Why Do I Try?

I don’t know why I even try to give our readers an idea of our travel plans, because the minute I do, everything changes. I reported in yesterday’s blog that we would send the CD with the new issue to our printer, and hopefully head west by way of Livingston, Texas and across the central part of the Lone Star State. What a difference a day makes! 

When I called the printer we normally use here in this part of the country, they didn’t have us on the schedule as promised, our contact person was unavailable, and it was obvious they were neck deep in chaos due to internal problems. Now what? We’re already running late and we don’t have time to wait for them to resolve their personnel issues.

I called another newspaper printer we have used in Victoria, Texas, explained our problem, and the customer service rep we work with there promised that if I could overnight the CD to her, she’d make getting us printed a priority. So it looks like we’ll be driving across Interstate 10 counting the road kill after all.

Publishing a newspaper on the road presents these kinds of challenges all the time. It would be great to have one newspaper do all of our printing, but the cost of having them ship the finished issue to us wherever we happen to be would be prohibitive, and timing would become a real issue. Most newspapers could actually handle the mailing for us as well, but besides the papers for our subscribers, we also print several thousand extra copies of each issue to pass out at RV parks, rallies, etc, and those would have to be shipped to us, with the inherent costs mentioned above.

Anyway, with all of that worked out yesterday morning, we drove about 35 miles to Pensacola, Florida to take care of some business, and made the mistake of stopping at a couple of stores. I was quickly reminded of why I try to avoid stores from Thanksgiving until New Years Day. Crowds of shoppers, everybody in a hurry, screaming kids, and frazzled store employees are about as far from the spirit of Christmas as you can get. Bah humbug!

Today we have an appointment at Camping World in Robertsdale to get the last of the repairs done to our motorhome from our burglary and vandalism. Our appointment is for 8 a.m., and they say we’ll be out by noon.

We had expected to be here in Summerdale until after Christmas, and probably until right after New Years, but, with this change of plans in our printing schedule, we’ll be heading toward Texas no later than Wednesday morning. In fact, if they get the work finished at Camping World early enough in the day, we may even put a couple of hundred miles behind us yet today.

We know we are disappointing some folks who wanted to get together with us while we were here, but we really have no choice. Unfortunately, we are not retired and we don’t always have the luxury of the relaxed schedule we like to have. It’s a lot better than our old workaholic lifestyle, but sometimes when duty calls, we just have to answer.

Tune in tomorrow and find out where we are. And if you find out before I do, send me an e-mail and let me know!       

Thought For The Day – I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

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