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-Gramps-

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  1. -Gramps-

    Restless

    By -Gramps-,

    I suspect that many readers of this here blog of mine (notice my use of a bit of Southern Speak) wonder what most of my last few entries have to do with motor coaching. My initial response is: not much.
    However, there might be a connection.
    I have a restless nature. I can't sit still for long periods of time doing nothing. I have to be reading, writing, watching something very interesting, and usually commercial free, on the LCD. I might play a World War II FPS online. For you non computer gamers, a FPS is a First Person Shooter. My restless nature may have been a large contributing factor that helped produce the mindset that led me to become a citizen of the RV community. I have always thought about places that I have not been to and places that I want to return to. I think about places that are anywhere except where I am at the moment. That has to be one of the reasons I bought a Motor Coach. What does a MOTOR coach do? It takes you to other places. My restless nature also contributed to the purchase of my motor coach lot. I love where it's located, near the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Parkway is a road. What do roads do? They lead you to other places. I can take the coach down that road or some other road at a moments notice.
    Well sometimes I can do that. The reality is that I am still constrained by time, money and business responsibilities. But those things don't stop me from dreaming and planning and hoping.
    As I said, I have a restless nature. I am sure that I inherited it. My mother and father were the youngest of seven and six siblings respectively. My Mom was the only one of her family to move away. My Dad was one of two. Every other sibling stayed very close to the place where they were born. There is nothing wrong with that. I am still living just across the water from the city I was raised in. I am presently living in the city I was born in. There was a time I couldn't wait to get away from here and leave my parents behind. I did just that and then I moved back, close to my parent's home, but not too close. Then sometime later, my parents became somewhat restless living here so they moved away, back to where they came from and left me behind. They live in Lexington NC just north of Denton.
    Dad did manage to see a lot of the world long before they settled down here and then again in their cabin in the woods. My Mom saw some of it with him. The part she saw was inside the borders of this country; however she could not allow herself to travel with Dad overseas. The pull of family, and those country roads, was always too strong. The ties to Denton just would not stretch to Sicily or Manila or Barcelona.
    I wonder to this day what my life would be like if part of my childhood had been adventurously spent in Italy or somewhere. I wonder even more when I think about the places I have traveled to and the people I met there. Yes, I have had some opportunities to feed my restless adventure craving nature.
    I have been around the world in ten days. Diane and I have been on numerous cruises to many islands surrounded by a Caribbean blue sea. I have been to the west coast many times. Many years ago I met Danny Thomas, Ephram Zimablest Jr, Francis Ford Coppola. Many years ago I was friends with Kathy Lee Gifford before she became Kathy Lee Gifford. I used to work for Ted Turner before he became rich and famous. Diane and I worked for Jim and Tammy Bakker back when they first started and traveled with them over most of the Eastern half of the United States. I worked for Pat Robertson as a roaming news videographer. I have installed phone systems on merchant vessels in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. I have taken weapons classes just in case the ship I was on was attacked by pirates. Diane and I have been camping in our first coach during a terrible Cape Hatteras nor'easter. I have seen fall colors while driving the coach around Grandfather Mountain that are so gorgeous it made me want to shout. We have been to some great coach rallies. I have been to Disney World multiple times. I felt like a kid, and loved every minute of it. I have been awed by the Grand Canyon.
    All of these experiences, friendships and encounters now seem short and sweet.
    What it boils down to is that my restless nature, at times being transported by plane and now by coach, has driven me to collect a lifetime of experiences that constantly fly through my mind.
    When I am sitting in front of my computer and mulling all these memories I look out the window at my coach, and ask myself the same questions.
    The First question gets overridden by all the following ones.
    First One, how do I keep paying for that thing?
    The following ones: Where is that thing going to take me to next and who am I going to meet when I get there? When is the next time our coach is going to add to my collection of dreams, hopes and memories?
    I always hope it is soon.
    I think you might be starting to understand why I write so much about my past. My past, your past, each has so much to do with who we are, what we believe, what we hope for, and what we will become.
    I sometimes want to retire now, retire from the phone game and become a full timer, free to go pretty much where my coach can take me. Once I get there, if it doesn't work out the way I thought it would or if I just feel like it is time to leave, then I may just pack up the rig and go.
    That is what I would like to do, but I also inherited a sense of responsibility from my parents as well. I have to look after my family until all members can look after themselves. I have to be settled and stable. What I want to do, when I can do it, and what I have to be now seems so far apart. I don't want to give up, but there are times I think the distance between responsible reality and my dreams is so great that it might drive me crazy.
    Do you understand what I am trying to say? Do you understand how your past pushes you to dream for something better only to find that it may be slipping away? You may have to let go of it because it is the responsible thing to do.
    I am quite sure that my Parents know exactly what I mean.
    How is that for a lead in to the rest of my story?
  2. -Gramps-

    Route 89

    By -Gramps-,

    It has been a peaceful two weeks since May 22, the day we left our brick house in Portsmouth. Once again we had to take our coach on the road for service before we could actually start our first long trip this year. The coach hasn’t been parked the whole time since our last long venture, which took place last September, I think. We made a fall trip to our spot at Deer Creek Motor Coach resort (the one in Virginia). I left Diane there while I made a trip back home in the car for work-related reasons (why else would I leave the mountains?).
    In October, we hoped to make a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary, but that didn’t work out, so we decided to go to Cape Hatteras, instead. We had a beautiful three days out of a planned seven, and then an uninvited guest named Sandy decided to crash our party. We had to pack up the coach and flee … as fast as we could. If we had stayed and tried to ride out a storm with an unpredictable potential for damage, we would have been stuck there for months; at least our coach would have been.
    We dropped the coach off at North River campground, which was the site of our next two group campouts, and then jumped in the car and made it home. Fortunately for us, Sandy decided that Portsmouth was not worth her time to visit. We sat in front of the TV, glad that we escaped all the wet, windy, destruction but at the same time feeling very sad for the people of New England.
    Between November and March we camped one weekend a month with either our Good Sam’s chapter or our FMCA chapter friends. This included two Christmas parties and three trips back to North River Campground (located near the Great Dismal Swamp) one to Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and one to the Virginia Beach oceanfront. They were easy fun trips. Our close friends Gary and Janis, who relocated their coach back in Elizabeth City, were there with us which made the trips extra special.
    One of the great highlights of our last group campout was the fact that my brother Rod and his wife Sharon joined us with their brand-new 26-foot Forest River travel-trailer. It is a very nice rig, I might add. They love it, and Picard, their Saint Bernard, does too.
    April and May were dedicated to using the weekends to shop for parts and materials to refurbish our kitchen. That project left very little energy for motor coaching. We christened our almost finished new kitchen with a special Mother’s Day/Joel’s Birthday Brunch. I did all the cooking…which consisted of a really good French Toast Casserole, Spinach Quiche, and a fresh fruit including bannans, blueberries, strawberries, (I forget the grapes) and strawberry-honey flavored yogurt salad.
    During the week of May15 our new Kitchen floor was installed and then all was done. Now, we really had the bug to hit the road again.
    We needed to get the coach inspected, and it needed an oil change. On the way to the service facility I discovered that the dash air was on the fritz again. It was a hot day and all it did was blow nice, warm air. I hoped that all it needed was a bit of Freon, but it turned out to be a much bigger problem than that so we made an appointment to visit Terry Labonte RV service. The guys there always take good care of us and our unusual Workhorse chassis.
    We arrived at Terry Labonte's lot late in the day, spent the night, and the next morning the techs discovered that we needed a new compressor, which they had in stock. They had the coach repaired by five that afternoon, so we spent another night in the lot, had Chick-Fil- A for dinner, and hit the road early the next morning.
    This all brings us to the afternoon of Friday the 24, when we climbed up Route 89 to Edmonds Road and then soon arrived at our beautiful lot at Deer Creek. It was a bit rainy and cold, but we didn’t care a bit. Early the next day I received a last minute invite to play golf with three friends (including my good friend Gordy) at the Blue Ridge Country club.
    I didn't play as well as I would have liked but I have improved since the last time I played the same course, so I guess I am moving in the right direction. Gordy said so and his opinion is very valuable.
    The next eight days provided a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things we enjoy. We made a few day trips to the small towns we love to visit around here including Galax, Sparta, Mt. Airy, West Jefferson, and Elkin. Each town has its own personality and things we like.
    Galax had a fifties car show which was fun. While there we made a run to Lowes buy some small parts for the coach including parts to mount my Z-Boost cell booster antenna.
    Sparta is an artist community with art galleries, good places to eat and clothing stores with squeaky wooden floors. We found some great clothing bargains there.
    West Jefferson is a very quaint and pretty place with a cheese factory and factory cheese shop located downtown along with an old classic movie house that shows first run movies for five bucks. There is a great old hardware store with a creaky wood floor where I found and purchased a handsome red handled Case pocket knife. The people of West Jefferson are some of the friendliest you will meet anywhere. We had lunch there, sitting outside with Teddy Bear. We devoured Bar-B-Que sandwiches, potato salad and fresh apple pie with ice cream for 7 bucks each. Remember, you can’t have good southern Bar-B-Que without sweet tea to go with it. That is a rule.
    We traveled back down route 89 so we could visit Elkin with our friends Bob and Wanda. We made a special trip to the Slightly Askew Winery, where you can buy some very unusual flavors. We love their wines and came back with a mixed almost case of bottles. From there we visited McRitchie’s winery and cider works for our second wine tasting. It was a beautiful day full of good flavors and good conversation with good people.
    The next few days were a mixture of coach washing, waxing, trip to Wal-Mart, more coach maintenance, and two more golf outings…both to the beautiful Crest View Golf Course just around the corner from Deer Creek. We met new owners, who will become friends, and we were reunited with already friends while attending the graduation party for Louie and Jesse, son and daughter of Laura and Barry, who built this special place. We enjoyed drink, food, fellowship and games.
    Memorial Day morning found us at a huge breakfast at Bob and Marlene’s beautiful site where there was plenty of smiles and food for everyone to get as much of both as they wanted.
    We made some new friends while walking thru Cool Breeze RV resort which is located right across the nine hole golf course next to our resort. We discovered a Holiday Rambler club chapter having a rally there. A new Vacationer caught my eye. It was a very late model one with a full wall slide and a great paint job. Eddie, the owner, happened to be outside trying to get his cable to work. A couple of other members were in the coach trying to figure out why there was no signal. This is the kind of think I love to figure out, so I immediately volunteered to help Eddie and his wife Sylvia, solve this electronic puzzle. I discovered that the TV antenna amplifier, which is supposed to switch to park cable when turned off, was not working. I made a temporary fix and advised Eddie that he should replace the stock amp with a more powerful Winegard digital TV antenna meter and amp. Eddie did just that, after visiting our coach to see how the same device works in our coach. It meant a trip to Camping World in Statesville, but it was worth it.
    That evening they invited us to be their guests at the club dinner out at the Mountain Surf Seafood restaurant, one of our favorite places, located just up the street from both resorts. We accepted, and as a result had a good dinner, and more good conversation with good people. Diane and I were also invited to join the club. We are giving that serious consideration.
    After dinner, we had dessert at the Cool Breeze meeting room. Before that Eddie and I performed a successful install of the new amp. We tested it and found that the park cable and off air worked just the way we wanted it to.
    We received another invite to attend a birthday dinner for Teddy, one of the owners and a golfing buddy of mine. We caravanned to Dobson, N.C., to a really fun place called The Depot, where I consumed a great half rack of baby back ribs with sweet tea, Cole slaw, sweet potato casserole, and hush puppies. We sat across the table from fellow owners Bill, his wife Connie and their son Mark, who was visiting from Washington, D.C. We talked about family, occupations, and the many things that’s go along with those two subjects. In other words, it was another evening of good food and good conversation with good people. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
    Diane and I drove back on our own and on the way we made a fortuitous wrong turn. We found ourselves missing our exit off I-77 to route 89 and so we took another road over to Fancy Gap where we turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, just as the sun was beginning to set on our right. It was a really pretty and peaceful drive back to our home. I opened the sun roof and let the mountain air blow in. Diane and I didn’t say much, we both were just enjoying the peaceful scenery.
    Diane loves the mountains just as I do. My roots are here. Diane’s heart is here, as it has been for years starting when we were young, in love, broke and sleeping in a tent. As we were driving she made the comment that our lives are like glasses of water and sand. Most of the time we have so many things happening in our lives that we are just shook up and the water in the glass is cloudy and brown. The mountains bring God’s peace and thoughts become calmer, our spirits become still. The sand in the glass settles to the bottom and things are then clear. I am not relating this the exact way that she expressed this, but the meaning is there I am sure.
    Tomorrow will find us on Route 89 and returning to our busy lives back in the big city. We do have friends and family there we want to see. Work is calling (literally) as well. We are taking some new clothes back with us, along with new pictures, but more important we are taking back new memories of this place, this special community called Deer Creek.
    We will be returning here. I say the sooner the better.
    Derrick
    "Gramps"
  3. -Gramps-
    The Black Ribbon part 2
    The French Broad River is a very beautiful, naturally flowing river, meaning that it is not dam controlled by the TVA like so many others are in western North Carolina. It flows north easterly through the mountains which includes Asheville and there it connects with the Swannanoa River. From there it continues through the county seat of Marshall, our destination. Eventually the French Broad flows into the Holston River in Tennessee and on into the Tennessee River near Knoxville. It is called the French Broad because it was one of two broad rivers in the area and it was the one that flowed through land claimed over two centuries ago by France. The other river was called the English Broad River, which later became known simply as “The Broad River”. The Cherokee had their own names for the river depending on what area it was in.
    The French Broad River is 213 miles long. We would be getting a very close view of about six of those miles.
    The Blue Heron Whitewater center is located about twenty-two miles from downtown Asheville, and about forty five miles from the Agricultural Center. The Ag center is right across the street so to speak from the Asheville Airport. We crossed the river three times on our way to Marshall. I saw it as a preview of what was to come. Being that it was not Diane’s and my first trip down the river, we had some idea of what to expect.
    I didn’t expect us to get fogged in on our way there, but it almost happened. It was pretty thick in places along I-26 just about where we passed under that great black ribbon of road known as the Blue Ridge Parkway.
    I must have called the Blue Heron office three or four times along the way to make sure we knew where we were going and to assure them we would be there ASAP. Sandy, who would become our guide, and Wags told us not to hurry, stay safe, they would wait, and if we drove past Grandma’s General Store we had gone too far and to turn around.
    We didn’t go too far. We made it just in time for the start of training for our half day trip down the river with lunch included.
    There was a couple from London along with one other rafter who would be in Wag’s large raft. Diane, Gary and Janis were assigned to Sandy’s raft. Jerry and I choose to go it alone in a Ducky. A Ducky is an inflatable one person Kayak with a double paddle. They are a bit more challenging and a heck of a lot of fun.
    We received some very precise training instructions both from Wags live and Wags on video. Basically the instructions were what to do if you fell out of the raft or off your duck, which could happen whether you wanted it to or not, and believe me, you don’t want it happen.
    We were issued spray jackets to keep us warm, helmets to keep our brains in place, and paddles that we were instructed not to lose.
    We boarded a used to be school bus, rafts and ducks lashed on top, for the trip up the mountain to the launch point.
    Once there we and our rafts were off loaded and we carried them down to the river.
    Sandy gave Jerry and myself a bit more instructions on how to paddle a duck. She also explained how to get off a rock if you become a pinned duck.
    If you don’t like getting wet, don’t white water in a duck. Like rafts they are self-bailing, water that comes in goes out, but the opposite is true and so you find yourself basically sitting in a rubber bowl of water. It wasn't all that bad even at fifty four degree water and just about the same air temperature.
    After about twenty minutes of paddling hard in order to miss a lot of rocks, one starts to warm up.
    The trip was a blast. Time flew really fast, lots of laughs and screams when the river threw cold stuff on everybody.
    It wasn't long at all before we arrived at a large rock on the left bank reserved for dare devils. If you were brave enough to take a jump you were invited to do so. Some did, including the couple from London and Gary. I declined, the duck provided plenty of excitement and water for me.
    We stopped for a good lunch of ham sandwiches, chips, pickles, cookies and soft drinks.Lunch provided a great place and time to take group photos.
    After lunch we had about another half hours trip down river. Jerry and Gary switched positions, which put Gary in the duck. He took to it…well, like a duck to water.
    This leg of our six hour trip was really short and over much too quick. We reached our take out spot.
    We washed the sand off the ducks and rafts and hauled them up to our bus. Once they were loaded we took off our vests and helmets, picked a seat and the bus took us back up the mountain to the center.
    Once there we changed, looked at our photos, which Jerry purchased for us, Janis, Gary and I bought a t-shirt, we loaded up and drove home with great big smiles on our faces.
    We all agreed that this Tuesday had been a great big blast!
    What do we do tomorrow and the day after?
    Take a Hike? Visit the farmer’s market? Take the Asheville Trolley Tour?
    How about all the above !
  5. -Gramps-
    It's been so long since I blogged anything that I find this blank page a bit intimidating. But I will get over that rather quickly.
    "What's it like owning a 38 foot coach?"
    I was asked that question just a few days ago. I had to stop and think for a minute or two.
    I have always thought that having that big thing sitting in my driveway is nuts. It really is crazy. It cost too much to buy, to own, to keep on the road, and to pay the taxes that come along with it. It is insane to own it, but at the same time owing it keeps me sane. How can that be? Owning a coach, or any rv requires a certain mentality, a different perspective, or philosophy as it were. Maybe it requires more than a philosophy it requires some rules. I have set a few for myself anyway. I will cover rule one. If you remember it, all the others will not be as hard to keep.;
    1. Remember owning a coach improves one's life, if you let it.
    Well, a coach allows you to get away, to visit God's handiwork. It will take you to all kinds of places, some of which you might not go to otherwise. Rving provides friends, life long friends. Some of them will stick closer to you than your own family. Rving not only makes friends, but rvers become friends with each other really fast. It's almost magical how easy it is to make friends when you own a coach. I can talk with people on the road, at a rally, campground, rv show, or at a rest stop and after just a few minutes its like I have know them my whole life. How can I put a price on that? I can't. It is part of the priceless experience of being part of a unique community that loves the road and the people who travel it. I know from first hand experience.
    This last Tuesday, I received an interesting e-mail. It was from a gentleman named Gary who lives just a few miles down on US-17 in Suffolk, just west of us. In other words, he is practically a neighbor. He and his wife Janis have been shopping for a new coach for almost a year. He wanted a diesel pusher, she didn't. She didn't want the front coach entry but he wanted the quiet ride and handling of a diesel. On the internet they found a coach like my Vacationer. With only pictures to look at, she loved the floor plan so much that the front entry door was no longer a problem; he found a chassis with a quiet engine and good handling. At least they hoped so. They needed to know more about this coach, so after searching "UFO" and "Vacationer" on MSN they found our FMCA profile and emailed me wanting to know if I would contact them and answer a few questions. I did just that. After talking on the phone with Gary for about an hour, I hung up, and my wife said to me "Silly man, why didn't you invite them to come over and see the coach?"
    It never occurred to me. But not being totally stupid, I listened to her, called back and suggested to Gary that he and Janis come over to walk through our coach before going to New York to see the one they are interested in. He didn't hesitate to accept, just wanted to know what time.
    So at three pm that same day, I started giving two people who have never owned any kind of rv the complete skinny on owning a really nice 38 foot motor home with a gas engine in the rear, made by a company that is presently in Bankruptcy. Three hours later they left with plans to travel to Buffalo and purchase a new coach that the dealer realy wants to sell.
    Gary and Janis consider us a Godsend. They were so nervous about this crazy thing they are about to do and having friends close by, especially ones with the SAME coach, who can answer questions, share experiences, and help them, why that is just too wonderful for words.
    God works in mysterious ways. He provides new friends to you in most unusual ways. And these new friends give you the opportunity to improve their lives and at the same time, they do the same thing for you.
    You must have gathered by now it was Gary and Janis who asked the simple but at the same time complex question.
    "What's it like owning a 38 foot coach?"
    My answer is its great. It has helped make new friends, taken us to places we have dreamed of going to and allowed Diane and I to be closer together. It has improved our lives because we let it.
    Derrick
  6. -Gramps-
    2. Keep your temper on a very short leash. Or, when owning a motor coach, patience is not only a virtue but a necessity.
    If you are the type of person who always wants to be in control of your circumstances and are uncomfortable when things are not perfect or not even close to it, you will have trouble adjusting to the motor coaching lifestyle. Things are going to go wrong whether you are an old-timer or a newbie. There are preventive measures you can take, but only God can stop anything and everything bad from happening.
    Let me break it down for you.
    A. All may not go well at time of the motorhome purchase.
    B. All may not go well when driving down the road from point A to point B.
    C. All may not go well when setting up and breaking down camp.
    All may not go well when your coach is at the repair shop because of A. B. or C. or any combination of the three. So this means you have to be patient with all kinds of people and circumstances. You have to be patient with drivers (and that includes yourself), passengers (and that includes your spouse), dealers, repair techs, manufacturers. You get the picture. Just be patient, because it can turn out better than you think.
    An Example of A:
    The day my wife and I bought our first, slightly used coach it was a rainy, cold Valentine's Day in 2005. We had signed the papers a few days earlier and now it was time to do our walkthrough, or PDI, or something like that. We started with the roof, and the tech told us about the satellite dish that came with the coach. I looked hard for it but I didn't see anything that looked like a dish to me. I had no plans to order satellite service for the coach, but if it is supposed to have a dish it should be there! I started to say something, but I didn't want to appear stupid. Plus, the tech was in a great rush due to the rain.
    We were told about the sewer system, the fresh water system, the electrical connections, the generator, the storage, and the hitch. It went on and on. I was cold, wet, hungry and needed to find a bathroom. We went inside the coach and learned about the dash controls, the radio, the video system, the leveling system, the voltage monitors, the battery disconnects, the batteries, the power switches for all the appliances we could not use at the same time because it was 30-amp service.
    Next, he shows us how to crank up the TV antennae and follows that with the manual satellite dish controls. The whole time we are inside, I am thinking about the satellite dish that is standard, that isn't on the roof, and I still need to go to the bathroom.
    I am getting impatient and am just about to complain when he shows us the washer and dryer combo -- the one that we had no idea was in the coach. On the day we signed the papers, we were told we could get a washer-dryer for 900 bucks and we said no thanks, maybe later. I looked at it and at the happy expression on my wife's face and stupidly said "Where did that come from?" The tech told us that it originally came with the coach, but the first owner didn't want it. Right after he traded it they put the combo back in the coach. The salesman didn't know it was there, so it was too late to charge us for it now, so consider it a bonus. At that moment I forgot about the dish that didn't exist ... well, I didn't forget, it just didn't matter anymore.
    An Example of B: (The Same Day!)
    So, with my wife leading in the car, I started up our new-to-us 36-foot Bounder, with no SAT dish, but a stump where it was supposed to be, and eased it along with the included washer-dryer combo out of the dealer parking lot (point A). I had no idea what I was doing. I should tell you that I had never driven the coach, or any coach or even been a passenger in one before. I was scared to death.
    I took it down U.S. 17 and missed my first turn. Great, I have not had it five minutes and now I have to do a U-turn. I managed to turn around in an abandoned gas station lot, made the right turn toward home. About 20 minutes later I am in front of our house and am looking at our tree-lined driveway (point B.) trying to figure out how to get this really long and wide box on wheels to go where I want it to go.
    I make a right turn and realize that that it is pretty tight between the trees. Diane is standing out in the rain and yells at me that I am not going to make it without clocking the tree on the left. I stop, grit my teeth and sit there for a minute or two. Okay, it will not go in the driveway, so what do I do.
    Diane comes into the coach. She knows me very well. She quietly suggests that we can park it in front of the house, off the road and hire someone to take down the tree the right away. That sounded like a good plan to me. So I backed out of the driveway, back up the street and then pulled it off the road right in front of our house and sank into the mud. At least I didn't hit the tree.
    An Example of C: (two months later)
    The tree is now gone. A tree service removed it. The rig is stocked and we are on our first weeklong trip. We are off to the mountains of Virginia, a wonderful place called Otter Creek on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
    It was not a bad trip up to the campground. We drove up U.S. 460 and stopped at a gas station to fill up the rig. This took a bit of planning. The gas tank opening was behind the license plate at the end of the rig. I had to be quite careful about where I filled up. It was very easy to block the flow of traffic in and out of the gas station, not to mention I ended up parked in front of two pumps for a long time.
    I have found out you have to be patient at gas pumps. Most will not allow more than a $100 purchase. With a 100-gallon tank, that means using my credit card three times to get my tank filled. It doesn't bother me now, but when we first became RVers, it ticked me off. But that is not the worst thing. Sometimes you just can't get the gas to go into the tank. The nozzle just shuts off. I found that if you hold it at the three or nine o'clock positions gas will flow, but you cannot leave it unattended and that makes your hand tired.
    After we filled up (and this was the first time, a bit of a shock even at 2 bucks a gallon) we continued on up the road. I drove carefully the whole way and it was a rather uneventful, pleasant but longer than I expected trip to the campground.
    Otter Creek is a national park campground. No connections. No water, no electricity, no sewer. It does have a dump station. Oh, one other thing it does not have: more than one site that a two-slideout 36-foot-long coach will fit into. I pulled into the first one, a pull-through that looked long enough. It was slightly curved but I wiggled the coach into it.
    I got out to check everything and realized I could not open the main slideout because of the trees. I looked at a site in front of the coach but slightly off to the right. The trees were not as tight around that site. It looked like it would work out quite well. I was quite anxious to get parked because I was running out of daylight.
    I got behind the wheel and started the engine. Diane asked me if I wanted her to guide me out of the site. "Why? The other site is just over there, I should be fine." So I took off, drove about 34 feet and made a slight turn to the right. It is too bad that I was in enough of a hurry that I couldn't take Diane's advice. It's also too bad that I didn't see the camper sitting outside his Airstream who was frantically waving at me as I made my turn. I didn't see him, just like I didn't see the tree stump I ran over with foot 35 of my 36-foot coach. The rear end of the coach went up in the air and dropped hard.
    "What was that?" I asked of no one in particular.
    "I think we hit something." Diane said.
    I pulled into the new spot, got out and looked at the coach. Everything seemed okay, except I noticed the gutter spout was missing off the rear of the coach. Not a big deal. I also noticed there was a wood-colored streak down the middle of the last basement door. And then I saw it! A fist-sized hole in the bottom of my end cap. I was sick. I had wrecked my new coach.
    "Diane, look at what I have done!"
    "Its not so bad" she said.
    "Not so bad? Not so bad!" I was starting to lose it.
    The man who was sitting in front of the Airstream walked over.
    "I was trying to warn you that your tail was swinging over that stump," he said.
    The man looked at the coach's boo-boo and said something that, well, I didn't know how to respond to: "You might as well bang up the other seven corners and get it over with!"
    Then he laughed and slapped me on the back and said, "Welcome to the club. It happens to everybody. Don't let it spoil your trip. Good looking coach you have here."
    All I could see was the hole in my end cap. I did find the gutter spout, so it wasn't a total loss.
    Just so you know. We met some really great people on that trip and had a good time.
    Actually, this could have been another example of B, but I think you get my point.
    Remember rule number 1!
  7. -Gramps-
    You know the old saying; it's the Journey not the Destination.
    There is a church two doors down from us. The church allows us to hook up our tow in their parking lot and we leave from there. It is quite convenient. When Diane and I have a trip it starts for us the moment we leave the church parking lot. Actually it starts the moment we start packing up the coach, no, it starts the moment we start thinking about THE TRIP.
    The trip, made up of two important parts, the route, and the destination also know as the goal.
    So this is my lead in to:
    Rule number 3:
    Enjoy the View!
    Where are we going?
    What route do we take to get there?
    What do we need to take with us?
    How much time do we have?
    What will it cost?
    These are the questions I am sure we all ask ourselves. Some of us may worry over the answer to one or more questions more than others. Can we spend the money? Can we spend the time?
    Did you notice I used the word worry? Worrying and rving should be mutually exclusive, but it isn't. We worry over the price of gas, the temp in the fridge, the amount of air in the tires, along with lots of other things, including the time it takes to get where we think we want to be. It can be hard to just sit back and enjoy the view.
    The view. The one outside my great big windshield can be wonderful at times. I remember being on the Blue Ridge Parkway coming around Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina one crisp, cool, fall morning. The sky was a fantastic blue and the colors of the trees sucked the breath right out of me! The only thing I could say was Oh God! I meant it. I knew who painted that picture, the same person who painted the sunset over the Albemarle Sound and the light bouncing off the waves at Hatteras Island, the green rolling pastures of the Shenandoah Valley, and the majesty of the Smoky Mountains while heading down I-40. All of these had two things in common. They were made by God and they made me want to slow down and take a longer look.
    At night in the campground I play back the day's windshield views in my head. My mental slideshow. I look at them later after our trip is over and I am back to my daily routine of answering business calls and driving around fixing problems.
    Where am I going with this?
    Owning a motor home is a metaphor for life itself. We all have a destination, but we also only have one journey to get there. I encourage you to sit back, try to relax, and Enjoy the View!
    Remember rule number 1.









