundreds of affiliated credit union branches all over the country who also belong to the network. We were told that we could go into any Shared Network credit union anywhere in the country and it would be just like if we were at one of Community Resource’s own branches.

Well, not exactly, as it turns out. We made a couple of small deposits at Shared branches here in Indiana, and it took anywhere from two to three weeks minimum for them to be credited to our account. I could mail a deposit to our regular bank and have it credited before that!

As if that were not frustrating enough, when we took in cash to get a cashier’s check when purchasing our motorhome, we had to jump through all kinds of hoops and get a manager’s approval.

I called Community Resource to complain, and was told that while we could use any of the Shared affiliate credit unions, we had to wait for them to forward the deposits to Texas, which could take at least two weeks. Or, to speed things up, we could take photocopies of the checks we were depositing, as well as the deposit receipt from the Shared branch, and fax them to Community Resource in Texas. Yeah, that sure sounds convenient!

I had a better idea. I just closed the account.  

But before I close this blog post, Bad Nick wanted me to tell you that he has a new post in the Bad Nick Blog titled Yes, Racism Plays A Role. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – One nice thing about egotists; they don’t talk about other people.

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I was listening to one of comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s segments on Blue Collar Radio on Sirius yesterday, and he said comedians don’t have to make up jokes, all they have to do is look around them and write down what they see. I agree completely.  

We have seen so much insanity and nonsense just going about our day that it would make great stand up material. And what we don’t see, our readers share with us.

Take, for example, this photo I received yesterday from Gypsy Journal readers Dennis and Donna Miller. They spotted this while vending at the Iowa State Fair. Now, that’s Redneck Engineering if I ever saw it.

Or how about this one, taken in Michigan? How do people come up with stuff like this? Why do people come up with stuff like this? Wouldn’t you like to be parked next to them at your favorite campground?

Compared to those two examples, this homemade VW camper looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

I think the bus conversion crowd, of which we were a part for many years, has some of the finest (or worst) examples of ingenuity I have ever seen. While there are many, many well planned and well built bus conversions out there, we have seen some that left us scratching our heads and saying “huh?”

One such rig that comes to mind was a fellow with an MCI 8 like ours that we ran into at Elkhart Campground. He couldn’t wait to show me his water tank system. Instead of installing his fresh water tank in his rear bay, like 99.9% of bus converters do, he had mounted a group of large diameter PVC pipes, capped on each end, on the roof of his bus. He had them plumbed together and a green garden hose going down the side of his bus and into a hole he had drilled in the side.

He explained that this way, he didn’t have to buy a fresh water tank, he had more bay space available, and it was gravity fed, so he didn’t have to buy a water pump. And because he had painted the tubes black, they absorbed the sun’s heat, and he didn’t need a water heater! Sure, he had to crawl up a ladder with a hose to fill his “tanks,” and sure he was a little top heavy, but think of the money he saved!

We have also gotten some laughs at the way people handle walking their dogs in RV parks. In Crystal River, Florida, we saw a gentleman who had trained his dog not to go potty until he put a paper towel under its rear end. Once he did, the dog squatted, did its business, and the man picked up the towel by the corners and deposited it in the trash.

Another fellow carried a wooden pole with a small shovel looking device on it, and his dog was trained to deposit only onto the shovel blade, making cleanup quick and easy. Well, except for that crappy shovel he had to stick in his RV’s bay.

What dog obedience school did these folks take their pets to? It’s only been in the last year or so that Miss Terry taught me to go inside when nature calls, instead of heading for the nearest tree. I’m glad she did, because we were in the desert at the time, and the nearest tree was 150 miles away!

Thought For The Day – If the shoe fits……buy it in every color.

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