Changes

I decided to change our blog template because I wanted a larger text area. I tried to add a photo of our truck and rig to the header, but it came out very large vertically. So if any of you know how to make a narrow image in the blog header, pass on the information.

We are great fans of Nick Russell's blog at http://www.gypsyjournal.net/NicksBlog.htm Nick and Miss Terry, his wife, are fulltimers who produce a newspaper on the road as they travel in their MCI bus conversion. We subscribe to the journal and have attended their wonderful rally in Texas last February. Recently Nick wrote a beautiful description of friendships among fulltime rvers, and with Nick's permission I wanted to share it with you.

Nick Russell – Gypsy Journal Blog
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Reprinted with permission

...The friends we have met on the road are some awesome people. Our backgrounds may be very different, but we all have much more in common than we ever did with those folks in our hometown. We share a love of travel, a sense of adventure, we’re all pretty much nonconformists, and we have all come to the realization that owning “stuff” doesn’t make you happy. We know that happiness is the freedom we have to roam this wonderful country of ours, to explore the back roads, and to just relax under the awning with a cold drink while the rest of society is caught in a traffic jam during their evening commute.

Overall, fulltime RVers are some of the most laid back, open-minded people you will ever meet. They make up a wonderful cross section of American society. At our rally last week we had blue collar working folks in older RVs, retirees, Baby Boomers in fancy new rigs, at least one millionaire, gays, straights, couples, solos, liberals, conservatives, born again Christians and atheists. But it didn’t matter. Nobody wore a label. We were all just friends hanging out and having fun.

Miss Terry always says we have two kinds of family in our lives – the family we’re born into and the family we choose. With a few special exceptions, I try to keep at least one state line between myself and most of my blood relatives. It just seems to work out better that way.

But we think nothing of driving a couple of hundred miles to get to a campground to meet up with some our extended RV family, fuel prices be damned. Of course, one other great thing about our RV family is that we all have wheels under our homes. So as much as we enjoy their company, we can leave before the warts start to show.