  8. -Gramps-
    Number 4. (Maybe the Last Rule!)
    Owning a motor coach is a never-ending learning experience.
    And just when you think you know it all, you find out just how stupid you really are.
    I have learned a lot about my coach, more than I ever wanted to know. I have had to study the mechanics of my engine, my slides, and my power seats as well as learn how it is wired for Surround Sound and cable TV. And, how it is plumbed including the ice maker, the fresh-water tank, the whole coach water filter and on and on. I have had to learn how to drive this big thing, including parking, turning, merging and more.
    I have learned that trees and rocks are harder than fiberglass.
    I have also learned, in no particular order, that:
    It is easy to lose arguments with inanimate objects located at various points inside and outside of my coach.
    Coach dealer mechanics are just like me -- they don't know as much as they think they do, which is why I have had to learn more for myself.
    Don't wait to consult the owner's manual. Read it before you start breaking something you are trying to fix. You might find out it is supposed to work that way!
    Two helping hands are better than one, especially when one of the hands is controlled by a brain other than your own.
    Still, the best helping hand is the one at the end of your own arm.
    Most things that break on a motor coach cost $650 to fix. Having owned two coaches I have had to:
    Replace a bent jack- 650 dollars.
    Replace two slideout toppers: dealer cost 650 dollars (I did it myself with some helping hands for a third of the cost).
    Have a non-square slide out modified so it would actually slide all the way in: 650 dollars.
    I have learned that when your rear end gets in a fight with a coach closet mirror, your rear end will win.
    I have learned that when my big motorhome gets in a fight with my little mailbox, the mailbox will win.
    I have learned that screws are better than staples for keeping things in their place (see above).
    Having friends with the same coach really helps trying to figure out if something is really broke or not (like a hard-to-open pantry and entry door).
    Wal-Mart has everything that the smart camper needs, like lots of beer.
    Don't throw any small plastic or metal things rolling around in your coach away until you find out where they go and what they do. Put them in a special drawer so you can find them later.
    I have learned that the tool you need to fix the problem you have is the tool that is still at the store.
    When emptying your tanks, at least two people will walk over to talk to you.
    I have learned that I find my self looking for the locations of the nearest Wal-Mart and Lowes no matter where my RV is parked at the time.
    Own good tools, not cheap ones. Why waste your money or your CCC?
    I have learned that CCC doesn't actually stand for carrying crappy cargo.
    I have learned that I sometimes have way too much crap; I mean cargo, in my coach.
    A 10-cubic-foot RV refrigerator is way too small when I load it.
    A 10-cubic-foot RV refrigerator is huge when my wife arranges its contents.
    I have learned that a cheap sewer hose and hot sand don't mix.
    I have also learned that a brown sprits bath from a sewer hose with hundreds of pin holes in it may be funny to a couple of people but not to me.
    .
    The day after you empty your overflowing special little parts drawer, you will open a cabinet, or crawl under a seat or something and then you will say, "Oh, that's what that strange little screw was for."
    Protect All really does work when used outside of its container.
    Washing and waxing a coach, aside from making it look nice, is great exercise.
    The day after washing and waxing my coach, I can't lift my arms above my head.
    I have learned that when a rear engine right access panel is open while going down the road, it makes your right turn signal and brake lights pretty much useless.
    All the above things are not so funny when you live through them, but then I think that one of my rules is about being patient. That is much easier to do if you have a well developed sense of humor. So if you don't have one of those, I suggest you learn where to get one!
    Try Wal-Mart, they have everything. Oh, Remember rule number 1!
  9. -Gramps-
    Rule 4: Owning a motor coach is a never-ending learning experience -- continued.
    Well, I had so much fun coming up with a list of things that I have learned over the five years that my wife and I have been motorhoming, I figured why not write down a few more? So here goes:
    I have learned that men need a precise set of directions when parking the coach.
    And women know just how to give them. For example:
    "I SAID STOP! STOP! DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT STOP MEANS?"
    "DON'T BACK UP, YOU WILL HIT IT AGAIN!"
    "NO, NO, YOUR OTHER RIGHT!"
    "JUST LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE NOW!"
    It's always the other person's fault when you miss your exit or hit a tree.
    The people camping next to you will find out first that you forgot to shut your black tank valve.
    My grandkids think the term "stinky slinky" is really funny.
    My wife doesn't like the way our all-in-one washer-dryer ties HER underwear into knots.
    A small speed bump can throw dishes around the coach. A big speed bump throws the dog around the coach.
    Old tube socks make great bottle savers; just make sure they are clean. I'm talking about the socks.
    Don't drive on the zipper, it's scary and you may lose a lug nut cap.
    While going down the road, I don't like hearing, "What the heck was that noise!?". even when I am the one saying it.
    If Wal-Mart doesn't have it, I must not need it.
    It burns me when the RV spots at Cracker Barrel have a car parked in them.
    It burns me even more when the RV spots at Camping World have a car parked in them.
    Sometimes when driving under an overpass, I get the urge to duck!
    My wife will not let me stop at South of the Border and buy anything.
    It's been over a year since we purchased our coach and I am still finding loose screws floating around inside.
    If you don't pack up your patio the night before you leave, it will rain.
    Quick disconnects are great on the water hoses except when you forget to turn off the water before disconnecting.
    I have learned that:
    Before pulling out of a campground, if your generator is off and your roof air is running, you may have forgotten to do something.
    I have a very tough shore power surge protector. How do I know? Because I dragged it down the road once and it still works great!
    I believe that some interiors of motor coaches were designed by people who smoke something more than just tobacco.
    At some point during a long trip I will bang my head on a slideout. It's going to happen, I might as well get used to it.
    The dash AC is always too cold for the pilot and not cold enough for the copilot, or vice versa.
    Most coaches have the dash radio positioned where no one can easily read it or adjust it (without falling out of your seat).
    I would rather be out in my coach than take a cruise or a trip to Europe. That's good, because I own a motorhome and can't afford to take a cruise or a trip to Europe.
    A bad day motorhoming beats a day at home in bed with a kidney stone (I had one of those two weeks ago).
    Fuel is always too expensive no matter what the price per gallon.
    A Ham and cheese sandwich in my motor coach at a rest stop on the way to somewhere tastes better than it does at home.
    I have learned that when I am home (in the stick house) I am always counting the days until I am on the road again with my beautiful wife and the pup.
    Feel free to comment and add to this list of "learned" things.
    Oh, Remember Rule Number 1!
  11. -Gramps-

    Signs

    By -Gramps-,

    If you are a regular reader of my blog you know that I enjoy the idea that motor homing is a metaphor for life.
    It is day four of a new year. How is this year going to be? That is certainly one question I don’t have the answer to. I am sure that many people would like to know what the future holds even if that knowledge is only about the next twelve months.
    When I was a kid I remember that there were a number of celebrity prognosticators that would make all kinds of predictions about the future. They predicted who would win the World Series, or who would win some national election or there would be an earthquake in Los Angeles that wipes out half the city. My dad used to say they would shotgun their so called prophesies. In other words make enough of them and maybe one or two might just happen.
    In my later years I would hear all kinds of people, including preachers and televangelists, predict that the world was about to end and that there would be all kinds of signs including famine, wars and an earthquake that would wipe out half of Los Angeles, foretelling and warning us of that coming event.
    The year 2000 was supposed to cause all kinds of terrible things to happen. Planes were going to fall out of the sky, the stock market would crash. For me the worst event was a lot of voice mail and phone systems crashing because they suffered from the dreaded Y2K bug. The best thing was I made quite a bit of money fixing those systems. I wrote my own program to do just that and made a lot of friends because I repaired the systems instead of replacing them.
    Now it is 2012 and people are once again looking for some kind of sign to tell them about our future or the lack thereof. According to the long gone Mayans the world is supposed to end at the end of this year. Will it be with a bang or a whimper? It seems to me that if the human sacrificing Mayans were so good at seeing into the future they would have done whatever it took to insure their own. They would have seen the signs so to speak. It there were any to see that is.
    I prefer not to worry about the end of the world. I do believe that there are signs of trouble on the horizon that we should pay attention to but I also think each day has enough trouble of its own.
    I believe that there are signs that we should pay attention to that will help us in our day to day lives, on and off the road, from getting into trouble.
    Let me simplify it for you.
    How many signs are there in your coach, signs that warn you of potential trouble if you don’t pay attention? Start looking and you may be surprised at just how many there are.
    Inside over the door of my coach was a sign that said something to the effect “make sure steps are extended before exiting.” I can’t remember the exact words and Diane peeled the sign off the wall. I asked her about that and she said “no one is going to read it when they need to cause it is posted in the wrong spot. Besides if you don’t see the steps after you open the door don’t step out of the coach!”
    That is logical but we know someone, actually it was the person who bought our Bounder, who didn’t notice the steps were not deployed after opening the door. Her two dogs jumped out of the coach before she could get them leashed (she opened the door thinking the screen would stay closed) and she went charging out after them only to fall on her face, bite through her lower lip and knock out two front teeth. Ouch!
    Next to the driver’s seat, posted to the wall above the seat belt anchor, is a little sign that says “Move cab seat forward before activating slide out.”
    Which should be easier to spot? Is it a little white note or a big captain’s chair that is too far back?
    The answer is; sometimes neither. I watched a tall salesman at an RV dealership forget to move the driver’s seat forward after he parked a coach and before he extended the main slide out. The chair was pushed off its pedestal with a loud crunch. I was surprised that the slide out didn’t stop as soon as it hit the chair. But I was also surprised when the main slide out in our coach removed the door to the cabinet housing the washer-dryer.
    Behind the curtains next to the drivers seat is a warning not to apply the parking brake while the vehicle is in motion. It also says something about the result being major damage and death or injury. No big deal.
    The third sign posted in the same spot reminds me not to press the accelerator while starting the engine. The sign says to turn the key only.
    I am not sure about that one. Is it there to help me not flood the engine? Or is it there to prevent me from plowing my coach through my one car garage?
    I suspect the first but the second might happen if I ignore the sign.
    There are more. Under my kitchen sink is a sign with lots of warnings about using propane. What to do if you smell it. There is also a list of things that could happen if you ignore this warning. The list includes explosions, fire, injury and possibly death.
    Two death warnings posted in the same coach!
    Inside the bathroom medicine cabinet door is a note about exceeding the GCWR of the coach and/or its towing capacity. What is the GCWR? It is the Gross Combined Weight rating which is made up of the CCC (carrying crappy cargo) and the weight of water in the tanks, passengers, fuel etc. It doesn’t say what happens if you exceed this GCWR (which you are supposed to consult your owner’s manual to find out how much that is) but if the results were listed I think they would include exploding tires, damage, injury and possible death!
    Makes you want to leave your coach in the driveway and hope the parking brake holds.
    There are many signs posted on the outside of my coach.
    On the fuel intake flap there is a sign that says “Unleaded Gasoline Only”.
    This sign takes on a special significance with my coach. I have a rear gas chassis. The fuel intake door is under the driver’s window….the same place you would find it if the coach were a diesel pusher. On more than one occasion I have been asked if I am using the correct fuel pump. It is one of my favorite questions. I know what kind of fuel goes in my coach but I sure want to avoid someone else making a big mistake. I can’t remember if a diesel fuel pump nozzle will not fit into a gas tank intake or if a gas nozzle will not fit into a diesel tank intake, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.
    On the gas flap is another sign. This one says to extinguish all appliances and igniters in the coach or something to that effect. Along with that is a warning that failure to comply could lead to….you guessed it….grave personal injury and or death!
    Next to the fuel warnings are warnings posted on the door to the compartment holding the propane tank. This sign is rather large and its message is posted in multiple languages. It repeats the same warning as the fuel warning label including the part about injury and death.
    Let us move farther down the coach. Inside of the wet bay we find all kinds of info posted about.
    There is a picture of a sink. Under that there is a neon yellow stick on label that reads “Warning! Clean with Windex only!”
    Thank goodness that failure to comply doesn’t result in serious injury. I hope not anyway.
    Why this warning isn’t posted in the head over the sink is a mystery to me.
    Up in the right hand corner of the bay there is a warning that says “Potable Water Only! Sanitize, flush and drain (consult owner’s manual) before using this tank!” Failure to comply (oh my goodness, not again!) could lead to serious illness or possible death!”
    I think the odds are beginning to favor death here.
    The last warning is posted next to a picture of a toilet. It reads “The sewer value must be open when using this inlet!” Now I know that the inlet posted in this warning isn’t the toilet itself, which is technically an inlet. No, the inlet is the flush valve. The sewer valve should indeed be open when back flushing or something very unpleasant might come out of the toilet.
    If my wife happened to be in the room housing said toilet and it did misfire due to my non compliance to posted warnings, the result for me or to me could be serious injury or possible death.
    I have only forgotten to open the valve once when flushing the tank. I was told of my mistake while washing the roof of the coach. I flew down the ladder in fear of becoming a player in a live scene from the movie RV.
    This brings me to my next to last warning. There is a sign attached to the roof of my coach under the ladder handles that reads, and I paraphrase “Maximum weight capacity 150 lbs when vehicle is moving.”
    Every time I read this sign the thought pops into my head that it must not be safe for me to hang on to this ladder, waving to passing cars, as the coach is flying down the road because I weigh 175 pounds!
    Of course we all know that lots of things are tied to roof ladders. Step ladders, bicycles, kayaks, mother in laws. Don’t exceed the 175 pounds. It isn’t printed on the label but if your kayak and your bicycle and your ladder flew off the back of the coach, I suspect it could lead to…forget it. Not going to say it … I am starting to scare myself.
    The last sign posted on the side of my coach is on the basement door located beneath the furnace. It reads “Caution…Do not allow door to remain open when furnace is running.”
    What does that mean? Don’t allow the door to remain open? I think it should read: “don’t allow the door to remain all the way open.” Locking it half way open is okay. All the way would allow the running furnace to blister the paint right off the door. That is no good. Unfortunately this half open door belongs to the basement compartment that I am in and out of the most, and so it is the door that I bang my head on the most. This is one time where complying with instructions leads to personal injury. I hope that I never hit my head so hard that it leads to possible death.
    We have now learned that signs posted inside and outside of our coach are there to make our Motorhome a safer place. That will be the result as long as we read them, pay attention, and comply with what these warnings tell us.
    I wish I had been able to take the Motorhome approach to raising my kids. I could have posted warnings all around their room.
    “Do your homework! Failure to comply can lead to failure at school which can lead to a lifetime of pain!”
    When my girls became teens and started noticing boys I could have stuck the following up on their wall:
    “Caution! A moment’s physical pleasure can lead to a lifetime of pain!”
    Along with that one how about:
    “Listen to your Mom and Dad so that your days will be good on this earth!
    Failure to comply can lead to a lifetime of pain!”
    And the last sign:
    "Warning! Don't insist on growing up so fast! Enjoy your childhood while you have one!
    Adulthood can lead to personal injury and will lead to eventual death!"
    You see I knew what the future could bring. As my kids grew older I could see the signs of trouble and would have done anything to prevent injury, physically, emotionally or any other kind, if possible.
    I think that the MotorHome approach to life is not a bad idea but only as long as you don't peel those signs off the wall and then charge out the door before the steps are deployed.
    Ouch!
    Derrick
    "Gramps".
  12. -Gramps-

