When we woke up Friday morning it was raining hard and the wind was blowing. Obviously, we were not going to do any traveling in that kind of weather, so we rolled over and snuggled back down under the covers.

The storm hung on all day long. Sometimes the rain pounded down hard, and other times it was just a steady drizzle, but whatever it as doing, it was not conducive to being outside or traveling.

I spent the day getting a lot of things done online, including loading up Carlyle Lehman’s new Focal Wood website. Carlyle is the Amish craftsman who built the custom workstations, bookcase, and dinette table for our Winnebago motorhome.

I stopped out to see Carlyle at his place in Nappanee a few days ago, and he said that ever since I told our readers about him in the blog, and then Ron and Brenda Speidel mentioned him in their Don’t Replace, Refurbish seminar at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally last month, he has been swamped with work. When I was at his place this week, he had three motorhomes there getting things installed. That’s great, because Carlyle does excellent work and I would recommend him to anybody wanting custom RV furniture.

Besides working on Carlyle’s website, I re-entered all of the telephone numbers into my Blackberry Storm that I had lost when I updated its software the other day. Note to self – back up the darned Blackberry!

It was a lazy day, and sometime in the afternoon I decided that a nap was in order. I stretched out on the couch, and had just fallen into a very good dream when the phone rang. It was Greg White, asking if we were up for dinner. We’re always up for dinner, so we piled into their truck and headed for the local Ryan’s Buffet.

It was the first time I had been outside all day, and the entire campground was one huge puddle! In fact, all of Elkhart was one huge puddle! Greg and Jan had braved the weather to drive their pickup down to Decatur, Indiana to tour the American Coach factory, and they said the wind had been strong all the way down and all the way back. We were glad we had decided to stay put and wait for the storm to move on.

Today the rain is supposed to be over, but the wind may hang on. We would really like to get on the road, and we probably will unless it’s just too windy. But just as I said in yesterday’s blog, there is no place we have to be anytime soon, so we have the luxury of staying or going, whichever seems best.

Thought For The Day – Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience.

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By the time you read this we may be rolling down the highway, headed south. Or, we may still be tucked away snug and warm in our bed. It all depends on the weather.

Yesterday the forecast for Elkhart, Indiana was supposed to be sunny, with a high somewhere between 65 and 70 degrees. Instead, a heavy overcast hung on all day long, and it was in the low 50s all day. Today the forecast was for cold temperatures, wind, and rain.

I’m hoping that the weatherman is wrong two days in a row, and that we get yesterday’s weather today. If so we’ll leave Elkhart Campground. But if the predicted storm hits, we’ll sit it out and wait for it to pass. We’ve been here a long time, and one more day won’t make a difference one way or another.

One of the great things about the fulltime RV lifestyle is that we usually have the luxury of setting our own schedule, and we don’t have to risk life and limb to get anyplace at any time. If the weather is bad, if we didn’t sleep well the night before, or if we just wake up and feel lazy, nobody is going to be calling to tell us to get a move on.

If we are traveling and things get ugly, we find a safe place to get off the road and hunker down to wait things out. Many times we have been parked in a rest area or a truck stop while nasty storms pounded our motorhome, and watched RVs flying down the highway. That just doesn’t make sense to me. We have also been ensconced in comfortable RV parks and watched folks pull out in weather that would even make a duck seek shelter.

I have always wondered about fulltime RVers who drive into terrible weather conditions just to get someplace else. Why? They have their home with them, so where are they going in such a hurry?

We also never hit the road until around 9 a.m. I just can’t see fighting rush hour traffic to get an extra 50 or 100 miles behind me in a day. Our preferred routine on a traveling day is to pull out somewhere between 9 and 10:30 a.m. By then most of the commuters have gotten to work and traffic is much lighter.

We try to be off the road by about 4 p.m. if we’re near a town or city of any size, to avoid the evening rush hour traffic. If we absolutely have to travel more that day for some reason, we will often pull into a truck stop or rest area, have an early dinner and just relax until the rush hour is over, then we’ll put a couple more hours of driving time under our belts.

Since my night vision is terrible, we try to be off the road before dark. Besides, we became RVers to see America, and you can’t see much with just headlights illuminating the landscape.

Though I always tell people that an ideal driving day is somewhere between 250 and 300 miles, I will admit that all too often, if the weather is good and the driving is easy, we’ll cram more miles into a day than that. If we’re not tired and traveling conditions are comfortable, sometimes we just enjoy the drive so much that we’re not ready to stop. On days like that, it is not uncommon for us to cover 400 miles.

