It’s getting close to that time of year again. The leaves are already beginning to turn in some places up north, and before we know it, the snowbirds will start migrating south for the winter.

If you follow the seasons, and will be away from your summer address for the winter, please don’t forget to send us a note or an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net giving us your winter address, so your Gypsy Journal subscription will get to you. Unless you pay for the first class postage upgrade to your subscription, the post office will not forward the paper. 

We spent yesterday printing more of our RV guides and making CDs to stock the inventory at our vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show, where we will be working eleven hours a day for the next few days.

We took a break for a while to visit with Russ and Patty Frady, longtime subscribers who stopped in for a quick visit. Russ took a bundle of sample issues of the Gypsy Journal to pass out at campgrounds in their travels. We appreciate them helping to spread the word.

Did I mention that there are a lot of geese here at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground? They’re everywhere, and while they are pretty, they are filthy, obnoxious critters. As I wrote before, this isn’t a place to walk around barefoot!

I didn’t have space in yesterday’s blog to tell you about our stop at Bird In Hand, another Amish town in Lancaster County. The Old Village Store sells an interesting collection of traditional Amish goods, tourist souvenirs, and antiques.

On the store’s crowded shelves, and upstairs in the antiques showroom, you can find flyswatters, Bag Balm, kitchen tools, Amish hats and shawls, recipe books, toys, and furniture that was old when your grandparents were kids.

You can even buy pumpkins and squash!

A couple of blog readers wrote to ask me what a “chocolate fountain” is, which I mentioned when I wrote about our dinner at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord. Well, it’s just what it sounds like, a fountain of warm melted chocolate cascading down from the top. People skewer strawberries, banana chunks and such, and dip them under the flowing chocolate for a delicious treat. Think of it as a vertical chocolate fondue, if you will.

We were originally scheduled to be a part of the Trade Days at the Hershey RV Show, which were Monday and Tuesday, but we skipped them to go sightseeing. I’m glad we did, because Al Hesselbart, from the RV Hall of Fame Museum, has been there, and he said it was dead. Al said that at one point yesterday afternoon, the vendors were playing frisbee football in the show aisles because they were bored and had not had any customers all day long. I like Al, but Miss Terry’s a lot prettier, and  I’d much rather spend time exploring the back roads with her than staring at him all day long!

Today the show opens to the public, and  I guess you could say that we’re cautiously optimistic. We have worked a lot of RV rallies, but this will be our first experience vending at an RV show, and we’re not sure how it will work out. We’re looking forward to seeing a lot of new people and introducing them to the Gypsy Journal, and hopefully some of them will like what they see well enough to subscribe. It’s going to be an interesting week.

When I took a break from the computer yesterday, Bad Nick  grabbed the keyboard and wrote a new Bad Nick Blog titled Let Them Serve! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

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We spent yesterday exploring the back roads of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and what a wonderful time we had!

This is the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, and on every back road we traveled we saw Amish farms, usually with laundry hanging on clotheslines, and livestock in their pens. 

This swaybacked horse looks like he’s seen better days, and is living out his golden years in retirement.

We always love wandering around the back roads, because we never know what we’ll find around the next bend in the road.

The Amish are enterprising people, and besides farming, they operate a lot of little cottage industries. We saw signs for fresh produce and flowers, eggs, root beer, handmade quilts, brooms, and furniture.

We saw a lot of horse drawn Amish buggies sharing the road with cars and trucks. The horses amaze me, because they don’t seem to be bothered at all by cars speeding past them.

The Amish also work their fields with horse powered equipment. Isn’t this a handsome team of work animals?

I didn’t know that the Amish grew tobacco as a cash crop until yesterday.

It’s harvest time, and we pulled off the side of the road to watch them cutting and stacking the tobacco on wagons.

Just a couple of fields away, this fellow was harvesting corn.

We passed several groups of Amish schoolchildren on their way home after a long day of lessons. Almost all of them seemed to be carrying coolers instead of lunch buckets like we did as kids.

This boy seemed to be in a hurry, running past all of his schoolmates. He must have had chores that needed doing.