    Skipping Thanksgiving

    By -Gramps-,

    Skipping Thanksgiving. (A running blog entry)
    Wednesday:
    Diane and myself are skipping the traditional Thanksgiving this year. We are presently sitting in site 41 at the Anvil Campground in Williamsburg, Virginia. Skipping the traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings, along with all the work that involves, didn't sit too well with some family members. I say too bad!
    Diane and I need some time to ourselves. Time with less stress, less responsibility. We need a time to heal from the loss of our dog. We need some couple time. So the plan is to hit the shopping outlets on the morning of Black Friday, then to come back to the coach, and take a break. Friday night we have reservations at The Trellis, one of the best restaurants in town if not the best. Saturday morning we might explore the Colonial area some more or Yorktown or somewhere.
    Around noon on Saturday we are going to Richmond to visit a copper colored Cocker Spaniel named Beasley. He is presently in the care of a dog rescue group. Beasley, according to what we have been told, is three years old, in good health, has a great personality and he needs a home.
    Thursday:
    We arrived at the Anvil CG around one o'clock on Thanksgiving day. It was an uneventful morning getting the rig packed up. We didn't need to load up much food or clothes but we did pack some doggie stuff. That stuff included treats, a Kong, a collar and leash and some dog food. All this is a just in case thing. The most excitement was over some lost cash, that Diane put someplace safe, so safe she couldn't find it. After some intensive searching it was discovered in a file cabinet drawer.
    Once our mad money was stored away and the car hooked up we hit I-64 for Williamsburg. Forty minutes later we were in the campground looking at a white board in front of the office door. The white board had a list of Thanksgiving day arrivals and site numbers. Site 41 was the same site we were assigned to the last time we were here.
    It did not take long to make camp and soon after we found ourselves walking on Dog Street in Colonial Williamsburg. It is not really Dog Street, but Duke of Gloucester Street. Dog is the name the locals give it and Diane and I consider ourselves locals. The street was quite crowded with tourists, most of them toting cameras and many walking dogs. We could not help but notice that. We talked to a mother and daughter walking a couple of Springer Spaniels and visited a couple walking a pair of PBGVs.
    We bought a couple of ten dollar large souvenir mugs of hot cider (which come with free refills ) and I played Quoints, a game related to horseshoes, with one of the park interpreters, who played the character of Mr. Randolph ESQ., attorney at law.
    We were back in the coach around five and had Chinese food followed by a viewing of Eat, Love, Pray or is it Eat, Pray, Love? We also watched The Crossing, a great movie about the Battle of Trenton, that I paid too much for at the Visitor Center gift store. Oh well.
    Friday:
    Diane and I woke up early this morning with plans to drive a short distance to the Williamsburg Premium Outlets. Unfortunately I discovered that the hot water heater had not been turned on so I could not give my face a quick shave. I flipped on both the 12 volt and the 120 volt switches in order to do a quick warmup. The hot water heater would not ignite its gas burner. I spent the next half hour troubleshooting that problem without success.
    So off to the Outlets we went. The hot water heater problem would have to wait. The Outlets were not that crowded when we arrived at nine thirty in the morning but sixty minutes later the whole scene changed. The placed became a mad house. Some stores had lines of people waiting to get in. Well the Coach store did anyway. The crowds, I didn't mind them, but the lines I avoided including the ones where the final place in line was in front of a cash register. Diane stood in a couple of those lines but not me. We purchased a few gifts for ourselves, and I mean that literally, including a pair of Sketcher Shape Ups for each of us. I put mine on in the store and wore them the rest of the time we were shopping. Those things really will make your rear end and legs sore. We visited most of the stores and found a bunch of really good bargains but bought none of them; however I may go back and buy a one hundred and thirty dollar Tommy Bahama shirt for forty bucks. But maybe not...I am feeling kinda cheap this year.
    We walked around the place until dead tired, then back to the coach where I found a loose connection in the hot water heater compartment. Problem solved, we will now have hot water for showers before dinner.
    Dinner at the Trellis was really good. Diane had half a grilled free range chicken. I had crayfish fritters and Idaho Rainbow trout and hot cider spiked with really good Bourbon. We ate a lot. Afterwards we made another walk down Dog street and visited a few shops. I didn't buy a thing. After our walk we made a visit to the local Wal-Mart with its Red Box to return Eat, Pray, Love. The titile of the movie seemed very appropriate for this little venture.
    Richmond tomorrow. We shall see what happens. We could end up with a new four legged coach companion.
    Stay tuned, so to speak.
    Saturday:
    Diane and I woke with the dawn. Actually I woke much earlier than that. I tend to wake every hour on the hour. I don't need an alarm clock anymore. I have not used one for years. After Diane had her morning coffee, she made a frittata with Portobello mushrooms, onions and green peppers. I sprinkled some grated cheddar cheese on mine. After breakfast we got dressed and loaded up the car with our just in case doggy supplies, which included a blanket, water bowl, treats and a leash. Then we headed over to the Yankee Candle Outlet.
    The Yankee Candle outlet is a great place. It is not only a place to get really good bargains but it is just a lot of fun. We watched kids making hand candles. A hand candle is a wax model of a human hand, to be precise the hand of the person making the candle. With the help of a Yankee Candle employee, the hand is dipped into a number of containers holding warm paraffin each in a different color. After all colors are selected the form is removed from the hand somehow.....I didn't get a chance to see that part of the process. I did see a finished product and it is quite interesting. The Outlet is quite large and has one section dedicated to toys, another to clothes and one just for Christmas Villages. We both enjoyed roaming around the place a lot.
    After leaving Yankee Candle we visited the Orvis Sporting Goods outlet. I bought a shirt there that was marked down from ninety eight bucks to nineteen dollars with an extra thirty percent off at the register. Diane bought two tops that were over seventy bucks each originally. Our total bill was just over fifty dollars including the tax. I want to go back tomorrow and buy a dog bed and another shirt.
    Yes, we need a new dog bed for our new pupster. As I write this he is asleep on the coach couch. He has had quite a day and he is "dog tired".
    It is a one hour drive from Williamsburg to Richmond. We had arranged to meet Becky, who runs Angel Dog Rescue and Transport otherwise known as ADRATI.com sometime between one and two pm at her house in Richmond. We had to skip lunch in order to get there on time, but neither of us cared.
    We called Becky and let her know that we would be arriving just before one thirty. We arrived at the said time and parked in a school parking lot just past her house. As we walked up the street to meet her, we saw Beasley zipping around at the end of his flexible leash. It was obvious that he is a high energy dog. That turned out to be more than the case. Beasley loves to walk and when given the opportunity loves to run. He is extremely social and loves people, other dogs, cats and children.
    Once Becky filled us in on Beasley's history, and we watched him run around the back yard, we both had no hesitation about taking him back to the coach. We are now in the first day of a one week trial. At the end of that if all is well, he will stay with us. Day number one has gone very well. He rode in the car well, and loved his walk down Dog Street. Many people, once they saw his cheerful face, long blond legs, and curly floppy ears, came over to take his picture and ask if they could pet him. One lady in a wheel chair just fell for him and loved it when Beasley gave her a big sloppy kiss. Diane had always wished that Nickolas had the disposition to be a therapy dog. But he was just to shy around strangers. Beasley, however, is not shy at all. He might just be able to fulfill Diane's wish.
    It will take a bit of time for us to get to know Beasley (his full name is Mister Beasley) and I am sure that his transition to a new home will have a few bumps, but a few is all we expect. He appears to be a dog with a lot of confidence in people. His first owners may have given up on him but it is obvious that the people who have looked after him since have given him good care.
    We are very thankful to have this opportunity.
    Tomorrow we head home. We shall see how Beasley travels in the coach.
    I think he will do just fine.

    Diane and Mr. Beasley (His name will be changed but that is another story!)
  13. -Gramps-