What is your traveling style like? Do you hit the road early and stop early, do you take a more leisurely pace and only cover a couple hundred miles a day? Or, like us, do you sometimes poke along in the slow lane, and other times have marathon driving days? 

If you are also stuck waiting for good weather to travel in, you can pass some time reading Bad Nick’s new blog post Halloween Is For Kids, Not Psychos And Fanatics.  

Thought For The Day – Middle age is when you have stopped growing at both ends, and have begun to grow in the middle.

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When I checked my e-mail yesterday morning, I had a message from Verizon Wireless that an update for my Blackberry Storm was available, which was supposed to be the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread.

So, being the trusting soul I am, I plugged my phone into my computer, logged onto the Verizon website, and clicked the update button. The process took a few minutes, and then I got a message telling me the download was complete. Quick and easy, right?

Well, yes, except for the fact that the upload wiped out my entire contacts list. The photos I had stored on the phone are still there, even a couple of songs I transferred over from my computer a while back. But every telephone number I had is gone.

Yeah, I know, I could have backed up my information to my computer, but I never thought of it. So I’ll be spending some time digging out business cards and entering all of those numbers all over again. What fun.

There are many features I like about the Blackberry, but after using it for the last few months I have come to realize that my smart phone is smarter than I am by a long shot! I’m sure my seven year old granddaughter Hailey could probably make it do wonderful things, but I get a headache trying to figure what all the buttons are for.

It has been interesting to read all of the e-mails and comments from readers of yesterday’s blog Considering Our Options, about RV extended warranties. Some people feel that an extended warranty is a good investment, and just as many, if not more, seem to think they are not worth the money. I also heard from some folks who did buy extended warranties on their RVs, only to find that the companies issuing the warranties either did not honor needed repairs, or were very slow in paying. Like so much in the RV industry, there seem to be so many snakes selling extended warranties that you have to be very, very careful who you do business with.

I have had some comments from longtime readers who took me to task for buying a factory built motorhome because I have always said that “all RVs are junk and I’d never own anything but a bus conversion.” I don’t know when I supposedly said that, and in looking back over several years of past blogs and issues of the Gypsy Journal, I don’t find any such comment.

Yes, I have said many times that the quality of most factory built RVs is pretty sad, and I have said that a lot of junk has been foisted off on RV buyers by a lot of companies. However I have also said many times, in print and in the seminars I present at RV rallies, that there were four companies whose rigs I would be comfortable owning. Those companies are Heartland, Tiffin, Newmar, and Winnebago. When we started looking for a rig to replace our MCI bus conversion, they were on our very short list.

I love our old bus, and I will always be a fan of bus conversions. For cargo carrying capacity, safety in the event of a crash, longevity, and overall ruggedness, there has never been a stick and staple motorhome built that can compare. When we moved from the bus to our Winnebago, we traded down in those respects. No question about it.

However, our needs have changed. As our granddaughters have gotten older, the bus has become very crowded when they came to visit. We really wanted a coach with a slide. We also do not see ourselves doing nearly as much dry camping as we have in the past, so the huge holding tanks, battery bank, and solar panels on the bus are no longer a necessity.   

Yes, we had many wonderful years in our bus, and it carried us many miles in comfort and safety. Just as it will whomever owns it next. And though we have moved on, we’ll always look when we hear an old Detroit diesel roar to life. Once a bus nut, always a bus nut.

Thought For The Day – It’s frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.

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We got wrapped up in some projects that have delayed our departure for a bit, but with most of the things wrapped up that we wanted to get done before we leave northern Indiana, we hope to be on the road by the weekend. Now we just have to decide where we’re going, and how to get there.

We plan to spend November and most of December in Florida, and as I wrote here before, the plan was/is to go over to the coast someplace and go down the eastern seaboard. But since we’re getting a later start than originally planned, we’re undecided about which route to take.

We would like to go to Washington, D.C. again, and considered dropping down to Interstate 70 across Ohio and into Pennsylvania, and then dropping down to catch Interstate 68 across the northern edge of Maryland. But we may be too late in the season. Getting to warmer weather is a priority. Playing tourist is no fun when you’re chilly.

I thought about going to Lexington, Kentucky, and then taking Interstate 77 east to hook up with Interstate 64, which would take us to Norfolk, Virginia, but again, weather is a factor.

A third option was to go to Knoxville, and then take Interstate 40 east, but a major rockslide has closed the highway near the Tennessee – North Carolina border, and news reports say it could be weeks, if not months, before the road is open again.

Now we’re looking at going all the way to Atlanta, and then striking east on Interstate 20, but we’ll miss a lot of the territory we wanted to see along the coast going that way.

