Never underestimate the power of positive sniveling! It actually warmed up a bit in Fort Lauderdale yesterday, and it looks like the worst of this cold spell is about over. The forecast for the next three days is for highs in the mid-70s, and sunshine! Whatever will we do?

Yesterday morning J.C. and Beverly Webber came by to say goodbye and pick up a bundle of Gypsy Journals to drop off at their next stop, then they headed on down the road toward Marathon Key.

After they left, Terry and I ran some errands, stopping at the post office, bank,  and WalMart. I have to be honest and say that even if the weather was good, this area is just too darned busy for our taste. We much prefer a slower pace, and this is a big city, with all of the hustle and bustle that any big city has.

Paradise Island is a clean RV park, and the staff are all very friendly and helpful, but it’s an older place, with very tight spaces, and for us it’s really just a convenient place to park while we visit our friends Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour. If we wanted to play tourist in this area, it would be a good base from which to do so.

Fort Lauderdale is called the “Venice of America” because of the more than 300 miles of waterways that wind past parks, estates, and luxury hotels. If it was warmer, I’d have my Sea Eagle PaddleSki in the water doing some exploring while we’re here!

For some reason, I had started feeling really puny while we were out, and it felt like my cold or flu from a couple of week ago was returning. Back at the motorhome, I took some Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Formula and took a nap. I woke up an hour or so later, and felt better, so whatever it was seems to have passed.

I called my daughter Tiffany in Arizona and we talked a little bit about what the grandkids wanted for Christmas, and then I went online and ordered a couple of items for them. Isn’t online shopping great? No parking places to find, no crowds pushing and shoving, no packages to wrap, and no long lines at the post office to stand in. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

So many people seemed to enjoy the link I posted to a You Tube video about Florida snowbirds in Tuesday’s blog that I found a new one to make you giggle. This isn’t a video, just a funny holiday parody that appealed to my warped sense of humor, so turn up your sound and enjoy!

Chris has been working hard on our website relocation, and tells me she’s making headway. I’m glad she’s the one doing all of this confusing technical stuff, because I get a headache just thinking about it!

Chris and Jim are a real RV success story. When we first met several years ago, they were in the early days of operating their mobile computer education business, and since then we have watched the Geeks on Tour grow into the recognized experts in the RV world. Their seminars are popular at RV rallies nationwide, and they have taught literally thousands of RVers how to get the most out of their computers. They also offer online education for those who can’t make it to one of their seminars. Check out their website to learn more.

Thought For The Day – Wealth is a crutch for those who can’t handle poverty.

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Today is the last day to take advantage of our Two For One Holiday Special. So if you haven’t clicked the link above, there’s still time. You can enter a new subscription to the Gypsy Journal for yourself, or renew your subscription early, and we’ll give someone on your Christmas shopping list a free one year subscription, with a note that it is a gift from you. All you have to do is enter your mailing address, and send me a separate e-mail with the name of the recipient of your gift subscription at editor@gypsyjournal.net and we’ll do the rest. The special ends tonight at midnight, so if you snooze, you lose!

It’s still unbelievably cold here in Fort Lauderdale, but at least the wind has stopped. We’d like to do some sightseeing while were in this area, but between having to get the new issue of the paper finished, and the weather, I don’t know if we’ll do much of anything but stay home and work.

I got an e-mail from my friend Tom Owen down in Key West yesterday, and he said they tied a record low, set in 1952, and that folks on that tropical island are running around in winter coats, gloves, mufflers and longshoreman caps. Tom said that the wind chill was 30 degrees in Key West! We won’t be going to the Florida Keys this year after all!

Speaking of the cold weather, I have been exchanging e-mails with a couple who are staying in their RV, in a relative’s driveway in the upper Midwest, until after the holidays. They wrote to ask for advice because their water lines were frozen, and I suggested that they put a droplight in their utility bay with a 25 watt bulb. That’s what we did when we were stuck in northern Michigan years ago during Terry’s battle with cancer, and it kept it toasty warm in the water bay.

They replied that their son didn’t want them to do that, because it would run up his electric bill. I also suggested they use heat tape on any exposed water lines, but the lady wrote back and said that was an “awful lot of trouble” and asked me if there wasn’t a simpler way to solve the problem. Uh, yeah, there is. Turn the key and get the heck out of there!

My friend Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour spent most of the afternoon yesterday helping me make some changes in our e-mail program, laying the groundwork for migrating our websites to another host, and talking about where we want to go with our online business in the future. The technology is changing on a daily basis, and it is amazing what we can now offer our readers online.

Later in the afternoon, Chris and her hubby Jim treated us to a wonderful seafood dinner at a restaurant called Catfish Deweys,  that is a local landmark. I had the blackened seafood platter and Miss Terry had blackened catfish, and both were excellent. Thanks Jim and Chris!

Bad Nick has been quiet for a while because he has been on strike, protesting the cold weather. But he finally got of his duff yesterday and posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled Snappy Comebacks. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – You shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back sometimes.

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I think we missed a turn somewhere along the way south, and instead of Fort Lauderdale, we ended up at the South Pole! I mean really, 33 degree overnight lows just 30 miles from Miami? Really? Isn’t that just a little bit ridiculous? Uh huh, global warming, sure. Would somebody get that damned penguin off my patio!

Yeah, I know, they are having blizzard conditions in Indiana and Michigan. I don’t care! I’m not in Indiana or Michigan! I left Indiana and Michigan and came to warm, sunny Florida!  Did I mention it was 33 degrees here overnight?

Yes, I’m sniveling. Get used to it. I intend to snivel until it hits at least 72 degrees and stays there. And don’t be surprised if I throw in a pout, a tantrum or two, and some serious bitching until it warms up!

Yesterday my friend Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, spent several hours with us, going over a lot of technical issues with our websites and e-mail. I would really like to move all of my websites off the Yahoo servers and to some other hosts. Over the years, Yahoo has messed things up so many times, and their technical support is terrible when you call with a problem. But I didn’t want to try moving to a new hosting company until Chris was available to help deal with any problems that might come up.

Chris has some concerns about moving the websites, and I’m not sure what we’ll end up doing yet. I defer to her in things like this, because that lady has more computer knowledge in her little finger than I do in my whole pasty, flabby body.  

Late in the day we went to the post office to mail out some orders, and when we came back, we stopped at J.C. and Beverly Webber’s beautiful Country Coach motorhome for a tour. Wow, what a palace on wheels!

The four of us went out to a great Chinese restaurant for dinner, called the Dragon Gourmet Buffet. The selection was huge, and everything was hot, fresh, and delicious.  

Even with the unseasonably cold weather, this is still snowbird season in Florida, and this great You Tube video pretty much sums things up. It’s just as applicable if you’re in the Rio Grande Valley; Yuma, Arizona, or any other snowbird roost. check it out, I guarantee you’ll get a giggle.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that something inside our door lock got out of synch, and we had to have a mobile tech fix it. Yesterday when we started out the door, I stuck my key in the lock to turn it, and the entire lock cylinder fell out! We can still secure the door with the deadbolt, but I think it’s time to just replace the entire thing and be done with it.

The door’s been acting flakey ever since I slammed it on the burglar’s hand last year, even though the RV repair shop took it off the Winnebago and put it in a jig to straighten it. Apparently you’re not supposed to use your door as a weapon. Who knew?

We still don’t know where we’re going when we leave here on Sunday. The weather still looks funky, so we probably won’t go down to the Keys after all. I want to spend our time there kayaking and playing in the water, not sitting inside shivering.

I had better close for now, before I launch into another rant.

Thought For The Day -The measure of a man is not whether he falls down, but whether he gets up again.

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Even though I knew it was going to work, and even though the folks at the Ford dealer who reprogrammed our Explorer’s computer brain so the four wheel drive transfer case would go into neutral for towing assured me it would, I still wanted to be sure everything was working properly before we took off, towing the SUV behind the motorhome for the first time.

So, once we pulled off of our site at the Orlando Thousand Trails yesterday morning, we hooked the Blue Ox tow bar to the Explorer, I went through the steps to put the transmission and transfer case in neutral, then had Miss Terry sit in the front passenger seat while I drove through the RV park, so she could let me know if the Explorer was making any nasty noises, or if the rear view mirror or wheels fell off.

Everything went fine, though Terry said some people we passed acted like they had never seen a guy stick his wife back in the dinghy when he hit the road. Don’t those people have any appreciation for peace and quiet? (You just know I’m going to pay for that one, don’t you?)

We pulled out of the  campground a few minutes before 10 a.m. and followed U.S. Highway 27 south down the state, passing through the small towns of Avon Park, Sebring, and Lake Placid.

As we passed the M RV Resort, just north of Moore Haven, I told Miss Terry that the place sounded familiar for some reason. A mile or two down the road it hit me – that’s where our good friends Stu and Donna McNicol are spending the month of December! Well, duh! By then it was too late to turn around and go back, and we didn’t know if they were home or out riding their motorcycles anyway. I guess we’ll have to catch them next time around.

We battled a very strong wind all the way south, that alternated between hitting us head on, to slamming us broadside. The wind really took a toll on our fuel mileage; according to our Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor, we were only averaging about 5.8 miles per gallon.

We passed through mile after mile of sugarcane fields on both sides of the highway, which is a major crop in this region.

There were canals alongside the highway most of the way, turning off here and there at right angles back into the cane fields. I told Terry they might be fun to kayak in. Shortly afterward we noticed several cars pulled off the road on the other side of the highway, their drivers and passengers all out and looking down over the guardrail. Terry said they were probably checking out the alligators that surely live in the canals. Here in Florida, any body of water bigger than a kid’s backyard wading pool probably holds a gator or two.

In different areas, we noticed several huge plumes of smoke off in the distance, and when we passed by close to one, it looked like the farmers were burning off their fields. As windy as it was, I sure hope they were being careful, because if one of those fires got away from them, it probably wouldn’t have stopped until it hit the Atlantic beaches!

Eventually we reached Interstate 75 and tuned east for a few miles, and then got onto Interstate 595. Traffic was noticeably heavier, and by the time we reached Interstate 95 it was really hectic. We pulled into Paradise Island RV Resort in Fort Lauderdale about 2:30 p.m., with 220 miles behind us. I sure was glad to be off the road after our windy drive south!

When I got out of the Winnebago and headed for the office to check in, I was met by Gypsy Journal subscriber J.C. Webber, whom we had spoken to briefly at the Thousand Trails last week. Once we were in our site, J.C. and his wife Beverly came by to check out the custom desk units that Carlyle Lehman from Focal Wood Products made for us a while back.

Later in the evening, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour also came by to visit. It’s nice having friends everywhere we go!

We’ll be here a week or so, and then, depending on the weather, we hope to get down to the Keys. But if it stays windy and cold, like it has so far this winter, we may scratch that idea and go to Plan B, whatever the heck that is.

Thought For The Day – Even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one.

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Today is moving day for us. We are leaving the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve this morning, headed for Paradise Island RV Resort in Fort Lauderdale, about 220 miles south.

The “quicker” route is to get over to Interstate 95 and take the superslab south, but what fun is that? If you’ve been on one interstate highway, you’ve been on all of them. We prefer the “blue highways” that show us small town America, and where we can travel at a slower pace.

So instead, we are going to take U.S. 27 south, through Sebring and around Lake Okeechobee, hook up with Interstate 595, and take it to 95. Then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump north to the campground.

Our friends Jim and Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, are staying at Paradise Island this winter, and we’re looking forward to spending some time with them, away from all of the hectic activity of an RV rally, which is usually where we cross paths.

We have had a very good time here at the Thousand Trails, and this is one campground we’ll be returning to again. Now that we have used up our allotted 50 nights per year that we get “free” under our Thousand Trails membership, any other stays are $5/night, which is a darned good price on a full hookup RV site! We do have to come back to this area in the next few weeks to have the nice folks at Camping Connection do our latest Norcold refrigerator recall, but during the winter the Thousand Trails keeps pretty full, so I don’t know if they will have an opening for us.

A while back, a gentleman named Ladd Lougee, an outdoor and fitness enthusiast, wrote me that he came up with the idea for a better travel chair when he was camping in the Mammoth Lakes area of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains. Ladd said that after squirming around in his chair in discomfort for the hundredth time, he asked if anyone else had a sore back from using the typical camping chairs. He was very surprised to hear that nearly everyone else in his group did as well. So Ladd said he set out to build a better chair, the result being the Strongback Chair.

Okay, a lot of companies and people contact me, telling me that they have come up with the newest and best whatever, from computers to books to widgets, and I have to admit that usually I’m a skeptic. Most of these outfits simply send me an e-mail press release and expect me to publish it, but I don’t do things that way.

I write back and tell them that if they want to send me one of their products to review I’ll look at it. But, they must be willing to accept the fact that if it is good I’ll say so, and if I think it’s crap, I’ll say that too. I seldom hear back from them after that. I’m never sure if they are just looking for free publicity, or if they don’t have enough faith in their product to let me try it. But Ladd offered to send me a chair to evaluate in his first e-mail. That’s always a good sign.

The chair arrived a couple of days ago, and after sitting in it a while, folding it up and stowing it in its nylon carry bag, and pulling it out to sit on again on different types of terrain, from grass and gravel to blacktop, it is absolutely the most comfortable camp chair I have ever sat in.

The chair is big and roomy, it has solid padded arm rests, a drink holder, and can hold up to 300 pounds, and best of all, its design incorporates a frame-integrated lumbar support that gives my lower back excellent support. Strongback Chairs come in two models, the Zen for smaller people, and the big, roomy Elite model that Ladd sent me.

My only problem with the chair is that Miss Terry likes it just as much as I do, so now we have to fight over it! Or maybe there’s going to be a new chair in her Christmas stocking this year?

Thought For The Day – Stop global whining!

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