If the Peanuts cartoon character would have been with us yesterday, he’d have believed that there really is a Great Pumpkin!

After dropping off the new issue of the Gypsy Journal at our printer in Allegan, Michigan Monday afternoon, we drove 60 miles further to Muskegon to visit with Rocky and Berni Frees, two of our favorite people in the world. We didn’t have much time, but we managed to have a nice dinner, and then go back to their apartment for a spirited game of Mexican Train that lasted until midnight.

Yesterday morning, after a quick visit with Berni, we started back to Elkhart and our waiting motorhome. For a person who doesn’t live in a house anyplace, I sure do miss my home when we spend a night away from it!

In Grand Haven, Michigan we stopped at the Green Acres Farm Market, which had the largest display of pumpkins I have ever seen. These are just a few of what they had to offer!

Who knew there were so many kinds of pumpkins in the world? There were huge pumpkins that must have weighed over a hundred pounds, pumpkins that were three times larger than a bowling ball, tiny pumpkins smaller than a baseball, and everything in between!

I’m not a big pumpkin fan. I’ll eat a half dozen slices of pumpkin pie in season, just to be polite, but I stay away from the whole jack o’lantern thing. Think about it – me with a carving knife and a candle. You just know that’s going to turn out bad! I’d probably cut my thumb off, and then knock over the darned candle and set fire to the motorhome while I was looking for a band aid!

But I have to say that I was impressed with the variety of pumpkins on display at Green Acres, and how many they had to offer. Sure, we’ve all seen the typical big orange pumpkin, but have you ever seen a Long Island Cheese pumpkin? They look like a roll of cheese, and their inside is a deep orange. According to the folks at the farm market, they make excellent pies, and can be kept in storage for up to a year!

Or how about these miniature varieties? The are called Circus Minis, because they look like a circus tent, and they fit into your hand. They are used more for decoration than eating.

The farm market had lots of other goodies too, including apples, fruit, pies, and cider. We didn’t buy any pumpkins, but we did get some cider and apples. Yummy!

Back in Elkhart, my pal Butch Williams stopped by to visit for a while, and then Jim Beletti from the Heartland Owners RV Club came by. Jim talked to the company, and has arranged for them to have a few Heartland fifth wheel units on display at our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally here at Elkhart Campground next year.

After Jim left, I wrote today’s blog post while Miss Terry logged in some orders that came in the mail, and then Bad Nick posted a new Bad Nick Blog called Close This! Then we watched TV and relaxed until it was time for bed.

Today we have a lot of chores to do, as well as winterizing our bus conversion for winter storage. Tomorrow we’re headed back to our printer’s to pick up the new issue of the paper and start getting it ready to mail out.

Thought For The Day – My idea of a well balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

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I remember the good old days of my youth, back when I was ten feet tall and bulletproof. Time and circumstance taught me that I was neither, but sometimes I miss those days when I was too dumb to know just how much I didn’t know, and too careless to care.

I’m reminded of that now when I get out of bed in the morning and my body snaps, crackles, and pops more than a bowl of cereal. I hear my Dad making those groans and sighs he did every morning, and then I remember that the old man has been gone nearly 25 years, and realize it’s me making those noises! Me? No way! Those are my Dad’s noises!

Terry and I were talking the other day about how everything has to have a name and a cure these days. I can’t just be stiff and sore because I abused my body as a youngster, and now that I’m getting older, it has come back to haunt me.

What we used to call paratroopers’ knees, from too many hard landings, now must be some sort of cartilage damage or deficiency, and a good arthroscopic surgeon could probably fix that right up.

Those banged up vertebrae must be reason for some hack to take a hacksaw to me. So what if a couple of Advil makes them tolerable until I loosen up? That’s just treating the symptoms, let’s treat the root cause of the problem! All it takes is a minor incision, a hammer and chisel, and few months of traction!

When I was a kid, I never heard of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and depression. If I hurt, I was told to walk it off, if I was tired, go take a nap. And if I ever said I was depressed, the immediate response would have been “I’ll give you something to be depressed about!”  

Every time I turn on the television I am bombarded by advertisements promising this pill or that potion will make me happier, make me as randy as a sailor on shore leave, and even make my hair grow back!

There are just as many commercials from attorneys telling me that if that pill or potion made me happy, hairy, and studly, but now I have to wear a diaper and I hear voices in my head, we’ll sue the SOBs who sold it to me!

There is a huge industry that has grown up around helping us deny that our bodies are machines, and that as we get a few miles on those machines, they let us know it. Just take this pill and all of your problems will go away.

An even larger industry has been created so we can sue the people who sold us the pill in the first place. And if we win, we can take the 20% or so the lawyer didn’t keep and just go away.

Not me. I prefer to age gracefully, thank you just the same. Even though, if you were to ask Miss Terry, she’d tell you that there is nothing graceful about me getting my body into an upright position every morning. Getting old isn’t for sissies or wimps!

Thought For The Day – Your best friend may not always tell you what you want to hear, but rather what you need to hear.

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Actually, we had more than just a single ray of sunshine yesterday. The heavy clouds that have been hanging over northern Indiana broke up, and by mid-day we actually had blue sky again! After days of gloom, it sure was a treat! And while we’re not suffering under a heat wave, the temperature is actually supposed to be a bit higher, clear up to 60, this week.

Except for putting the cover page together and a final proofing, the new issue of the Gypsy Journal is finished, and we plan to take it to our printer in Michigan today. Then we’ll scoot over to Muskegon and spend the night with Rocky and Berni Frees to get in one final game of Mexican Train before we head south.

I plan to spend a lot of time telling Rocky that while he is shoveling snow and shivering this winter, I plan to be kayaking in the Florida Keys and basking in the Arizona sunshine. Yeah, I know, that’s not very nice, but if you can’t rub a guy’s nose in it once in a while, what fun is life?

We still don’t know what route we’ll take south. We’ve been down Interstate 75 so many times we could probably drive it in our sleep. Every year for the past five or six years we have taken the same route, usually with a few days’ stop at the Escapees Raccoon Valley RV park near Knoxville, Tennessee along the way. That’s all well and good, but we’re bored and would like to see some new territory for a change.

If the weather cooperates, we’d like to get over to the coast and follow it south. We’ve never been to the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, so we’re open to suggestions on routes to take and places to see along the way. Please share some tips if you’ve spent any time exploring that region.

On the other hand, if winter starts nipping at our heels, I may just fire up the Cummins diesel in this Winnebago, point the nose south by the most expeditious route, and run over anything slower that gets in my way until I start seeing palm trees!

Thought For The Day – The easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people smarter than I am.

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We’re getting down to the wire and I’m hoping we can get everything done here in Elkhart that we need to before we leave. I’m wrapping up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal and hopefully will have it done by tonight so we can take it up to our printer in Michigan on Monday.

Then we need to make a quick overnight trip to Muskegon, Michigan to visit Rocky and Bernie Frees one more time before we begin our winter travels. We’ll get the new issue back from the printer Thursday or Friday, and Miss Terry will spend next weekend stuffing envelopes to drop off at the mail service the following Monday morning.

Meanwhile, I have to put some finishing touches on a website I’m building for Carlyle Lehman at Focal Wood Products and visit him in Nappanee to get his final approval before the website goes live.

And somewhere in that time we need to winterize our bus conversion and move it to its winter storage location. We located an inside storage location, but I still want to have the bus winterized, just in case a bad storm knocks out power for a few days.

I also wanted to get the Winnebago in to Cummins for service, and to a local shop to have a couple of small things done. We may have to wait until we get further south to do that. 

But you know what they say about all work and no play. So yesterday I got away from the computer long enough so we could go to dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant with Greg and Jan White. We first met Greg and Jan when they came to Life on Wheels as students, and I remember that during my Reluctant RVer seminar Jan began to cry. She told me later it was because she felt like I was talking directly to her and addressing many of the fears she had about fulltime RVing. The other day Jan credited me with “talking her in off the ledge” when she wasn’t sure if she could go through with the change to the fulltime lifestyle. Whenever somebody tells me something like that, I am very flattered, and I feel good that maybe I could make a positive impact in their life in some small way. 

Speaking of RV seminars, in yesterday’s blog I told you about my pal Charlie Minshall, the Silver Gypsy. Charlie has offered to come to our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma to present an excellent seminar called Moments in Time:  A 20-year full-time North American RV Adventure that will take you along with Charlie as she lives on a Mexican beach, drives the Trans-Labrador Highway, experiences the Blue Ridge Parkway, discourages a bear on the haul road to Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, takes a Yukon River wilderness canoe trip, and mushes dogs on a glacier. You can bet this is going to be a great seminar, and I plan to be sitting right in the front row!

Even as busy as I’ve been, Bad Nick still found time to write a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Will You Stand By Your Principles? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – The trouble with life is there’s no background music.

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Yesterday I got an e-mail from one of my personal heroes, Charlie Minshall. If you don’t know her, Sharlene “Charlie” Minshall is the author of half a dozen books telling the stories of her adventures over 20 years of solo fulltime RVing, including In Pursuit of a Dream, Freedom Unlimited, RVing Adventures with the Silver Gypsy, and the newly updated RVing Alaska and Canada, to name just a few.

Back when Terry and I were dreaming of escaping our hectic workaholic lifestyle and becoming fulltime RVers, we read all of Charlie’s books, and she helped convince us that we too could make it happen.

My first contact with Charlie was when I conceived the idea of the Gypsy Journal. Since the name of her self-publishing company is Gypsy Press, I wrote her to ask if she would have any objection to the name of our new publication, or if she felt there would be a conflict between the two names. Charlie wrote back and told us to go for it, and very graciously wished us well in our new business and in our new lifestyle.

We met Charlie a couple of months later when we went to our first Life on Wheels conference as brand new, wet behind the ears RVers. We sat through two of her seminars, and found her just as entertaining and delightful in person as in print. Over the years we had quite a few laughs together when we also became Life on Wheels instructors.

Whether she’s taking a jet boat ride up the Rogue River in Oregon, exploring the wonders of Alaska and Canada, or taking a “detour” over a cow path in the middle of Montana, Charlie always seems to find something interesting to get into, and somehow survives her adventures and misadventures.

When we visited Charlie at her lot at the Escapees North Ranch in Congress, Arizona a couple of years ago, Charlie told me that she had entered the “nesting” stage of her life, had bought a park model, and sold her motorhome. I wondered how well the Silver Gypsy would adapt to life in one place, and in yesterday’s e-mail she proved that the gypsy blood still flows through her veins. This year Charlie packed her little red Chevy Cavalier, bought a tent, and took off on a four month long journey that covered 11,623 miles! It doesn’t look like she’s letting any grass grow under her feet!

You can read Charlie’s Silver, Single, and Solo column on the RV Life website, or visit her own website, Full Time RVer. I bet you’ll enjoy getting to know Charlie as much as we have over the years.

Thought For The Day – Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way, and some of the roads weren’t paved.

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