    Still Fighting

    By -Gramps-,

    This is a very strange thing to report, but Nickolas is back at the small animal hospital at NC State School of Medicine. It has been a long and very weird night.
    It seems that the pain pill I gave our dog, a dose big enough to knock out a full grown man, didn't do much to our dog but allow him a couple hours of very deep sleep. Diane who had been keeping vigil beside him, out on the deck the whole time wating for him to finally slip away, came to the door to speak to me. I was looking out the door and suddenly Nickolas popped up his head, turned and looked at Diane, then got up and came to the door. She and I just stood there in shock. I opened the door and let him in, and he went immeadiately to his water bowl and slowly drank from it. Then he looked up at us, laid down and went to sleep. A real sleep.
    Diane and I looked at each other. I had no idea what to do. About an hour earlier, just after we decided to end his suffering, I went out to the coach to get my camera for one last picture. While out there I thought of how empty the coach would be with out Nickolas in it. I lost it and told God just what I thought of my pup dying. I hope the neighbors didn't hear what I was saying, coach walls are not all that thick, but at the moment I was reminding God of his abliity to heal a small dog, of all the prayers that had come from my wife and myself and if nothing else, I still needed Him to get me through this.
    I looked at Nicolas sleeping peacefully, obvioulsy there was still some life in him and he was not as ready to leave us as it appeared.
    I just stood there in a kind of stupor and then I told Diane, " That's it, we are going to take him to the animal emergency hospital right now.....grab your purse."
    I made a phone call to the hospital, told them of our situation and they said bring him in ASAP.
    We did, and to make a long story short, after a lot of fluid, a pain injection, and blood work and some other things, we took him back to NC State where he is presently in a good but guarded condition. With medication to treat his pancreas, iv fluids, and iv supplements, he has the chance for a surgery free full recovery.
    What else can I do except thank God.
    I will keep all of you, the members of my Coach Family posted.
  14. -Gramps-
    On Christmas night, Diane and I met Gary and Janis for dinner and a movie. We got together at the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth for smoked chicken salad and fruit, ice tea and popcorn. We had not seen each other since the rally so we chatted about that before the show started. We all came away from the rally knowing that everyone who attended, including us, had a good time. Many, including Gary, learned to appreciate “It’s a Wonderful Life” more. Gary watched it again when it was aired just last week on NBC.
    We talked for about our hour about our families and how our Christmas day had been.
    Gary and I headed upstairs for some popcorn just as the theater lights were dimming.
    We watched Saving Mr. Banks. I really enjoyed the movie. I think we all did. I like a Disney ending. Isn’t that what we all want in life…a Disney Ending?
    Eight o’clock Saturday morning found me back in the meeting room along with Gary getting things ready for our full breakfast. The first thing I noticed on the way over was that the weather was starting to go south. In other words it was beginning to get cold. I didn't mind. It is Christmas time; it is supposed to be cold.
    Gary started the pots of coffee while I made sure the tables were in order. Janis arrived next and Diane not far behind after taking Teddy Bear for a trot around the campground.
    The caterers arrived at just after eight with lots of aluminum trays of food.
    I was surprised at how much. There were cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, pork sausage links, turkey sausage patties, really flaky biscuits, and some of the best buttery grits I ever ate. There was plenty of juice and coffee of course.
    By eight thirty the place was full. Everyone seemed very cheerful, and ready to get this part of the festivities going. I heard very positive comments about the previous evening.
    Once again I rang a bell. As soon as I had everyone’s attention I announced that we would be eating, the Marines had arrived and once the Toys for Tots presentation was over our business meeting which included installation of our new offices would commence.
    We held hands, one our men said Grace and then the line formed.
    Breakfast was good. The two Marines, in their dress blues, sat with us at the host table and we chatted for awhile. Then they stood in front of the toy table, which by now was quite crowded with all kinds of toys and told us some history of the charity. They gratefully accepted the toys, packed them up and were on their way.
    We cleared the breakfast item and reset the buffet tables to work as officer tables and then the meeting began.
    Once the meeting was over I took the floor to announce that dinner would still be at six, happy hour at five.
    I also announced that the trivia contest would be a team effort.
    “The contest will be by table so I advise you to not sit by someone stupid!”
    That got a laugh…one of many before this day was over.
    The morning ended and every one headed out, some to go shopping (some for gifts, some for vintage clothing for some reason), some to one of the local bar-b-que spots for lunch, and some just decided to hang around in their coaches.
    The four hosts decided to go vintage clothing looking as well. Diane needed a 1940s hat. I didn’t need anything.
    I had my hat and along with that a brown three button suit, brown button up sweater vest, burgundy cap shoes, white French cuff shirt (with 60 year old cuff links!) and a burgundy striped tie it yourself bow tie. They all looked like they could have come from the movie wardrobe department. I tried the ensemble on a couple days before the rally. Along with the gray Stacey Adams fedora,I added some old wire rim glasses. I walked into the living room where Diane was sitting on the coach. She looked at me with a surprised expression:
    “You look like my Papou.” She said.
    We headed out to a place called the Old Mill shops in Weldon. There was a big flea market/consignment area there and who knows we might get lucky.
    We did get lucky. I found Diane an old 1940s black pillbox hat with a big side bow and gold beads around the crown. It reminded me of the style hat a stewardess would wear on the Pan-Am flying boats of the late 1930s or early 40s. It cost 14 bucks. Best of all it fit.
    “If this makes you happy, I will wear it” she said. It made me happy.
    We bought a couple of other things including a really cute animated snow-man baby (it plays peek-a-boo) which I wanted to buy for Diane to add to her collection, but she said no, “I have too many of them already and we are planning to downsize.” I bought it anyway with the plan to give it away that night.
    We traveled back to our coach where not much happened the rest of the day. Around three we started getting ready for the biggest event of the weekend.
    I let Diane go first and gave her lots of space. She refused to wear a dress or heels because that was too much trouble while hosting this party. I think she had a legitimate point. Earlier, I bought her a forties style black and white dress which I found at Macy’s but she didn't want to keep it both financially and logistically. She is a wise lady.
    Diane took her new hat and combined that with a Fuchsia suit jacket, a wide black belt and old style slacks with black round toed shoes. She finished it off with some antique Christmas marguisite jewelry. The whole effect was pretty darn good.
    I couldn't tie my own tie it yourself bow tie so Diane took care of that for me and she also helped with my cuff links..
    “Well now, George.” She said as she fastened a cuff and helped me with my jacket, “I think you look pretty good.”
    I put on my hat, a gold pocket watch in my left pants pocket, hooked the chain to my belt and looked in the mirror
    I thought she was right again.
    The final touch was a large light brown leather suitcase with straps that could have been a movie prop. It was provided to me by Janis, she brought it to the rally, and it looked like the real deal. I was thrilled with it.
    I looked forward to seeing what the other party goers would look like. I was hoping for some good competition. I didn't know it yet, but I was going to get just that.
    I went to the back to the room first with some items to put in my suitcase which included printouts of the trivia contest, pencils and prizes for all the winners.
    I made sure the room was in order, went back to the coach to help Diane carry our drinks and presents for the party.
    Gary and Janis caught up with us on the way back. Gary had borrowed a black bow tie and suspenders from me. He was dressed like a bartender with a white shirt and black shirt sleeve bands. Very appropriate for Gary to be Mr. Martini for the evening.
    Janis told me I looked like George Bailey. Well, that was the whole idea.
    We went in, and I shed the jacket while I set the banquet table with the leftover goodies from the night before for people to snack on during happy hour.
    About five fifteen our guests arrived including a very convincing Mr. Potter in his wheelchair, George in his football uniform, Carl and Dot came as a Gangster and his girl and others dressed for the forties. The best dressed contest now had a good number of candidates, I was glad to see.
    The caterers brought a ton of food, all of really good. While it was being set out on the table, I pulled out my suitcase and distributed pencils and copies of the Trivia contest, all six pages of it. One went to each table. It looked like a high school final exam. The surprising thing was, everyone dug right into it, even to the point that when dinner was announced no one wanted to get in line. They all kept on working at it.
    Of course everyone did finally help themselves to ham, turkey, stuffing, real mashed potatoes, Mac and cheese, green bean casserole, and peach cobbler.
    During diner the black and white version of the movie played silently on the TV. I informed all that when The End came up on the screen, the contest would be over. The contestants learned that some of the answers to the quiz could be seen, if they watched close enough and could read lips. People were huddled together discussing the questions; a lot of phones were out with Google being accessed. I never said that was not allowed. The very back table was using a couple of books about the movie that were on display on the table with the village. That was cheating, but pretty smart at the same time.
    I sat and chatted with Gary, Diane and Janis as they tried to answer as many of the trivia questions as they could. I was disqualified from playing, as I knew all the answers.
    At times the room was so quiet with just the hum of whispers and big band music playing (not too loudly) in the background.
    There was one interruption required during all this time. I needed votes for the best dressed. Once again I opened George’s suitcase and removed my pre-made ballots.
    I instructed all to vote for the top two people who fit the criteria. It didn’t take long for the votes to be turned in.
    My table did the tallying. Once the votes were counted first and second place were obvious. We had a tie for third. I had not voted yet so it fell to me to break the tie, which I did.
    I stood up to announce that we had our winners and that Mary Bailey would be presenting the prizes.
    Diane (who received a couple of votes) asked for Betty to come forward. Betty, who wheeled Mr. Potter into the room, came up front.
    Diane opened the suitcase and then said to Betty:
    “You have won third place and so I present to you…”
    She handed Betty a sea salt grinder full of sea salt.
    “Salt! So that life may always have flavor.”
    There was applause.
    Diane then turned to me and announced that I had won second place. She removed a long French Baguette from the case as she said.
    “I give you bread that this house may never know hunger!”
    There was laughter and more applause and by this time everyone had to know what the prize for first place would be.
    Diane asked for Frank to roll forward.
    “And to Mr. Potter I present” and then there was a chorus from all in the room as Diane lifted a bottle out of the case.
    “Wine! That joy and prosperity will reign forever!”
    I looked at Frank and said “Merry Christmas Mr. Potter!” in my best George voice.
    There were a lot of cheers as Frank, aka Mr. Potter, rolled back to his table.
    Even a warped, frustrated old man deserves first place sometimes. I didn't mean you Frank.
    A few minutes later as dinner continued and folks went back to the trivia questions they had passed over, THE END appeared up on the big screen.
    I rang my bell to announce the Hardest “It’s a Wonderful Life Trivia Quiz” was now over. It was time to review all the answers and determine our winners.
    I quickly read the questions followed by the answers, all fifty seven of them. There were a few “I knew it, why did we change it?!” responses along with some “We should have had that one.”
    The winning table had correctly answered fifty two. Mr. Potter was sitting at that table. I guess it was just his night.
    I carried my suitcase to the table and before I opened it I told the room I had one more question to ask of the winners.
    “What did George say when he hit the cigar lighter?”
    The table answered as one:
    “Wish I had a million dollars!”
    “Correct! You have won and here are your prizes” and then I opened my case, pulled out an old measuring tape and threw it at Mr. Potter as I said:
    “Except for you, because you don’t measure up!” That got a huge laugh.
    “For the rest of you here you go”
    Then I handed them all, including Mr. Potter, a chocolate bar wrapped in a million dollar bill.
    I also gave one to the oldest person there. We all call her Mom and she just turned ninety.
    “I think that anyone ninety years old who last night watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the very first time, unlike me who saw it for the hundred and something time, deserves a million dollars!”
    Everyone agreed with that.
    The rest of the night was a blast. We had our gift exchange and there was some stealing which created a lot of laughter, shouting and applause. Billy, our resident Santa made sure no one got too naughty. I had my gift stolen twice, I stole one from Mr. Potter. Why not? He owned me eight thousand dollars. I ended up with a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Crème and matching glasses. How appropriate is that?
    Diane, Mary, the light of my life, took home a box containing three gorgeous electric candles.
    When the last present was unwrapped, and my peek-a-boo snowman in the plain brown bag, was one of the last, the evening was officially over.
    No one wanted to leave. Everyone milled about or continued to sit even while all the hosts cleaned up and prepped for the next morning’s breakfast.
    I figured that was pretty good evidence that so far the rally had been a success.
    Tomorrow it would be breakfast; goodbyes pack it all up and then home for Christmas.
    The morning found us there early, hustling around making fresh fruit salad, ham biscuits, laying out trays of Danish and heating up leftovers from Saturday’s breakfast. Our efforts presented everyone with a good looking spread.
    A lot of our people leave early on Sunday. They skip breakfast to do so. Not this time. Everyone came. They prayed, they ate, and they talked. We heard so many good comments about how much fun the last two days had been. It really did my heart good.
    No one was in a big rush to see it end.
    When finally Andy closed it, we had lots of people stay and help us clean up. A special thanks to Grover and Margo for helping me box up my village, they saved me a couple of hours at least.
    Diane, Gary, Janis and I were the last ones to pull out of the park. We were all tired but we knew it had been worth all the work. The only thing left to do was to hug goodbye and say
    “Merry Christmas!”
    Now I know that this blog entry has gotten a bit long. I don’t apologize for that. The length is necessary to convey to you what I said at the beginning; I, we, wanted to make it possible for all my friends to really enjoy themselves. Many of our group had gone through some very tough times during the previous year and I believed they needed this weekend to reaffirm their faith in friends and family and something even greater than that.
    We did our best to create a Disney Ending.
    I wanted them to remember it, long after this rally was over.
    Now I am thinking about the next one the four of us will host….
    I already have a name for it.
    How does the “LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES RALLY” sound?
    Gramps
    PS if you want to take the IAWL quiz here it is:
    http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/2006/12/most-challenging-its-wonderful-life.html
  15. -Gramps-
    Part uno of duo.
    Before I started writing this, I was sitting at my computer browsing recipes online. I am planning my menu for Christmas Day brunch with my family. I have narrowed my entrees to Blackberry French Toast Casserole, Lump Crab Meat and Shrimp Quiche and a fresh fruit and honey yogurt salad. Diane plans on making some oatmeal and date muffins. They are a tradition every Christmas day.
    This party will be for eight adults including my parents. Not as much preparation will be needed as the last party that I co-hosted. That one took place back on the first weekend of this month at an RV resort in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The attendees, all thirty of them, are all members of the Colonial Virginians, our local FMCA chapter.
    The planning for this Christmas Rally started last December at the very end of last year’s rally which happened to be at the same location. Diane and I, along with our close friends Gary and Janis, decided then to host this year’s event. The Christmas rally is the one rally that is catered, at least in part. We told ourselves it would be a lot of fun and less work to take charge of the biggest party we have all year if someone else does the food stuff.
    I am not sure how we came to that conclusion because it isn't true. Our party turned out to need a lot of labor to pull it off.
    We started planning the two nights, three days, rally with three things in mind.

    We wanted it to be fun and meaningful so we had to come up with a theme.
    We wanted people to attend and bring only their beverages to each night’s festivities. No need for plates, utensils or a pot luck dish. We wanted to provide lots of food for Friday night, a full country breakfast on Saturday morning, full traditional Christmas meal on Saturday night and a good continental breakfast on Sunday.
    We wanted to do all this for around twenty five bucks a person. (That is what added to the work).
    I had to get myself a Fedora. Okay that’s the fourth thing I had to keep in mind.

