Today is a very special day for myself and Miss Terry. It’s our twelfth anniversary, and we still feel (and often act) like newlyweds. This was not the first marriage for either of us, and believe me, it was not something that either one of us was looking for, or expected to happen. But isn’t that the way it sometimes goes? We often find the best things in life when we least expect them.

I’m a very fortunate man to be able to live this dream life that I have, to make a living doing something most people can only dream of, and to be able to share it with my best friend in the world. And tonight I’m taking my best girl out for a nice, romantic dinner. I love you, Terry.

Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk writing when suddenly a volley of gunshots went off right outside our motorhome! That will make your blood pressure shoot way up! I wasn’t sure what was happening, but in today’s world who knows? As it turns out, we didn’t have a crazed mass murderer running wild through the park. It was an America Legion Honor Guard firing a gun salute as part of a memorial service for one of the park’s residents who recently passed away. Geez, they should warn a guy before they do things like that!

Little things like gunplay never bother Miss Terry. She spent part of the day yesterday installing one of the new day/night shades in our bedroom, and discovered that it was more of a job then she had expected. Of course, it didn’t help that the company that supplied the blinds did not send any mounting hardware or installation instructions. But she eventually figured it out.

To prove that there isn’t much she can’t do, Terry also decided to make a batch of Asiago cheese bagels. This was only the second time in her life that she had made bagels, and she said her first attempt years ago produced something more akin to hockey pucks than food. But not this time! They turned out yummy! 

I received two different e-mails from readers yesterday about the problems they are having securing financing for RVs. One person is a retired Marine officer with excellent credit, and he has been using the same bank for years. They financed his current motorhome, which he has a lot of equity in, and he said his bank was ready to approve the loan on the new unit until they realized that he is a fulltimer, with no “fixed” residence. Then they turned him down.

The other e-mail was from a gentleman who said his credit union would not finance the fifth wheel he and his wife live in fulltime, but they would refinance his truck. As he said, “Go figure – I can drive the truck away easier than pulling away my fifth wheel!”

I have no idea how the bean counters at financial institutions think, or why they make the decisions that they do, but I did recommend that both of these men call Eileen Gilmore at Alliant Credit Union at (773) 462-9642 and tell her I told them to call. After the financial setback we had from Terry’s cancer, and being self-employed fulltimers, even our own bank, that we’ve used for over 25 years, would not talk to us when we were RV shopping.

But, Eileen got us financed in no time at all, because she took the time to listen to us, look at our credit history, and do the extra work to get us taken care of. I don’t get a penny from referring anybody to Eileen, and she is not an advertiser. I just like to help spread the word about good business people who go the extra mile for their customers.

Of course, Bad Nick just likes to spread controversy, so he posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled Can He Walk On Water Too? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Procrastination is the thief of time.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

I spent most of yesterday updating our Gypsy Journal website and working on details for our upcoming Gypsy Gathering rally March 8-12 in Yuma, Arizona. As of now, we already have about 100 RVs registered, and at past rallies, most of the registrations come in during the last three weeks. So I think we’re going to have a big crowd.

I posted a preliminary rally schedule on our website to give you an idea of some of the seminars we have planned. Please scroll down to the bottom half of the page to view the schedule. This is a preliminary schedule only, and there will be some changes as more seminars and activities are added.

New for this rally will be seminars on oil painting, wine tasting, and Joe and Vicki Kieva’s excellent Personal Security Tips For RVers seminar, just to name a few. Byron Hibshan will also be on hand to tell you how you can get a non-resident concealed weapons permit from Utah, and we’ll have not one, but two seminars on RVing Alaska. We’ll also have seminars on boondocking, choosing a home base for fulltimers, and Mac McCoy’s excellent RV Fire Safety class.  

While the rally dates are March 8-12, Early Birds can arrive on Sunday, March 7 for an extra $15 fee. There is a Good Sam rally going on at the fairgrounds before our rally, and they will be leaving by noon on Sunday. Our people cannot be parked before noon. There is a large parking lot outside the fairgrounds, on 32^nd Street, and RVs can park there until the Good Sam group departs and we can start bringing our people in.

As always, we have had many requests from people wanting to be parked next to friends at the rally. While we cannot absolutely guarantee it, we will try our best to park everybody together who wants to do so. To help us make that happen, please arrive together, or be prepared to park off to the side until the rest of your group arrives. We will have 200 RVs or more to get in and parked in a very short time, and the logistics can be very difficult. Please try to arrive at the fairgrounds with empty waste and gray water tanks, and full fresh water, if possible.

They do not have full hookups at the fairgrounds, but the fairgrounds manager has told me that everybody will have electric, and there are water bibs and a dump station on the grounds.

I am a firm believer in both people in an RV being able to drive it, if only in case of an emergency. Dennis and Carol Hill from the RV Driving School will be at the rally, and Dennis will be presenting two seminars. They have two instructors in Yuma during the season. Dennis said they can give lessons before or after the rally, and they have four different RV parks in the Foothills area of Yuma that they suggest to students. You can contact Dennis at rvschool@wizwire.com for details on driving classes in your own RV.

Another important service we will have at the really is RV weighing by Rick and Joyce Lang from the Recreational Vehicle Safety Education Foundation (RVSEF). An overloaded RV can cost you money in the form of increased breakdowns, premature tire wear and failure, and can be downright dangerous. If you want to have your RV weighed, please click the appropriate link and complete either the Truck and Trailer Worksheet or the Motorhome Worksheet before the rally so you can give them to Rick and Joyce and they can get you on their weighing schedule. For more information on getting your RV weighed, you can call Rick at (207) 522-3336.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on. We hope we’ll be seeing you in Yuma!

Thought For The Day – If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Do you remember that famous line? It made actress Bea Arthur a star in the old 1970s sitcom Maude, and in its time, it was as common as Archie Bunker’s “Stifle” order to his wife, or “Sit on it” from Happy Days.

Well, in yesterday’s blog I wrote about how I was gloating to my cousin Berni Frees back in Michigan about our pretty blue sky, and how nice the weather is here in Apache Junction, Arizona. Guess what? Yesterday evening God put on a beauty lightshow, as streaks of lighting illuminated the mountains, and thunder rumbled across the Valley of the Sun, followed by rain! It was just God’s way of reminding me who’s in charge. Okay Big Guy, I get the message!

We had a real treat yesterday. We spent some time visiting with two of our favorite RVing friends, Ed and Alice Allard, at their park model in Sunrise RV Resort, a couple of miles from our place.

We have known Ed and Alice since very early in our fulltiming days, and we have run into them at RV parks, rallies, and all kinds of places, in every corner of the country. Some of these encounters have been planned, and other times fate has just put us in the same place at the same time. When this happens, it’s never hard to spot my buddy Ed, since he’s about seven feet tall (okay six feet eleven inches, but let’s not quibble).

And we’ve had some near misses too. One time we pulled in Country Roads RV Park in Lake Delton, Wisconsin, only to learn that Ed and Alice had left not more than a half hour before our arrival. Another time, we were northbound on U.S. Highway 31, headed toward Fisherman’s Landing RV park in Muskegon, Michigan, and our cell phone rang. It was Ed and Alice, who had just passed us going in the opposite direction. They had  left Fisherman’s Landing, and were headed to Elkhart Campground in Elkhart, Indiana, which we had left a couple of hours earlier! Serendipity, my friends.

I wrote in a blog a while back that we sure missed our Olympian Wave 8 catalytic heater, which we left in our bus conversion for the new owner, and Ed had e-mailed me to say that they had an Olympian Wave 6 that they no longer used, and we were welcome to it. What a wonderful gift! Thanks Ed and Alice!

After we left Ed and Alice, we stopped at some local RV parks to drop off sample bundles of the Gypsy Journal. Or at least we tried to. The problem in Apache Junction and east Mesa, as in a lot of snowbird locations, is that what they call RV parks usually have about 75% park model trailers, with just a handful of RV sites. We’ve been at this a long, long time, and we know our potential market. Folks in park models are not usually into traveling as much as our reader base is, and we get very few subscribers from places like that.

We did drop off a couple of bundles, but by then it was getting late in the day, and Terry’s mom called to say that our bedroom day/night shades had been delivered, so we headed to her parents’ house to pick them up. They were the last remaining things we needed to complete the insurance claim from our burglary and vandalism. We’ve never installed day/night shades, but the folks at the RV repair shop that did the rest of our work told Miss Terry that they are easy to replace, and she, as always, is confident that she can handle the task. I’m the eye candy, all I have to do is stand around and look pretty while she does the work.

Thought For The Day – Have you noticed that they are making adults much younger these days?

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Does anybody still believe in global warming? Except for Al Gore, did anybody ever believe in global warming? We had planned to spend a couple of months this winter in Florida, before our schedule got all messed up, but looking at the weather reports for the Sunshine State, I’m glad we didn’t. While it’s been unbelievably cold in Florida, it’s warm here in Arizona.

It was 74 degrees yesterday, which I was sure to rub in when I talked to my cousin Berni Frees, back in Muskegon, Michigan yesterday. Hey, why be warm and toasty, if you can’t flaunt it to your friends and relatives who are freezing their hinnies off someplace cold?

Yesterday we were as stiff and sore as we had expected to be, after spending Monday washing the outside of our motorhome. Terry’s sister Lisa stopped over to visit the other day, and Terry said that if we had known how much all the things we did as kids was going to come back to haunt us when we got older and were paying for it with aches and pains, maybe we’d have done things differently. I said that looking back on my misspent youth, where I did dumb things like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, riding motorcycles, even driving (and crashing) a race car one time, and a lot of other foolishness, I’d do every darned one of them again! It was sure fun at the time!

But alas, we’re older now, even if no wiser, and we do pay the price, so yesterday we took it easy. I spent a lot of time playing around on the Ancestry.com website, discovering that I come from a long line of misfits and ne’er-do-wells.

I’ve been fascinated with genealogy for a long time, and earlier this year Judy Bayless put on an excellent seminar called The RVing Genealogist at our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally. I was too busy with rally duties to attend the seminar, but a few days after the rally, Judy gave me a crash course on the topic and introduced me to the Ancestry.com website.

It amazes me how much information you can find online. I was able to pull up my grandfather’s draft card from World War I, along with census records from 1900 through 1930. It kind of gives you a tingle to see the original form, in the census taker’s handwriting, that they filled out while standing on my grandfathers’ front porch or sitting at my newlywed parents’ kitchen table.

While I was goofing off on the computer, Miss Terry was working on paperwork for the upcoming rally, and filling some orders that came in online. We took a break while she cut my hair and trimmed my beard, because the park here has a leash law, and I’m not sure my rabies vaccination is up to date. Then we went to the post office to mail out the orders, and afterward we stopped at Terry’s parents’ house to visit for a while.

Then it was back to the motorhome, where we were forced to leave the screen door open because it was so nice and warm. Ahhh, life in the desert is good this year!

Whiles I was goofing off, Bad Nick was busy yesterday, writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Way To Go, Sheriff Joe! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

A while back a company called Aero Cosmetics contacted me about trying their cleaning supplies, and after a delay in shipping, a box of their goodies finally caught up with us. The company has been selling their waterless wash/wax/polish to airplane owners, and is expanding into the  market. We decided to give it a try, to see how it worked.

Our Winnebago had a couple thousand miles of road grime on it and really needed a bath. So we spent most of yesterday cleaning the outside of our motorhome. You have no idea how big a Winnebago Ultimate Advantage is until you have to wash one from top to bottom! What a job!

I have tried most of the RV cleaning products on the market, including Protect-All and Dri Wash N Guard, at one time or another, and my impression of the Aero cleaning products is that they are probably as good as anything else on the market, but certainly no better. We tried both the Degreaser and the regular version of their Wash Wax All, following the instructions on the bottles, and found that while they worked fine on the less grimy parts of our RV, the front end, where we had an accumulation of highway bugs, required a lot of very hard scrubbing with a microfiber cloth to get clean.

Would I buy the Aero products to clean my RV? Yes, if they were available and the price was right. But, since I know several vendors who sell Dri Wash N Guard, 303, and other cleaning products, I’d probably give them my business first. It’s not a bad product by any means, but I don’t think it’s going to set the RV world on fire, either.

Okay, here’s my take on cleaning the motorhome. Keep in mind that I am terminally lazy, and, to quote a line from a Jimmy Buffet song, “any manual labor I’ve done was purely by mistake.” Terry and I worked on the coach for about six hours each, which included cleaning the fiberglass roof, polishing the wheels, and everything in between.

In that time, I could have written a couple of magazine articles and made $400 or more, paid somebody to wash the RV for me, and we both would not be sore, stiff, and achy this morning. My Daddy taught me a long time ago that it’s better to do what I do best, and to farm out the other stuff to people who can do a better job of it. The older I get, the wiser I realize my old man was.

Thought For The Day – Heroism consists of hanging on one minute longer.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally