Time has flown by this week, and we have not accomplished very much, even though we had the best of intentions. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we had a succession of visitors, and it was like a big family reunion. It has been a lot of fun, but not very productive.
Wednesday I was standing in line at the post office, waiting to mail off some orders, when Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour called to tell me they were passing through on their way to New Jersey, and were stopping at Elkhart Campground for the night. We had not seen the Geeks since last winter, so we were excited for the chance to get together, and to see their beautiful new motorhome.
They were pulling into their campsite just as we got back from the post office, and we had a round of hugs that included Greg and Jan White, and Tom and Barbara Westerfield. Then we all piled into a couple of vehicles and went off in search of food. The only thing fulltime RVers like more than traveling is eating, and we had a wonderful meal, with lots of laughter all around.
Back at the campground, Jim and Chris came over to our Winnebago to check out our new iMac computers, and I think they were suitably impressed. Jim said he sees a Mac in his future, and that kind of validation from the RVing world’s acknowledged computer experts is pretty impressive. After Jim and Chris left, Terry and I worked on some paperwork, and I wrote a new blog post. By the time I finished it and got it posted, and we took our showers, it was after 3 a.m. by the time we got to bed.
Yesterday dawned rainy and cold, and about 8:30 somebody knocked on our door. We seldom get up that early, and especially after only five hours sleep, I wasn’t about to crawl out of our snug, warm bed to go see who it was. Our rule has always been that if our curtains are open over the door, we are receiving visitors. If they are closed, we may not answer when somebody knocks. We observe the same etiquette with other RVers, figuring that if they still have their curtains closed, they want privacy.
Eventually, we did get up and in gear, and I sent out an e-mail with an info letter for our Ohio Gypsy Journal Rally to all of the registered attendees whose e-mail addresses we had. While I was doing that, Terry was preparing envelopes with printed copies of the letter to send out to people whom we only have a snail mail address for.
After dropping those envelopes off at the post office, we drove to Mishawaka to go to the Apple store. Somehow, in the process of buying our iMacs on Sunday, they gave us a bag with some other customer’s items in it – a battery charger and a $100 gift card, and we wanted to return them. We had called the store after we discovered the mistake, and they said to drop them off whenever we were in the area. While we were there, I bought a copy of Parallels, a program that will allow me to run my Windows programs on the iMac. This will save me a small fortune, because I won’t have to replace all of my Windows software right away. The programs we use to produce the Gypsy Journal cost several hundred dollars, an expense we would like to avoid right now.
On the way home, we stopped at WalMart,and while Miss Terry went in to do some shopping, I sat out in the Explorer and read my Kindle. Well, at least I tried to read my Kindle. I read a paragraph or two, and the next thing I knew, Terry was knocking on the window to wake me up. Hey, naps are nice too! 🙂
Back at the campground, we picked up Tom and Barb Westerfield and went to dinner at Bob Evans, a Midwest chain of family restaurants. Our young waitress was very nice, but she personified the stereotypical young, dumb blonde. By the time we had finished our meals, we knew all about her braces, about her life back home in Alabama, her move to Elkhart, that she liked cats instead of dogs, that she loved going barefoot, and… you get the picture 🙂
After we ate, we drove to the Mor/ryde factory, about five miles away, where Wil and Cyndy Olsen were spending the night, at one of their customer hookup sites. Most of the local RV businesses have courtesy hookups for their customers. Wil and Cyndy work for Adventure Caravans, and the last time we saw them was at our Yuma rally last March. Since then they have caravanned to Alaska, and are now headed to Boston for an East Coast history-themed caravan. Those folks don’t let any grass grow under their wheels!
We visited with Wil and Cyndy and their lovable mutt, Turbo, for a while, but then I started feeling droopy and was afraid I’d fall asleep right there. We said our goodbyes and headed home. By the time I got the blog ready to post, it was after 1 a.m.
Today we plan to get caught up on our rest, and then get back to work on figuring out these new computers.
Thought For The Day – Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!
Click Here To Register For The Geeks On Tour Computer Boot Camp Before Our Ohio Rally
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Tip of the day: To take a screen shot, press Command+Shift+3 keys. To take a snapshot of a portion of the screen, press Command+Shift+4 keys then align the resulting cross hairs on the starting corner and then click and drag to size the resulting window to whatever you want to capture. To take a snapshot of a particular window on the screen, press Command+Shift+4 and then the space bar. Position the resulting camera icon over the window you wish to capture and click the left mouse button. Resulting snapshots should appear on your desktop as new icons. To cancel any of these screen captures prior to execution, just hit the Escape key.
Nick,
Do you realize how many people would have kept that $100 gift card? Kudos to you for doing the right thing.