    First thing was to work on number 2 and not forgetting about 3. Janis started looking for a caterer the first week in January. It took a couple of weeks and a lot of phone calls but she found one that would provide two meals, the country breakfast and the Holiday dinner. If we, meaning the four of us, sat up the buffet, the price was really good per person. That meant that we would have to take care of Friday night ourselves and Sunday Breakfast ourselves. We could shop for some things ahead but most of it would have to be done same day. Diane and Janis planned the menus, made some trips to BJs and the Dollar Store.
    I came up with an idea for number 1. We were sitting at our chapter business meeting this summer at the Holiday Travel Park in Virginia Beach when it hit me.
    I leaned over to Gary and Janis and said “We can make this an “It’s a Wonderful Life rally! We can show the movie on Friday night, I can set up my IAWL village and we can decorate the room with movie posters and snow flakes.” We also came up with the idea of having a trivia contest.
    They liked the whole idea. We added one thing. We decided to make it a costume party as well. Come dressed in 1940s style or as a character from the film.
    Now we had a plan. Over the next two months we worked out the details.
    Let me tell you all something. I gave this rally a lot of thought about how we could make it special. I really wanted all our friends who attended to have more than a good time. I wanted them to feel something while there. I wanted them to feel close to their other members. I intended for this rally to use the Christmas season and the It’s a Wonderful Life story to reinforce the need for friends and family. I wanted to emphasize the Family in Family Motor Coach and have fun doing it.
    I knew that was not going to be so easy.
    The decorating became really important to me. The decorations had to be inspired by the movie. My village was all about Bedford Falls but we needed more. Together we came up with ideas that were simple but good.
    Another trip to the dollar store and a trip to Andy our fearless leader’s house took care of it.
    The rally officially started on Friday. Diane and I knew that to get everything done we needed to do we would have to leave on Thursday. That included emptying a lot of bays of chairs, grills, kites and loading lots of boxes of Christmas stuff including a whole miniature village, a tree and other items.
    On Wednesday night at 8:10 pm I received a call from one of my customers. They are a telemarketing firm that makes calls to Las Vegas. Their office phones were dead.
    I was supposed to leave the next morning by ten at the latest. The office had two separate phone systems and I was going to have to move all the lines and phones from the dead one to the one that was still working. There was no way I could do that before Monday unless I did one thing….drive forty five minutes to the site and fix them tonight.
    That is just what I did.
    I crawled into bed at midnight exhausted, but couldn't fall asleep for a couple of hours. I lay thinking about all that we needed to do including packing up the coach.
    The next morning Diane and I started making the first of many trips from the house to the coach. After about an hour I lost count. I also lost count of the phone calls I received. It was one of those mornings after a not so easy night.
    We backed out of our driveway at 9:50, pulled into the church parking lot next door, hooked up the car, checked the lights, said a prayer for safety and at finally made it on the road at 10:45 am.
    We pulled into the Carolina Crossroads RV resort just before one. While I was setting down jacks and hooking up all the things that needed to be hooked up, a Monaco Knight pulled into the campground. Gary and Janis had arrived right behind us.
    Now the real fun would begin.
    I loaded up the car and delivered a bunch of containers to the meeting room. Not long after that the other three arrived and we started pushing tables around. The ladies decorated the tables including candles and silk rose petals, while Gary, using my ladder, started hanging snow flakes. We picked out a corner for the village. Gary and I successfully connected my DVD player to the large screen television, and hung movie posters in such a way they would not try to roll back up and fall off the wall. This last bit was very critical to the whole effect.
    The decorating went pretty well. There was one that that didn’t. I forgot to pack the light bulbs for the 21 village buildings. Light bulbs went on our shopping list. That trip would take place early in the morning.
    It had been a long first day. We all met at our coach for a one pot meal and some strong drink. During dinner we planned the rest of our attack.
    Early the next day it was off to Wal-Mart. We divided our shopping list and hit the aisles.
    It took a couple of hours to load up our carts, go thru the checkout lane and load up the Vue.
    Back to the resort we went, off loaded and then finished the decorating. A few more snowflakes, a bit more painters tape to hold up the posters, lights installed in the village, a bit of snow, decorate our little tree, and then it was done.
    The place looked pretty good. We found out later that the owner of the resort, who lives in Asheville, thought it looked so too. He saw it by way of his online remote security camera, called the managers and told them they needed to go take a look for themselves.
    I guess we chilled out for a couple of hours. I don’t remember if I went back to the coach and watched television or read a book. I remember that it was really warm, windy and humid. I wished I had not unpacked all my kites and left them at home.
    I spent the part of the afternoon walking around the campground handing out my printed itinerary for the weekend.
    Four o’clock and we were back at the room. We sat up a serving line, started the coffee pots perking and made up trays and crock pots of goodies. We lit the candles on the tables, and dimmed the lights. I turned on a special CD of 1940s Big Band Christmas music.
    The only thing left to really get this party started is for our friends to arrive.
    By a quarter to five our members started to arrive with anticipation knowing (in part) what was in store for them.
    Almost everyone who walked in the door took a look at the ceiling, hard to miss all the snow flakes hanging from above, and then gravitated toward the Bedford falls village with the chugging little train moving in a noisy circle.
    I forgot to mention that our Christmas rally is also a Toys for Tots event and as such every coach provides at least one toy. Those items began to fill up a couple of tables placed on one side of the room.
    The mix of drink and talk began. There was a month of catching up to do. For some it was even longer. I milled around and said hi to as many people as I could and then at five after five, I rang a bell (a sound they would hear a lot over the next two days) and when silence came, I officially opened the “It’s a Wonderful Life” Christmas Rally and Party.
    I reviewed the itinerary:
    Movie tonight at seven…popcorn will be served
    Breakfast will be served at 8:30 in the morning including our Toys for Tots presentation.
    Breakfast would be followed by our annual business meeting.
    Everyone will be on your own until happy hour at 5:00 pm tomorrow night, followed by our Holiday Dinner with ham, turkey and lots of other things.
    Also don’t forget that the hardest “It’s a Wonderful Life” trivia contest will take place during dinner as well as voting for the best dressed.
    Following Dinner is our traditional “Don’t get too attached Christmas gift/steal exchange.”
    “Now Come Eat!”
    They did. They had a lot of choices, chips and salsa, mixed nuts, raw veggies and dip, spinach dip in a bread bowl, meatballs, spicy wings, (chicken not angel), b-b-qued cocktail whinnies (my favorite), crab dip, (my very favorite!), cheese and fresh grapes, pickles, green and black olives, cake, creme puffs, really good cookies, and other things I can no longer remember. There was plenty for all.
    The tables filled up, lots of talk, lots of smiles, a few trips back to the serving tables.
    At six forty five I announced that the movie would be starting in fifteen minutes. It would be a special colorized version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
    “Concessions, including fresh popcorn, will be served at the back of the theater.”
    Janis had purchased a mini antique popcorn machine which she was already heating up in the back on a table set up just for that purpose. We had popcorn bags, cookies and cake, and a special lamp to illuminate it all during the showing of the movie.
    We cleared the banquet tables, which were located under the large screen TV, and placed all the goodies on the kitchen counter.
    At seven I turned off the lights and rolled the DVD.
    I suppose with any plans there can be technical glitches. I had one…audio too low. I was forced to push pause and halt the movie during an early critical scene. It took me a couple of minutes to find a way to up the sound from the max it was already it. There was a TV equalizer setting that, once all the sliders were moved to the right, increased the sound to a comfortable level. I continued the show.
    Almost everyone had stayed to watch the movie. They all became really quiet. I could tell they were listening and watching it closely. During my chit chat and milling about earlier, I was surprised to discover that a lot of people there had not see the movie at all. The rest had seen bits and pieces of it. Not like me at all.
    This would be my 100 and something viewing of the film.
    Just before I started the movie, I took a few minutes to explain how important this old little film was to me.
    I told them how “It’s a Wonderful Life” had saved my life.
    I wrote about it here about a year or two ago I think. http://community.fmca.com/blog/62/entry-526-its-a-wonderful-life/
    I like to think my little story was the reason for the total attention that the movie was receiving from all there. Maybe in part that was true….but a trivia contest could have had something to do with it as well.
    The movie played….Young George got his ears slapped back, grew up, bought a suitcase, got married, had kids, yelled at some nasty old guy in a wheel chair, lost a bunch of money, thought he was going to jail, thought about jumping off a bridge, changed his mind, helped an angel get his wings, THE END.
    The audience attending, like many others over the last seventy years, clapped at the end of the movie. Some, like me, wiped away a few tears.
    Well, I can’t help it, I cry every time.
    The party’s first night ended on a great note. I was told by many, as they filed out the exit, how much they enjoyed the movie. There was a chorus of good nights and see you in the morning.
    The four of us cleaned off tables, threw away trash, swept the floor, put away leftovers, and swept the floor some more.
    By ten we were on our way back to our coaches. We were all dog tired.
    Gramps
  16. -Gramps-

    The Black Ribbon

    By -Gramps-,

    Part 1 "That Day"
    Recently Diane and I were given two large gifts. These gifts allowed us to escape from work, from our day to day routines, to recover from disappointment and hurt, to be refreshed. These gifts allowed us to spend time with many friends, including our closest ones, to learn new things, and to have a whole lot of fun in the process.
    These two gifts were tied together by time, distance, and a long black ribbon.
    Sometimes a black ribbon is a sign of mourning.
    On December thirty first of this last year, Diane and I signed an agreement to provide an exclusive option to sell my business. We set a cash price for the purchase and a date for that option to be exercised.
    We agreed that I would spend the next six months training the buyer’s personnel to look after my customers and their equipment.
    So for the next six months we took very few trips in our coach. We had a couple of weekend campouts with our FMCA chapter and in May we took a weeklong trip to the Blue Ridge for a Parker Family Reunion. By this time all looked well for me to retire and the new company to take over. Diane and I promised to travel to Florida to see our daughter and to pick up the grand boys for a few days so she and her husband could take a cruise together. We also made other travel plans as well.
    I guess you could say that with only a couple of weeks to go before the closing that we could now start to count our chickens….we could look forward to retiring after twenty three years of being self-employed.
    We planned to sell the house and live full time in our coach. We started downsizing, making plans to sell some things, and give lots of things away.
    The day before the closing, actually about eleven hours before, the other company killed the deal. They did not want to spend the cash, they would only purchase if I loaned them the money at terms totally acceptable to them.
    I refused to do that. I had no other choice. I could not loan them my financial future.
    Just like that our dream for retirement vanished.
    Diane said it felt like she was a bride left standing at the altar.
    That analogy seemed to sum it up pretty well.
    We mourned for the life that we thought was about to start.
    I was not devastated, not completely anyway, because being the pessimist that I am, I told myself right from the beginning that something could happen that might stop this deal and I should have a backup plan. I needed a way to keep going even though I was tired and worn out from the long term responsibility of running my own business.
    The first thing I did after the air came out of the balloon, was to contact my customers and inform them I was not retiring, which they had no problem with. One of the ladies I work with when hearing the news said "Thank God! I was praying you wouldn't leave us."
    I suppose I could have responded with "well, at least God answered someone's prayer." But I didn't.
    Actually contacting my customers was the second thing I did.
    The first was I prayed to God to give me the wisdom and the courage to keep going for as long as I needed to.
    God answered two prayers.
    I wisely rebuilt my company website. I also created a company Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus Page. I updated my oldest field test and office equipment. I attended out of town training classes in order to be certified to sell and service Vertical's new telephone equipment. I did things that the other company should have done in order to become successful at their new venture.
    In essence I sold my company to myself.
    I rebooted and it worked. I received plenty of work. I did not take a day off, except for a couple of Sundays, for the next two months.
    Just after Labor Day, things began to slow down. That was a good thing because that gave Diane and I time to plan to take the one trip that we refused to cancel after “that day”, as she and I refer to it, happened.
    We were not going to miss the GEAR rally in Asheville, North Carolina. We had not attended a GEAR rally in three or four years. This one looked so good that six months earlier we had paid for the trip. We planned on arriving early as volunteers and extending our visit to Asheville by a few days simply because we love the area so much.
    The trip to Asheville became present number one.
    On a sunny, pretty Friday in late September, Diane and I loaded up the coach for what we hoped would be a quiet two week trip to the gentle Blue Ridge Mountains. It was one of those unseasonably warm days that can fool you into thinking short sleeves is all you need, but we knew better so we carried clothes out to the coach that covered three seasons. I find that golfing shirts work well for all occasions.
    We left the next morning around ten thirty with the intent to drive to a point mid-way between Portsmouth and Asheville. Our target was the appropriately named Mid-Way campground and RV Park located just off I-40 near Statesville, NC. We planned to stay there for two nights and do absolutely nothing for the only full day we were there.
    Our trip down was uneventful other than the fact that I could not get our generator to start when parked for lunch. Diane wanted to use the microwave and I flooded the genny when I held the starter down for too long. Diane settled for a cold tuna fish sandwich instead of the hot chicken patty she had hoped to eat.
    We arrived at Mid-Way just after three. The office parked us parallel between a hill and a, what you could call a small lake or large duck pond. There was a fountain in the middle to keep the water moving and a lot of baby ducks were floating along like one of those carnival duck games. It was very peaceful and quiet. The phone never rang once the whole time we were on the road, well if it did it was family calling, not customers.
    It was easy to park the coach on our spot. It was not so easy to level it. I used about twenty of my many Lynx blocks under the wheels and the jacks to get it level, but in the end I prevailed.
    I tested the generator and it started without a hitch. That was a relief.

    Saturday I washed the coach roof after climbing up there to see if a limb that fell off the oak tree we were parked under had done any damage. It had not, but my new slide out toppers were filthy from pine needles and road dirt. We were not supposed to use a large amount of water but I could not let it go, so I carried a few five gallon buckets of water, one at a time of course, to the roof to wash it.
    Just as I was about to finish, Diane said “how are you going to rinse all the soap off?”
    Just then it started to rain.
    “I think God is taking care of that for me!” was my response.
    Sunday morning I climbed up on the roof again to remove the many acorns that were laying on the toppers. I didn’t want them jamming up the works when I retracted the slide outs back in. We soon pulled out and had some excitement when making a very tight turn uphill between trees on the left and a drainage ditch on the right. It can be fun taking a forty foot coach around a thirty foot curve.
    Diane kept saying I was getting too close to the edge and I told her hang on because I had to get the tailpipe past a tree, which I did successfully.
    In just a few minutes we were back on I-40 heading west. It was only a couple of hours later that the mountains started getting larger and larger in the front window. We stopped for gas and filled the tank. We added the weight of a full gas tank to the weight of a full water tank. The hardest climb was still ahead of us…so much for getting good gas mileage. I was confident that our UFO coach would make it up the mountain regardless of all our liquid cargo.
    About noon we arrived at the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center. Now this is the only time when things went a bit array. We took the wrong turn at a fork in the road so to speak. We turned left when we should have gone straight. We ended up on a very twisty one and a half lane road with no place to make a u turn. Diane is on the phone with Andy our chapter president, who was already at the venue, and he is telling us to turn around, Diane is relaying this message and I am saying, none too kindly, that I cannot do it…..yet. My fear was that I might not be able to do it at all. I hate being lost, especially when driving the coach. I wasn't actually lost but you know what I mean.
    We finally came out of the woods to a major intersection and I found a place to reverse our route. We made it to gate seven and with a little guidance from Andy and a couple of other chapter members we parked our coach. I needed to use quite a few Lynx blocks again but I had no trouble with that considering the rehearsal I had a couple of days earlier.
    Our good friends Gary and Janis, who should have arrived after us, were already parked due to the fact that Gary did not make the same wrong turn that I did. I was not the only one who made that mistake however.
    The next day there were volunteers directing traffic. Good thing too.
    It was absolutely beautiful in Asheville. Being parked on a large parking lot was not bad at all. We had full hookups which included fifty amp service. Gary and I shared a sewer connection but that presented no problem at all. The only question was what to do with all the water I was hauling and no longer needed. I figured at some point during the coming week I would just use the water pump and dump it down the sewer.
    That first afternoon we registered our coach, one of some four hundred that would attend the rally, plus vendors, and we made some plans for later that day.
    Gary, Janis, Diane and our good friend Jerry, decided to make, what for us is a pilgrimage, to the Moose Café. This great eatery is located next to the Asheville farmer’s market just around the corner from the Biltmore Estate. We left around four thirty for what should have been a half hour drive. Due to an accident, which was flashing on my Verizon GPS, it took an hour and a half. I told our three companions, who had never eaten at the Moose Café that it was worth the longer drive. It was.
    Most of us had the smoked pork chops, which came with the largest buttermilk biscuits you have ever seen. They have great country side dishes, all freshly made from ingredients that come from the farmer’s market next door. The meal was really good. I finished mine off with fresh blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of that warm sticky berry stuff.

