Celina, OH to Wapakoneta, OH

We had a great time here at the Eastern Gypsy Journal Gathering at the Mercer County Fairgrounds. Today we’re heading over to Lakewood Village RV Resort at Wapakoneta, OH. Since Wapakoneta is only about 24 miles east of here, we’re not in any hurry to get on the road.

This morning before we started getting ready to leave Celina, we went for a walk to find Nick & Terry Russell to tell them how much we enjoyed our first Gypsy Gathering. We took Tinker with us & he enjoyed the walk & getting to see (smell) parts of the fairgrounds he hadn’t been in. We located Nick & Terry at the Hospitality Room & told them how much we had enjoyed the Gathering & what a terrific job they had done. We had hoped to pick up a bundle of the current Gypsy Journal paper to hand out at the campgrounds that we would be going to, but Nick & Terry had given out all of their extra copies.

From Gypsy Journal Gathering

About 10:30 we started getting the RV ready to leave & pulled out of our spot about noon. We had to stop at the dump station & dump our tanks before leaving the fairgrounds. We decided since we only had about 24 miles to our next destination, that Mike would drive the RV & I would drive the Vue.

We stopped at Kroger's at St. Mary's for gas & groceries. The price for gas at Kroger's was $3.77. We filled the tanks on both vehicles & got $.10 a gallon off on $136 worth of gas. We have a Kroger customer card & we get credit for our purchases, which gives us a discount on our gas purchases at a Kroger gas station. We then pulled over into the parking lot & ate lunch. Then I went grocery shopping in Kroger. Mike hooked up the Vue to the RV while I was in shopping. We checked the gas price when we left & it had gone up $.20 in an hour and a half - $3.97! We actually got gas at the right time for a change.

We got in here at Lakewood Village a little after 3 pm. We got a site this time near the clubhouse facing one of the lakes, so we have a better view than the one we had when we were here in August.

Last day of Gypsy Gathering

Since we're not going to any of the 9 a.m. seminars – we slept in this morning until 8:00 - nice!

We both went to Nick Russell's "The Frugal Rver" at 10:30 - 12 - another seminar of his that we had attended at Life on Wheels Conferences. Nick is always informative & an enjoyable speaker.

From Gypsy Journal Gathering

Then back to the RV for lunch break & quality time with Tinker.

After lunch Mike decided he & Tinker needed to take a nap, so I went to Cheryl Green's "Digital Scrap Booking Made Easy" seminar from 1:30 - 3. She is a Creative Memories agent & it's a very impressive program & concept. I was curious to learn about Creative Memories since I had won a door prize from Cheryl. I really liked what you can do with the software - I'm keeping it in mind for the future. Remember, I’ve a blog & web albums to put together.

Mike joined me for the 3:30 - 5 seminar for "Google Earth" by Jim & Chris Guld. We were both familiar with Google Earth & had downloaded it a long time ago, but only used it occasionally.

I had used Google Earth when we were planning to catch the subway into Boston for some sightseeing. I checked our route from Hanscom Famcamp to the parking garage for the subway station & was able to see what the route looked like at street level. After today's class I'll be using Google Earth more - it just hasn't always been my first choice when I wanted to check out something on our route.

Then back to the RV for dinner & some more time with Tinker.

This is the final night for the Gypsy Gathering & we had door prizes at 7 p.m. Nick & Terry had planned the door prize giveaway really well. All the tickets that won on Monday were held out of the Tuesday drawing. Then tonight the rest of the tickets that hadn't been drawn on Monday & Tuesday were drawn for the door prizes. Then all of the tickets were put back in for the remaining door prizes & the grand prizes.

We won again at tonight's door prize drawing. We won a year's subscription to the Gypsy Journal - we already subscribe so we get a year's extension. So between the Creative Memories album & materials we won Monday & tonight’s prize, we did pretty well in the prize department.

Second day of Seminars

We were up again this morning at 7 a.m. We looked over the seminar schedules for today & decided to go to only 2 of them.

We went to "Hosting in State Parks" at 9 - 10:30 by Ron & Brenda Speidel. We had been to seminars on hosting at the Life on Wheels conferences, so this was a refresher course for us. They discussed the different types of duties, hours required & situations that happen as campground hosts. They also covered the questions to ask before accepting a campground host position (duties, hours, etc).

Afterwards we decided to drive out to Grand Lake St Mary's State Park to check out the campground there. We took Tinker with us since he’s been staying in the RV by himself while we’ve been attending seminars. St. Mary’s State Park is a Passport America campground, so the rates are 1/2 price Sunday thru Wednesday. We drove around checking the size & how level the sites were in case we were back this way & wanted to stay there.

While we were out we stopped at the Celina post office & picked up our mail from General Delivery.

After lunch we attended another of Chris & Jim Guld's seminars today called "Managing Digital Photos with Picasa". Picasa is a photo management software from Google & we can create web albums with Picasa & Google. I downloaded Picasa tonight & look forward to working with it on organizing our photos better. We've tried other web photo albums & they were so limited in the size of albums that we weren't pleased with them. We'll be able to share our photos with family & friends through our blog & the web albums - instead of waiting until we can get together for a visit.