Then, just to muddy the waters even more, we have learned that Terry’s father has some health issues that are causing us some concern. Hopefully everything will be just fine, but we are prepared to scrap our travel plans and head for Arizona at a moment’s notice.

We have also been kicking around getting an extended warranty on our Winnebago motorhome. The Ultimate Advantage only has 34,000 miles on it and except for a contrary electrical side to our water heater, it’s in excellent condition. We’re debating whether the cost of an extended warranty is worth it.

Like any insurance policy, it’s a gamble. If we are lucky and don’t have any major breakdowns or system failures, we’d lose money on an extended warranty. However, a serious problem, such as an engine or transmission failure could easily cost much more that what we’d pay for an extended warranty. So do we bet against ourselves, or for ourselves? Why don’t some of you fulltimers and extended time RV travelers out there pitch in and share your input? Do you have an extended warranty? If so, who with, and are you glad you bought it? Is there anyone out there who decided to play the odds and lost with a major repair bill? Inquiring minds want to know.

Thought For The Day – Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

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Yesterday we had what my friend Greg White calls a Don Quixote Day. We were up and out of bed early because we had a lot to get done, we worked hard all day, and we didn’t accomplish a damn thing!

We have a Magnum Energy 2,000 watt pure sine wave inverter in our MCI bus conversion, which is, in my experience, the finest RV inverter on the market. I wanted to replace the standard equipment Heart modified sine wave inverter in our Winnebago motorhome with a Magnum, so yesterday my pal Michele Henry, from Phoenix Commercial Paint, let us use one of the bays at her shop to do the job inside, out of the cold.

We had previously measured the space where the Heart unit is in the motorhome, measured the Magnum inverter, and though the Magnum is a little bit bigger than the old inverter, it looked like there would be no problem at all getting it in. Wanna bet?

Whoever builds RVs goes out of their way to make it difficult, if not impossible to reach just about anything you need to get to. It was quite a chore to get the old inverter unbolted from its location on the bulkhead of the fresh water bay of the Winnebago, but Greg finally managed to get it out and disconnect all of the wiring.

Then we started to install the Magnum inverter, and we immediately ran into a roadblock. While yes, there was plenty of room inside the bay to mount the inverter, what we had not considered was that getting in into the bay involved sliding past the fresh water tank, and we lacked about half an inch of space in the opening. We spent hours trying to wiggle and jiggle the inverter to get it in, and no matter what we did, there was just no way it was going to fit.

Finally, late in the afternoon, we had to admit defeat. If our fresh water tank had been square or rectangular, we would have been okay, but it is wider at the bottom than at the top, and Greg, who worked for NASA on space shuttle projects, tried everything under the sun to get the Magnum inverter in, without success. I think he was as disappointed as I was, because Greg is one of those guys who love a challenge.

So we decided to put the old Heart inverter back in, and while it slid into the bay opening just fine, getting the holes to match up with the mounting bolts on the bulkhead of the compartment was a real bear. The inverter weighs about 45 pounds, and trying to hold that much dead weight up in the air, in a space with very limited room to maneuver, was another nightmare. It took Greg, myself, and Miss Terry until after 8 p.m. to finally get it mounted and all of the wiring hooked back up.

Meanwhile, Greg had also tried to figure out why the electric side of our water heater was not working. The water heater is mounted on the bottom passenger side of the chassis, and several Winnebago owners have told me that there is supposed to be a reset switch on the back that is often the culprit. Again, whoever built the coach sure didn’t want to make it easy for anybody to service it. Greg could not access the back of the water heater, and that’s a project that will have to wait for another day.

It was dark by the time I backed the Ultimate Advantage out of the paint shop, and I know Michele must have been glad to finally see us leave, though she was as gracious as always. It was only about three miles back to Elkhart Campground, and Terry followed me in the van. I was quickly reminded of why I never drive after dark. My night vision is terrible, and I was sure glad to get back to the campground and pull into our space.

While I was plugging in the electric and hooking up our water and sewer connection, Terry realized that her cell phone was missing. We tried calling it, hoping that we could hear it ring and find it in the van or motorhome, but no luck.

It was 9 p.m. by then, we had not eaten all day, and all four of us were famished. We went to Bob Evans for a late dinner, and then Greg and Jan volunteered to follow us back to Michele’s shop to see if Terry had dropped her phone while she was guiding me out of the bay, and hoping that if she did, I hadn’t run over it with the Winnebago. Sure enough, just as we pulled in, we both spotted the phone laying in the driveway, and all in one piece! That was the only break we had all day!

Thought For The Day – The only thing I know for certain is that I don’t know anything for certain.

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