The Rally-Louisville

That’s Loueville, not Looeyville, or Louis-ville like I like to say it, its Loueville. You might think its three syllables and I suppose that would be techniquely correct, but here, and we are here(!),its really closer to two and a half syllables. LOUEVILLE, with kind of a short e.




So now that you have that straight I reckon the big news is, it is hotter than blazes here. This is the second day of weather alerts because of the heat. The latest we’ve heard is a heat index of 110o today. Only 105o yesterday. And we’re on 30 amp electrical service so we can only use one air conditioner without blowing the outside circuit breaker. So we can only cool it down about 15 or 20 degrees. That means if its 110 outside we’re going to hit something too hot for comfort inside. And we’re approaching that now. Jade is saying, “are you guys nuts, turn on the air”! The good news is all of the Rally is inside and very well cooled. A very nice facility and all indoors. So we’re good there. The bad news is we lost one of our air conditioners and it won’t be fixed for a few days. So we’re back to the good news, we can only use one air conditioner anyway. So its good news, bad news, or maybe bad news, good news, whatever! We’re surviving and Kat ain’t whining too much. She can always go shopping over in a cool spot where they have all the vendors and she is,,,,,,,,,,, you guessed it,,,,,,,,,,, cool!

This is our third Grand National and much like the others, lots of vendors, new motorhomes to tour, seminars to attend, food to eat, little things to get fixed or ask questions about, entertainment to watch, and people to meet. We’ve done all of that! It has been good. Why should I spend more time describing it when you can check it out at therally.com Wasn’t that easy. And I got to check out a new feature of “blogger”.

Now we have to work on some cooler weather.  And next time I'll play some 'bean bag baseball'.

Filling the gap

Pictured: This is the carving I did after learning a new 'eye technique ' from Jim.

Now the agenda called for two weeks in southern Illinois at South Sandusky on Rend Lake, and a week in Kentucky before the Good Sam National Rally in Louisville. We had reservations but the problem was we had a gap in the middle on the weekend of the 4th. Everything that was reserveable was. That was at Corps of Engineers parks. We hoped to be able to get a ‘walk-up’ site and fill the gap. No such luck! Just nothing available. Fortunately I had checked at the campground at the fairgrounds in DuQuoin and they had lots of room. So after being turned away at Rend Lake we headed back to DuQuoin. We got a nice spot in the shade under a big Oak tree and settled in ‘till after the 4th. We even had fireworks right next to us at the fairgrounds. All in all a pretty good deal.

Then we did do our time in South Sandusky and now we’re in Kentucky at Rough River Lake. We’ve had nice sites and a pretty relaxing time of it. Kat has caught up on farming and I have done some carving and got the rig all spiffy for the Rally. So tomorrow we’re off to our third Grand National Rally. Looking forward to it!

Howard in his Happy Place

The Fleetwood rally is over and it was pretty good. We met some real nice folks, some of whom happened to be our neighbors, and some we just happened to run into. We met Howard and Ginny (on the left) by the horse barns where Kat was looking (hoping) to find a husband for Jade. We didn’t find a husband but we did find a few cats to feed and met Howard and Ginny. And then I kept bumping into Howard. All very nice of course because Howard definitely was in his ‘happy place’. Just another ‘happy camper’ enjoying the RV lifestyle. Howard just doesn’t mind showing it. He was fun! Then we met Jim and Alvada at our first dinner. Jim is a fellow woodcarver who later showed me a different way to do ‘eyes’. Real cool! And it was nice to share perspectives from our neighbors Rich and Alicia and Glenn and Connie who were from Michigan and New Jersey respectively.

This is the first rally we have attended where meals were served on a regular basis. Three dinners and maybe four breakfasts. Very good too! Especially when you consider there were about 900 folks here. 410 rigs plus Fleetwood folks and maybe some vendors.

Entertainment was good. ‘Blue Suede Crew’ (?) did Elvis and Johnny Cash impressions. Good if you’re a fan I guess? But I liked “Three Guys, Thirty Instruments’ They were good, funny, and did everything from Willie Nelson to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ with Tina Turner in the middle.

The Fleetwood people looked at a couple of problems we had and we spent some time looking at all the vendors and their wares. Of course we bought a few things, the biggest, or should I say most spendy, being ‘TireTraker’, a tire pressure/temperature monitoring system. With 10 sensors it will monitor our six coach and four car tires. Got to set that up today.

So I’ll be back and yak’atcha s’more later!