Tonight was the pizza dinner. We had Domino's pizza - they had cheese, sausage & pepperoni pizzas. There were 112 pizzas ordered & the delivery pickup had to make 2 trips since it couldn't hold all the pizzas. We all took our chairs & beverages & had a great time.

So I am “officially” starting our blog tonight, but I will be making entries that go back to when we started fulltiming & adding our photos to albums. Looks like we’re going to be very busy this winter!!

First day of seminars at Gypsy Gathering

It was 50° this morning at 7:00 when we got up - does it ever feel good after the heat we had at Camp Atterbury. The seminars start at 9:00 this morning. We're taking a couple of folding chairs to sit on during the seminars. Since the seminars are being held in the fairground buildings, there may not be enough chairs for everyone & we all were advised to bring our own chairs.

Mike went to the 9-10 am seminar on "Electrical Management Systems" & I went to "Boondocking Basics". We both attended Nick Russell's 10:30 - 12 seminar "Highway History & Back Road Mystery" (always an enjoyable time). Then back to the RV for lunch 12 - 1:30 & to give Tinker lunch & some quality time.

We split up again for the 1:30 - 2:30 seminars; Mike went to "Appearance Care for Your RV" & I attended "The First 48 Hours After a Death" (not a real cheerful subject, but really informative & thought provoking).

Mike & I both went to "Every RVer Needs a Blog" at 3 - 4:30 given by Chris & Jim Guld - Geeks on Tour. We've talked about having a website to chronicle our travels since we started fulltiming in May 2006, but never really found anything that we were happy with - until now. We have friends & family all over the country & we're not always the best e-mail writers - so a blog is perfect for us.

One of the items in our seminar packet were discount coupons for Bella's Italian Grille in Celina (http://www.bellasitaliangrille.com/), so we decided to go there for dinner. We both had spaghetti & dessert (both very good) & had a scenic view of Grand Lake St. Mary's.

Then back to the fairgrounds to attend the door prize drawing at 7 p.m. & afterwards back to the RV & look over our seminar schedules for tomorrow.

First day of Gypsy Gathering

This is the official first day of the Gypsy Gathering. This morning we walked down to the registration building where we picked up our name tags & seminar packets. Wednesday will be pizza night & we paid $5 each for the pizza dinner.

After we got back from registration, Mike hooked a water hose up to the water spigot near us & washed the RV & car. There are still RV's arriving for the Gathering and we're parked where we can see most of them coming in.

We each have a seminar schedule. We spent this afternoon looking it over & deciding which ones we wanted to go to. If there are 2 seminars that we want to go that are scheduled at the same time, we each take 1 seminar. Mike usually goes to the technical one & I go to the other seminar.

This afternoon we attended the opening of the Gypsy Gathering where Nick Russell introduced the instructors for the seminars and vendors. After dinner they had drawings for door prizes and we won a package from Cheryl Green of Creative Memories that contained a photo album & supplies. She really put together a nice package for the door prize.

Camp Atterbury, IN to Cellina, OH

We got up at 6:30 this mornng & were on the road at 8:50 - much earlier than our usual 10:30 departure time.

We had crosswinds most of the drive to Celina, except for the stretch of I-75 where we had a tail wind & got up to 9.9 mpg. After we turned off of I-75 on to US-33 we had crosswinds again. We pulled off the road a couple of times to check the slide topper for the living room slide to make sure that it wasn't going to unroll & rip. We slowed down to about 45 mph & that helped some.

We got in here at the Mercer County Fairgrounds about 2:30 pm. & got in line to fill our fresh water tank prior to parking. There were volunteers directing the new arrivals where to fill up on water & where to park. The wind was getting stronger & it started to rain. Since we run the water through our filter system, it takes a while to fill the fresh water tank; so we sat inside the RV instead of standing outside in the rain. We ended up parking near the water spigot where we filled our tank. We leveled the RV, put out the slides, made coffee & waited out the weather. Ike had arrived!

Did it ever rain & the wind was something else! Even though we had our jacks down, our RV was still rocking with some of the gusts. We heard later that the wind gusts were around 50 mph in the area near Celina. The RV & car were a mess from the blowing dirt & then the rain! Mike's planning on washing the RV & car tomorrow since we're close enough to a water spigot to run a hose.

We've decided to register tomorrow morning for the seminars for the Gypsy Gathering instead of this afternoon.

Tropical Storm Ike

We've been watching the path of Ike & it appears he's heading this way. We've decided to get up tomorrow morning at 6:30 & get an early start leaving Camp Atterbury. Hopefully we'll be able to stay ahead of the bad weather.

We're excited & looking forward to attending the Gypsy Gathering in Celina, OH this coming week. The Gypsy Gathering is a rally put on by Nick & Terry Russell who publish a newspaper for RV'ers, The Gypsy Journal. We've been subscribers & have met Nick & Terry at the Life on Wheels seminars in previous years.