If you are Gypsy Journal subscriber, check your email inbox, because yesterday evening I sent the link to the new issue out to our subscribers. This is issue #108, and marks our eighteenth year of publishing the Journal. Last night I reminded Miss Terry of how I came up with the idea for it while sitting at our kitchen table in our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona. I asked her if she had any idea back then where that would lead to and she said no, she really didn’t, but agreed it’s been one heck of a fun ride!
Our little publication has allowed us to enjoy a wonderful life of freedom and travel that not everybody has an opportunity to do. It has also allowed us to experience things that very few ever will. We were once given a private tour of Beauvoir, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ last home, in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the tour guide handed me his sword. How many people get to hold such an important piece of history? On another private tour, this time of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, our tour guide was a former Marine pilot from World War II who had been shot down over the South Pacific and lived to tell the tale. Oh, the stories he told us!
On yet another private tour, this time of the Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker Alabama, our tour guide invited Terry to sit in this Sikorsky CH-34 Choctaw helicopter. The CH-34 saw extensive service in Vietnam as a transport and evacuation helicopter. But what makes this particular CH-34 interesting is that it was taken from the Army’s inventory and became the first helicopter assigned to the White House, and was used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Do you know anybody who’s sat in the President’s helicopter before?
I could go on and on, including a behind the scenes tour of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, or being invited onto a research boat at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, Michigan. But I think you get the idea.
Even more important to us are the wonderful people we have met along the way. Some of you we have only crossed paths with once or twice, while others have become close friends that we spend time with at every opportunity.
And the thing that means the most to us is that this did not happen because I came up with an idea a long time ago, or because we’ve kept at it for all these years. It’s because of you. All of you who have subscribed and stuck with us through good times and bad are the reason we have been able to live this wonderful adventure. And though we are not fulltiming anymore, rest assured that our gypsy souls still have a lot left to see and do. Somewhere along the way, I hope we see you in our travels.
Congratulations Ronald Bradwell, winner of our drawing for an audiobook of Slow Falling, book six in my friend George Weir’s excellent Bill Travis mystery series. We had 68 entries this time around. Stay tuned, a new contest starts soon.
Thought For The Day – If walking is good for your health, the postman would be immortal.
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Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Those of us who have traveled the road with you (mostly in our minds but enough to count you as friends and personal baker) thank you