I got a chuckle out of some of the names of the towns we visited, including Blue Ball.

If that names makes you uncomfortable, you probably don’t want to know that Intercourse is only few miles away. How do you spell relief?

For years people have been telling us that we needed to check out the Shady Maple Smorgasbord near Blue Ball, and I’m glad we did!

Can you believe that this is the lobby of a buffet restaurant, and not a fancy hotel lobby?

And what a buffet it was! The selection was huge, including both New York Strip and Delmonico steaks, smoked pork chops, fried chicken, shrimp, and at least a half dozen other entrees, and more sides than I could count. Everything was fresh and hot, and the dessert bar was unbelievable.

But if that wasn’t enough, they also had a chocolate fountain where we could dip fresh strawberries, bananas, pretzels, and other goodies. Can you say decadent?

We arrived back at the Thousand Trails campground tired, with our tummies full, and with memories we’ll have for a lifetime of our day of exploring.

Thought For The Day – The silence is part of the music.

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It rained all night Saturday night, and when we woke up yesterday morning, we were greeted by a gray drizzle that lasted all day long. The temperature never got over the mid-60s, and heavy clouds hung low over the rolling hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We drove back to the Giant Center and finished setting up our vendor booth for the Hershey RV Show. I wanted to check out the room where I’ll be doing my seminars, but it was locked. So we trudged all the way around the main level of the stadium to the show office to see if we could get inside. We had to wait fifteen minutes or so while the lady there tried to straighten out a problem for another vendor, and then were told to go back to the Registration Tent where we were yesterday.

There we found the person in charge of speakers and seminar rooms, who told us that the room was indeed locked, and that we couldn’t get inside to know what equipment I will need for my seminars. As far as she knew, all that the rooms had in them were screens, so I’ll have to use my own LCD projector and laptop for the seminars. I also got her to agree that during my thirteen hour seminar on Sunday, which I described in yesterday’s blog, I can get two potty breaks and a short nap.

Once we had the booth set up, we drove back to the Verizon store where we got our new phones the other day. I had not been able to get my e-mail on my Android phone and needed help. Apparently there was some glitch in our e-mail program, which originates from Yahoo, which hosts our websites, that would not let the Droid in to access my e-mail.

A very nice Verizon tech named Jaimie Zamora worked on the problem for over two hours, eventually calling Yahoo’s technical support. Between Jaimie and the Yahoo tech, they finally got the problem figured out, and now I can get my e-mail on the go. I get upwards of 200 e-mails a day, a lot of it junk that folks insist on forwarding to me, and my big reason for having a smart phone is to manage it when I’m away from my desk. Otherwise, it can pile up and backlog pretty quickly. I really appreciated all of Jaimie’s hard work!

The Giant Center is right across the street from Hersheypark, an amusement park that is popular with families from all over the east coast. My buddy Greg White would love this place, because he never quite grew up, and loves riding roller coasters. I never grew up either, but I never had the stomach for those contraptions, even as a kid. So if we’re ever here together, Greg will just have to ride alone. I’ll stay on the ground and eat all of his cotton candy!

Can you stand one more picture of the neat old buildings we keep seeing in this area? I hope so, because here you go. We spotted this handsome old farmhouse near Hershey the other, and really admired it.

There are so many beautiful old buildings around here that we are gawking like typical tourists everywhere we go. Don’t be surprised if I slip a few more pictures in the blog before we leave the area. For folks who live in the east, places like this may not be any big thing, but after spending most of our adult lives in the west, where there aren’t nearly as many structures like this to be seen, they’re pretty awesome.

After we finished at the Verizon store, we grabbed a quick dinner at a Chinese buffet we had discovered when we were in Harrisburg a few years ago, teaching at Life on Wheels. Then we made a quick stop at WalMart, and headed back to the Thousand Trails campground, where we spent the evening inside the motorhome, printing out a supply of our different camping guides to sell during the RV show.

Bad Nick doesn’t like going outside in the rain and the cold, so he stayed home yesterday to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled Screaming Kids. Check it out and leave a comment.

Hopefully, today it will clear up a bit and we’ll see some sunshine.

Thought For The Day – How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.

Click Here To Register For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally!

Yesterday we drove over to the Giant Center in Hershey to pick up our name tags and parking pass for the Hershey RV Show. It was a lesson in frustration.

First, there had been some miscommunication about what the show expected from me, in terms of being a speaker, as well as our vendor booth. Like any big operation, there seems to be a lot of people in charge of something, but apparently they don’t always communicate with one another about anything.

We drove around the massive Giant Center twice before we could find a place to park, and then went to the Registration Tent, only to find nobody there. So then we had to find the show office. The ladies at the ticket booth didn’t know where that was, so they had to make a telephone call or two. Once they pointed us to the show office, we were told to go to the tent. I told them nobody was there, and was told they were there now. So back we went.

Sure enough, the girl was back, and she quickly located our packet. Now the only problem was that it contained the parking pass and my name badge, but not Terry’s. The young lady was very nice, and quickly made Terry a name badge, but she insisted that the mistake had to have come from our end, not theirs. Apparently they are all infallible.

Next, we went down to the main vendor floor to locate our booth space, and ran into our friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart. Al brought a beautiful old 1915 Model T camper to display, and he will be presenting two seminars a day during the show. They have me down for my Highway History And Back Road Mystery seminar every day during the show, and as it turns out, Al will be doing his seminars in the same room. According to the map, it looked to Al and I like the room was upstairs, so we went up and walked all the way around the arena, with no success.

Then Miss Terry called to tell us that she had found the room, and it was down on the main  floor, just a few steps from where we started. The Giant Center is a huge sports complex and hockey arena, so Al and I had to trudge all the way back down the steep steps to the main floor, which is actually the ice rink, which is covered by thin temporary flooring. We could see ice under the edges in a couple of places. Note to self – wear warm socks to the show.

Miss Terry was looking over the schedule, and discovered that my seminars are Wednesday through Saturday from 4 to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 2:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M.  That’s going to be one heck of a long seminar! I’m good, but I really think I’m going to be hard pressed to find enough to talk about for thirteen hours! I’d think it was just a typo, if I didn’t know that the show folks are infallible.

We unloaded a truckload of Gypsy Journals to pass out to the show crowd, and then we retired to Al’s Newell motorhome for a cold drink and a chat. Then we all three piled into the van and drove to a nearby Fuddruckers for dinner.  I found the restaurant in my GPS, but when we followed the directions it gave us, we ended up at a retirement and rehabilitation home. Al and I agreed that we probably need rehabilitation, but we decided we didn’t need it that day, so we drove another mile or two, found the restaurant, and had a nice dinner.

After we dropped Al back off at his motorhome, we stopped at Sam’s Club in Harrisburg for a couple of items, and then drove to a Verizon company store, where a very nice and helpful young lady named Carin helped us select new phones. I replaced my Blackberry Storm with a Droid Incredible, which I think will be a major improvement. Miss Terry replaced her LG Decoy with a Samsung Alias 2.

Unlike the pushy guy at the mall in Lebanon the day before, who just wanted to sell something, Carin was very patient, explained the pros and cons of several different phones, and then transferred all of our contacts from both phones, and set up our e-mail on the phones. Unfortunately, while Terry’s e-mail works fine, mine didn’t take for some reason, so I have to give Carin a call and have her try to walk me through setting it up.  Once I get a little more familiar with the Droid, I’ll have more to report. 

In yesterday’s blog, I reported that we had opened registration for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in Yuma next March. Dave and Lynn Cross wasted no time being the first to register. A couple of folks e-mailed me to say that they were having a problem with the registration link when they tried to pay, but I think that was a temporary glitch that has been cleared up now. If you run into any problems, you can just log onto www.paypal.com and make payment to editor@gypsyjournal.net, and make a note that the payment is for the rally.

Today we’ll go back to the Giant Center and finish setting up our booth for the show. The show hours are from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., so we’re going to be very tired by time it’s over.

Thought For The Day – Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.

Click Here To Register For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally!

We’ve been Geeked! A couple of days before we left Elkhart Campground, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour interviewed us for one of their Gabbing With The Geeks podcasts. We talked about the Gypsy Journal and how computer technology makes it possible for us to live and run our business on the road.

Jim and Chris are a success story when it comes to operating a business as they travel fulltime in their RV. They give seminars on all kinds of technical topics at RV rallies and RV parks, they have several websites and blogs, and they teach RVers how to get the most out of their computers and digital cameras, both in their seminars and online. Their website is sort of like an online college for anybody who wants to know just about anything about computers and how they fit into the RV lifestyle.

Speaking of all things geek, my Ipad had started to malfunction recently. When I hit the Home button to exit a program or application, it wouldn’t work, and I would have to reboot the Ipad to get back to the home page. So yesterday I took it to the Apple Store at the Park City Center mall in Lancaster, about 20 miles from the Hershey Thousand Trails campground.

Driving to Lancaster, we just drank in all of the beautiful scenery. We passed fields of corn, and farm fields that had recently been harvested, with just the stubble of cornstalks sticking up like a rural five o’clock shadow. 

Around there, the old houses, barns, and commercial buildings crowd close to the roads.

In Manheim, one of the most picturesque old towns we have ever visited, the streets are pretty narrow, and I sure wouldn’t have wanted to drive a big motorhome through town!

Terry and I are history nuts, and we love the architecture of this area. Manheim was laid out  in 1762, and formally incorporated in 1838. There are so many buildings dating back to Colonial days that we were like two kids in a candy store, rubbernecking in every direction. If these old buildings could only talk, the stories they could tell!

When we got to the Apple Store, the nice tech who waited on us (they call them Geniuses at Apple) checked the Ipad out, verified that the button had malfunctioned, and handed me a brand new 64 gig 3G Ipad, just like I had! No questions, no hassles, and he even switched my AT&T sim card from the old unit to the new one for me so I could get online with no problems. I appreciate customer service like that!

While we were in the mall, we stopped by the Verizon kiosk, because I want to upgrade from my Blackberry Storm to a Droid Incredible. The Blackberry has not lived up to my expectations, and it seems like every time they do a software upgrade (or sometimes just because it feels like it), it wipes out all of my apps and I have to fight to get them back on it again.

I was all set to go with the Droid, but then the clerk started hammering me to also buy an “accessory bundle” that included a car charger, case, and a Bluetooth headset. I told him I didn’t need or want any of that, and he insisted that I just “had’ to have them to get the most out of the Droid and that “everybody” needs a Bluetooth. Guess what, mister? I’m not “everybody” and I don’t “have” to have anything! I’m sure I’ll still upgrade pretty soon, but I’ll deal with somebody who is more concerned with what I need, not what he wants to sell me.

We can never pass up a bookstore, so when we left the mall, we browsed through a nearby Border’s, where Miss Terry found a couple of cookbooks that she has been looking for.

Then we had dinner at a Five Guys restaurant. Five Guys makes excellent cheeseburgers, and their fries are delicious. Unfortunately, there was no ice, so my soda and Terry’s tea were room temperature. I told the manager there was no ice, and he said the machine was broken. I had to wonder why nobody was fixing it, or at least buying ice somewhere to put in the drinks. I like Five Guys, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to that particular restaurant again.

After dinner we stopped at Home Depot, where Miss Terry got a new toy, a Dremel Trio multi-tool, as a late birthday present. Some guys buy their wives flowers or jewelry for special occasions, but my lady likes books and power tools!

We’ve just finished our Eastern Rally, and we’re already working on Arizona for next year!  I have added a Rally Registration Page to the blog, since I have had people asking when they could register for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally, which will be held in Yuma, March 7-11, 2011. To register online, click the link below, or the Arizona Gypsy Gathering tab on the top right of this page, above the blog header.

Whatever else you do today, please take a moment to remember all of those who perished nine years ago today during the terrorist attacks. We can move on with our lives, but as a nation, we must never forget.

Thought For The Day - Consciousness - that annoying time between naps.

Click Here To Register For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally!