Down To The Wire

We’re getting down to the wire on our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally, and everybody on our advance team is busy, busy, busy! The rally starts a week from today, and we still have a lot to get done.

Miss Terry and Barbara Westerfield have been locked to their computer keyboards, making lists, setting up registration guidelines for their volunteers, and a hundred and one other things that need done.

After helping me map out all of the electrical outlets and RV parking spaces on the fairgrounds over the weekend, today Greg White and his wife Jan are out pounding the pavement, soliciting door prizes from local businesses.  

Today Terry will touch base with Dominos to make arrangements for our pizza party, and with the WalMart bakery to order donuts for morning treats for rally attendees.

While she’s doing that, Tom Westfield and I will go over how we can best get arriving RVs off the street and parked in the most efficient manner. Tom will be in charge of a sort of parking triage process, greeting RVers as they pull in, determining where they need to be staged (regular attendee, handicapped electric, handicapped mobility, and vendor), and directing them to the proper holding area until we can get them parked.

Last year, a combination of poor planning on my part, an unprecedented rain storm, and not being completely familiar with the fairgrounds, caused long delays in the Early Bird parking process. Yuma got its entire year’s normal rainfall on the morning that our Early Birds came in. It was a mess! Hopefully, we learned from that experience and things will go easier this time around.

Yesterday I updated our rally seminar schedule, which you can see on the rally registration page. Scroll down the page and check out some of our offerings. I am still adding new seminars and tweaking the schedule, but as you can see, we have a lot to offer.

Barbara Westerfield and “Cool” Judy Rinehimer will be presenting a seminar on the popular hobby of geocaching, followed by an outdoor geocaching demonstration. We also added a seminar by Barbara on Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAKZ), a handy program loaded with features to help make any geocacher’s life easier.

One of the questions every fulltiming couple gets asked is “How can you live together, cooped up in that tiny thing every day?” Yes, even a 40 foot diesel pusher with multiple slides can seem tiny at times, but successful RVing couples have the skills and abilities to get along under all kinds of circumstances.

To answer that question, we’re going to try something new this year that I have been thinking about for quite a while. We’ll have a two part seminar titled Staying Married & Happy In An RV, which will address the problems and solutions that couples have found, living in an RV.

During the first session, we will have a panel discussion with several couples talking about the issues they have had to deal with, what works for them, and what doesn’t work. During the break between sessions, attendees can submit written questions, and the panel will try to answer them. We aren’t marriage counselors, but maybe between us, we can come up with an idea or two that will help you stay married and happy in your RV!

Another couples’ activity we’ll have will be a lot of fun; a golf cart rodeo. We did this at a rally in Florida once and it was a big hit. Here’s how it works – in a lot of RVs, one person seems to do most of the driving, while the other navigates. Quite often, it’s the husband behind the wheel, and the wife telling him where to go (sometimes literally!). So we are going to reverse roles, and have the navigator drive the golf cart through an obstacle course, while the regular driver gives directions. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But did I mention that the driver will be blindfolded? 🙂 I guarantee we’ll have some laughs at this event!

If you haven’t registered for the rally yet, visit our rally registration page and sign up today. Or, you can just show up at the fairgrounds, either on Sunday afternoon as an Early Bird, or Monday as a regular attendee, and register then. We’ve got plenty of room, so come join the party!

While we’ve been busy with all of the rally planning, Bad Nick took advantage of a chance to get at the keyboard and write a new Bad Nick Blog post titled What Kind Of Idiot Does This? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. ~ Albert Einstein

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally