In yesterday’s blog, titled Walter, I told you about picking up an elderly gentleman I found walking along a highway on a snowy winter night back during my Army days. I said then that I used to pick up hitchhikers all the time, especially those in the military, and several of you left very nice […]
In a blog post titled Speeding last week I wrote that when I was stationed at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York during my Army days, my parents lived in Toledo, Ohio, and at least once a month during our slow time when we were not training cadets, I would jump in […]
We know it’s wrong, but we’ve all done it at one time or another. Most of us probably do it fairly often to some extent. Pushed that gas pedal a little too hard and broken the speed limit. Maybe out on the open highway in the middle of nowhere, and hopefully not in a school […]
I have done quite a few things to earn a buck in my life, and some of them have been a bit bizarre while others have been rather mundane. I think the shortest job I ever had was about four hours. Right after I got out of the Army a thousand years ago, I got […]
Before I do anything else today, I want to wish my son Travis a happy 43rd birthday. Hey guy, when did you get so damned old? Travis and I have a special bond, partly because I was a single father, and the two of us kind of learned how that should go as we went […]
When I was in high school in Toledo, Ohio, the father of one of my friends was a seaman working on freighters plying the Great Lakes. A couple of times when he was in port my buddy and I went down to the ship, a massive freighter, and he gave us a tour. I can […]
Note: This is the last of three installments about our trip to Ohio. When we were going through the Smoky Mountains the day before, the tire pressure monitor on Terry’s Chrysler Pacifica kept alerting to two low tires. Low as in 34 pounds instead of the suggested 36 pounds. Not enough to worry about much, […]
I have received quite a few questions about our trip to Ohio and thought I’d answer a few of them in today’s blog. Q. Why did you wait until it got cold up north to go up there instead of making the trip earlier in the year when it was so hot in Florida? A. […]
While I have had more success with my mystery books than I ever could have imagined, thanks to loyal readers like you wonderful folks, for a while now I have been toying with the idea of writing a family saga type series spanning several generations from the early 1900s through the Vietnam War. One reason […]
We were up and out the door early yesterday morning, headed for Home Depot for more parts for the bathroom faucet project. I’m not sure why I was up so early, since Miss Terry and Greg were the ones working on the faucet. Sometimes I think they drag me along just for ballast. As I […]
Longtime Gypsy Journal and blog readers probably already know that I am fascinated by those small world encounters that we have or hear about all the time. You know what I mean, those chance conversations with a new friend in a campground, where you suddenly realize that you both worked at the same company 20 […]
The bad weather that had been predicted rolled into central Arizona right on schedule, with cold, a gloomy sky, and rain. Monday was a gray day in more ways than one for me. I got an e-mail first thing in the morning that one of my oldest and dearest childhood friends, Dan Connell, had passed […]
Boy, there sure are a lot of RVs here on the campus of Bowling Green State University for the FMCA! The last official word I had was 2500 family coaches, plus a couple hundred vendors, staff, and volunteers’ RVs, not to mention several dozen new motorhomes on display by dealers and manufacturers. The FMCA brought […]
Yesterday started out windy here in Show Low, Arizona, but by noon it had calmed down quite a bit. My daughter Tiffany and her family stopped by for a visit in the early afternoon, and it’s always a treat to spend time with them. My son-in-law, Jim, crawled under our Ford van to unbolt the […]