The Carnies Are Coming!

The carnies are coming! The carnies are coming! Oh my, what should we do?

The fairgrounds is gearing up for the annual Pima County Fair, April 14-24, and for the last few days carnival workers have been arriving at the fairgrounds RV park. In fact, as it turns out, the folks who I wrote about in yesterday’s blog, who couldn’t park their motorhome, are one of the head honchos and his wife. I hope he can run a rollercoaster better than he can a diesel pusher!

In our time on the road, we’ve been at several RV parks and fairgrounds where circus and carnival workers have been staying, and it’s always been interesting. Once, during our first month on the road, we were at the fairgrounds in Torrington, Wyoming when a circus was getting ready to set up. I spent two or three hours getting a personal tour from a very pretty lady, who helped run the circus with her father and mother.

Another time, at Elkhart Campground in Elkhart, Indiana, a truck that was part of a circus passing through town broke down, and they brought in two trailers with cages containing a couple of Bengal tigers and some other exotic animals. They parked at the back of the campground property while the truck was in the shop, and we all got to check out the animals and visit with their handlers.  

Besides the fact that they are usually less expensive than local RV parks, we like camping at fairgrounds because we are always seeing something interesting. We’ve been at fairgrounds where there were monster truck shows, quilt shows, gun shows, horse shows, carnivals, gourd festivals, classic car shows, antique shows, and more going on. If you have never stayed at a fairgrounds, give it a try sometime. We sell a Guide to Fairgrounds Camping on our online Gypsy Journal Bookstore. Give it a try, you might be surprised how much you have been missing!

Some of the carnival workers travel in their own RVs, and others live in long fifth wheel trailers that are divided up into several small sleeping compartments, with six or eight doors down the side. One of the carnival workers walked over yesterday to borrow a wrench from Greg White, and he seemed like a nice enough fellow. But I think I’ll just keep to myself, so they don’t kidnap me and put me on display as one of their sideshow freaks! 🙂

I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get some work done on my Publishing4Profit self-publishing website. A couple of years ago we set up a blog on that website, but I never really did anything with it, I was just putting it in place for future use. But for some reason, now that I want to get active with it, I can’t access the blog’s WordPress administration panel. The password and log-in information I have won’t work.

After exhausting my limited abilities, I called Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, who helped me set up the original blog. Chris poked around a bit trying to recover the password and log-in info, with no success, and later in the evening Greg also spent a couple of hours trying to get me in. I’m sure that if anybody can figure it out, between Chris and Greg, the job will get done.

While I was busy with that, Greg was replacing the gate valve on his American Eagle’s black water tank, since the old one had started to leak a bit. Mine needs replaced too, and Greg has added it to the long list of chores to be done before we part company. Greg and Jan said they planned to hang out with us for a few weeks, but Miss Terry keeps warning me that if we ever go to town without then, we’ll return to find their RV site empty, and Greg a hundred miles down the road, making his getaway.

Thought For The Day – Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives