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!

Kats Carvings

It kind of looks like I went through some kind of midget phase. I guess I did. Not that I had any kind of wood shortage issue. I left Texas with a goodly supply of wood to carve. Unless I get busy I'll still have plenty when we get back. So I'll get busy on something a little taller.

The center piece is a Whimsical house carved out of cottonwood bark. This piece is about 2" thick and right at 9" high. Fun and easy to carve. The little guys are all carved from basswood and are all less than 4" high. My tool kit is about old country doctor medicine bag size and contains a roll of 17 assorted knives, gouges, and 'V' tools. That plus a shaving kit full of sharping stones and I'm good to go. I do have a clamp and a couple of saws that take up a tiny space but nothing else would fit there anyway. And of course I have some wood. More than usual right now but it will be a long summer and I didn't want to run out.

My current problem is finding a place to put the finished stuff. Some of my stuff is fair to good but honestly speaking some of it is just 'designer firewood,. The problem is Kat won' t let me get rid of anything. As soon as its done it hers and I ain't leaving anything of hers behind or giving it away. Well not much anyway. I am prone to hang something in a tree or nail it to a post but the longer I do this the more we seemto accumulate. I do appreciate her apprecciation of my work but we have got to do a better job of convincing her to let some stuff go. You can contact her at 503……………………. Well you know how to contact her.

Thank you

Upper Stamp

So here we are in to our second month at Upper Stamp Creek. A real tough gig. Well, not so much really. The park is open on weekends only and our job, if you could call it that, is to watch the place during the week. So we lock it up Monday afternoon and kind of watch the place until Friday morning. Mostly its walk or drive through and make sure nobody enters the park through the boat ramp which can’t be seen from where we are. Like I said, “tough gig”.

The real work goes to Jim and Glenda. They are the contract folks who do the real work on weekends and staff the gatehouse. But it’s a small park and they’re not complaining. They came from a much larger park and this is only 20 sites so they will be staying and coming back. Real nice folks! We get along well and more often than not have our social and cocktail hour at five or six o’clock to close the day. Sometimes if they are working we just put our chairs in front of the gatehouse so they can continue to work. A couple of days ago Jim got and split a watermelon for us all. Very tough gig!

Just recently Jim (see above) helped me do a ‘service’ on the MH.
Over the past several years, maybe even decades now (Damn!), I have gotten away from doing my own work. It was too easy to go to Jiffy Lube, or cars became more complicated and just more difficult to work on. Even harder to work on because of the need for bifocals. (How do you get your head in that position?) Anyway, I got use to having it done and paying for it. So Jim says “I’d be glad to take care of it for you”. I said “Cool!” Well I couldn’t just let Jim do it all so I got involved and rediscovered how easy it is. Mostly I guess because there is lots of room under these ‘big rigs’ to crawl around; even for an old fat guy! And with all the time I want and lots of time I can even get my head in the right position to see what I’m doing. So I’m genuinely excited. I mean that saved me a couple hundred bucks. And now I can do it myself for the next 15 services and even I can do the math there! Soooo………………… THANK YOU JIM !!!!

So Kat went to get pizza that night for ‘social hour’. A really tough gig!

We’ve seen my old friend and “best man” Doug who lives down the road in Marietta. We took in a ballgame in Gwinnette County. The AAA ‘G’ Braves, a farm club of the Atlanta Braves. And we’re just kind of ‘hanging out’. Catching up on reading, carving and motorhome maintenance. It’s still a lot to keep clean and polished. Kat enjoys her knitting, farming at Farmville, and shopping in Cartersville.

Life is good!

Michigan's first Living brain donor

You can see I needed a cold compress after getting the results or maybe it was just too much reading. It was a very good book. The Quest, Bernard Smith.

Did you happen to watch the Miss America Pageant? For want of something better to watch or do we had it on. Kat was on the ‘net’ and I was doing some reading but then we both got sucked in. My selections never do well and this was not much of an exception. And Miss Oregon was disappointing. Anyway, the girls I liked kept being eliminated until the only one I liked was Oklahoma. I kept saying Miss Maine was entirely too tall at 6’6” and Michigan was trying too hard and thought she had ‘it’ and was using way to much of ‘it’! They came to the ‘question’ and Oklahoma knocked the “Arizona immigration” question out of the park and Maine did real well too but I forget what is was? Michigan’s answer sounded like her I.Q. was a lot lower then her bust size. Not only did she not know the answer, she didn’t even understand the question. So then it was three. I said OK, Oklahoma (no pun intended), maybe Maine (it was a good answer and maybe it made her look a little shorter), but please not Michigan. Maine goes next and I’m thinking OK! (This time you got it right?) And then they picked Michigan. Being from Ohio, that is hard to accept; I mean come on! It’s Michigan! And then she is perhaps Michigan’s first living brain donor! Oh well! It’s 2010! Why should I be surprised?

Send Sugar

Whenever possible when parked we make an effort to feed the birds. Just something we enjoy. I started way back when in Oregon City one winter when it looked like the birds were hungry and the weather was crap. I just looked in my National Geographic Birds of North America and counted 159 different birds that we have checked off. Admittedly we have an advantage in lifestyle. That is never more true when you consider our winter home in the Rio Grande Valley. I think it is said there is a greater variety of birds there than anywhere in the country. Sooo……….. We’re here in Upper Stamp Creek on the banks of Allatoona lake in northwest Georgia and haven’t seen a bird at our feeders yet. And I know they’re here. I can hear them. Cardinals, finches, and all sorts of LBJ’s (little brown jobs). A few weeks into it I have given up on the birds here. Don’t know what is up???

Not so with the hummers. There are Ruby Throated hummingbirds here and they are making up for the absence of other birds. I’m filling our little feeders every day. Our big feeder lasts 3 or 4 days but not the small ones. Now I’m sending out a request for sugar to make more nectar. We’ve got some real piglets here. Kat got a couple more little feeders and the hummers found them right away. As a matter of fact when I put out our first feeder the response was almost immediate. I made some nectar, filled the feeder, and hung it on the window awning. I walked around the front of the MH came in and put the rest of the nectar in the frig turned toward the window and there was a hummer at the feeder. No lie! I’m a pretty good cook and even make a fair batch of nectar but that was a real surprise! I don’t figure it was more than a minute. And now we have hummingbirds chasing each other around fighting over the feeders. I store the nectar in the frig and fill feeders as needed. Like I said, the response here is immediate. You would think that the little guys would get ‘brain freeze’ sucking that cold stuff up so quickly? Obviously not here. What a bunch of porkers! …………….SEND SUGAR!!!