    We covered a lot of subjects during dinner. We talked about the upcoming rally, the vendors and seminars we hoped to see and what we would do during our down time. We also talked about our non- retirement and I told them more details about what happened back in July.
    Most of our friends and family already knew about it falling apart and many gave us their initial response of “It must be for the best”, or “It will work out for good”, or “it just isn't the right time.”
    All of those responses are absolutely true, but I didn't always want to hear any of them. It just seemed like too simple a thing to say.
    Our friend Jerry lost his wife almost the same day we lost our dream and that really put things into perspective for me. I watched him stay upbeat and cheerful with his friends even though he had lost Charlotte, his best friend in life. I figured that going into some dark place just because I couldn't retire and travel “right now” really wasn't the thing to do.
    I still had a good life to live with my wife and best friend so I best get on living it.
    We decided to do just that and while In Asheville we were going to have some fun.
    Diane told everyone we planned on taking a white water trip while there. Gary and Janis had never done that before. Jerry had done it quite a few times. We asked ourselves, why not book a trip for the very next morning?
    We found some flyers in the information stand in front of the café and later that night, after a stop at Wal-Mart for tooth paste and other things I needed, I hopped online and started looking to book five people for a trip down the French Broad River early in the morning.
    I didn't have much luck. The season was over for most of the rafting companies and some sites would not take a booking our size. I would have to wait until morning and make some calls.
    The next morning at eight ten am, I contacted the Blue Heron Rafting Company. I asked them if they could squeeze in five people and they say sure, if we could be there around nine fifteen. Wow, that did not give us a lot of time to make our way forty-five miles the other side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, but we said we would get there. They said they would wait for us as long as they could.
    We quickly packed changes of clothes, water, snacks and people in Gary’s car and took off like a bat out of you know where.
  17. -Gramps-

    The Candle

    By -Gramps-,

    In late November of 1990 I received my December issue of Reader's Digest. I read all the humorous parts of the magazine, and one cover story and then promptly stuck it on a shelf with all the other issues that I still had in my possession.
    Soon it was Christmas. At that time all of my three children were young. Christine was fourteen, Jeri was eleven, and Joel was five.
    It was a tough time for us. I was unemployed. I had been without work for almost two years. The country was in an economic recession and things didn't look too good for the coming year. I was not sure what to do. I was taking all the temporary jobs I could find. These jobs actually came from an agency that offered part time work to technical people. I installed a mri, worked for other phone companies installing microwave systems for the Navy, installed voice mail systems, whatever I was offered. Diane helped with the cash flow by working as a demonstrator for super markets, frying sausages, handing out flyers and samples of cookies, that kind of thing. Together the two of us were just getting by. Unemployment compensation was not something we were interested in, even if it paid as much as our combined pay checks.
    There would not have been anything for the kids if Diane and I had not decided to spend the traditiononal Christmas money given to us by Diane's dad on just them.
    The girls knew that our financial situation was bleak so they were not expecting much on Christmas morning.
    They awoke and were very surprised to find a brand new Nintendo attached to the TV.
    There were also some new clothes, Disney videos, Fisher Price Dinosaurs for Joel, and candy for everyone stuffed into stockings.
    We had to tear the kids away from the Nintendo for breakfast. After a meal of home made muffins, eggs and sausage (we had lots of that) and orange juice we went back to the living room for a reading of the Christmas story.
    We had a great morning in spite of being as poor as church mice or something like that.
    The morning was really good, much better than expected, but I was still anxious about the coming weeks. I was fighting discouragement.
    I was not sure why but I had the urge to read something for myself. I got up from my chair and and got the copy of Reader's Digest that I had stuck on the shelf weeks before.
    While Manheim Steamroller was playing on the stereo, I began to thumb through the magazine looking at the condensed Christmas story collection that it contained.
    I came across a story written by a prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp. After a paragraph or two I knew that I had to read it to the family. Silent Night began playing just as I started. It was amazing how the music fit the words as I read out loud. I began to think that this moment was not an accident.
    This is the story:
    The Candle
    "We were barricaded into a dank shed ringed with barbed wire in a Japanese concentration camp called Si Ringo Ringo on the east coast of Sumatra. Outside the tropical sun blazed by day and a huge moon filled the fantastically starry sky by night. Inside the shed was perpetual darkness.
    There were people living in that shed. No, 'living' is the wrong word. We were packed away there. Sometimes we could see beyond us little sparks, as sun or moon flashed on patches of barbed wire that hadn't rusted over the years. For it had been years now - or was it decades? We were too sick and too weak to care. In the beginning, we thought about such things as the day or the hour. Now, eternity.
    Beside us and in front of us, men died - from hunger, from disease from the ebbing of the last ray of hope. We had long stopped believing in the end of the war, in liberation. We lived in a stupor, blunted, with only one remaining passion that flew at our throats like a wild animal: hunger. Except when someone caught a snake or a rat, we starved.
    There was, however, one man in the camp who still had something to eat. A candle!
    Of course, he had not originally thought of it as food - a normal person doesn't eat candle wax. But if all you saw around you were emaciated bodies (in which you recognized yourself), you, too, would not underestimate the value of this candle.
    When he couldn't stand the torture of hunger anymore, the prisoner would carefully take the candle from its hiding place, a crumpled little suitcase, and nibble at it. He didn't eat it all. He looked upon the candle as his last resort. One day, when everyone was utterly mad with hunger, he would need it.
    To me, his friend, he had promised a small piece. So I watched him and his suitcase, day and night. It became my life's task to see to it that in the end he would not eat the entire candle by himself.
    One evening after counting the notches he'd made in a beam, another prisoner mentioned that it was Christmas. In a flat, toneless voice he said, 'Next Christmas we'll be home.' A few of us nodded; most didn't react at all. Who could still cling to that idea?
    Then someone else said something very strange: 'When it is Christmas, the candles burn and there are bells ringing.' His words barely audible, as if they came from an immense distance and a deep, deep past. To most of us, the remark had no meaning whatsoever; it referred to something completely out of our existence.
    It was already very late, and we lay on our boards, each with his thoughts - or, more accurately, with no thoughts. Then my friend became restless. He crept toward his suitcase and took out the candle. I could see its whiteness clearly in the dark. He is going to eat it. I thought. If only he won't forget me.
    He put the candle on his plank bed. What now? He went outside, where our captor's kept a fire smoldering. Then he returned, carrying a burning chip. This little flare wandered through the shed like a ghost. When my friend reached his place, he took the chip, the fire, and he lit his candle.
    The candle stood on his bed, and it burned.
    No one said a word, but soon one shadow after another slipped closer. Silently these half-naked men with sunken cheeks and eyes full of hunger formed a circle around the burning candle.
    One by one they came forward, the vicar and the parson, too. You couldn't tell that's what they were, for they were merely two more wasted figures, but we knew.
    'It's Christmas,' said the parson in a husky voice. 'The Light shineth in the darkness.'
    Then the vicar said, 'And the darkness overcame it not.'
    That night those words from the Gospel of John were not some written word from centuries ago. It was living reality, a message for each of us.
    For the light shone in the darkness. And the darkness didn't conquer it. We knew this not because we reasoned it out at the time, but because we felt it, silently, around the piercing flame.
    That candle was whiter and more slender than any I have seen since. And in the flame (though I'm sure I can never describe it, not really - it was a secret we shared with the Christ child) we saw things that were not of this world. We were deep in the swamps and the jungle but now we heard the bronze sound of a thousand bells ringing and a choir of angels singing for us. Yes, I am perfectly sure - I have over a hundred witnesses. Most of them can't speak anymore; they are no longer here. But that doesn't mean they don't know.
    The candle burned higher and higher, ever more pointed, until it touched the very roof of the dark shed, and then it went on, reaching to the stars. Everything became full of light. Not one of us ever saw so much light again.
    We were free, and uplifted, and we were not hungry.
    Now someone softly said, 'Next Christmas we'll be home,' and this time we knew it was true. For the light itself had given us this message-it was written in the Christmas flame in fiery letters. You can believe it or not; I saw it myself.
    The candle burned all night (yes, I know there is not a candle in the world that can burn so long and so high), and when morning came, we sang. Now we knew that there was a home waiting for each of us.
    And there was. Some of us went home before the next Christmas. The others? Well, they were home as well. I helped to lay them down in the earth behind our camp, a dry spot in the swamp. But when they died, their eyes were not as dim as before. They were filled with light, our candle's light, the Light that the darkness did not conquer." (The Candle, c'77 by Hollandia, printed in December 1990 Reader's Digest Magazine, pp. 69-71, ubp).
    I was so moved by the spirit of the man who wrote this story that I could not finish it without tears. I thought that if he could have this kind of faith in the middle of such dire circumstances, that I could have faith that our New Year would be better. I could have the faith that something would happen to change my family's fortune and circumstances.
    I was right. The following March I started a little company that I called LINK voice & data. It would be a struggle but we got it off the ground and soon it will be twenty years old.
    We still read The Candle at Christmas. Jeri reads it on Christmas morning in her home as well. It still makes me cry.
    Maybe you are going through a rough time now, or know someone who is. This is the day for remembering that the light of God can overcome any darkness. God can bring you, your friends or your family out of any situation you are in. He can bring you into the light!
    God bless and Merry Christmas!
    Gramps
  19. -Gramps-

    The Course of Dreams

    By -Gramps-,

    If you have been reading my earlier blog entries, you know that I have said that a motor coach will improve your life, if you let it. I said it will improve your life in many ways. Your coach can take you to places you might not think to go to if you traveled like most "normal" people, carrying your bags and staying in hotels. It can also help you to make friends. Recently for Diane and I, our coach has done both.
    This has been a rough year for the two of us. Mike, my best friend and business partner for the last 10 years, discovered last Christmas that he had stage-four lung cancer that had spread to his stomach and esophagus. He had to virtually quit working and just try to survive. I took over the whole work load and tried to make an income for us both. So, while Mike went for radiation treatments and lived off smoothies and Ensure, I took care of our customers. This lasted for three months.
    During the week of March 20, while Diane and I were in Florida visiting my daughter, her husband and son, Mike went into the hospital on a Friday and died two days later. He had just collected a large check, the final payment on a large install we had done some two months earlier. He deposited it into the bank that same Friday morning. He died and all accounts were immediately frozen by his bank. He left no will or instructions of any kind as to how his affairs were to be handled. This caused a lot of problems. I can only assume that because of his illness, his books were, to put it mildly, a wreck.
    It would take another two months almost from the day he died for me to help his family figure out what he owed and what was owed to him. I helped him start his own business and now I had to close it out.
    It was heartbreaking to scan his list of jobs and to remember the projects we had worked on together for so long. It was also stressful for all the months of his illness and for the two months afterward to not have any income from most of the work we had done together. It was a huge relief the day in May that his daughter was finally able to pay me for the work I had done for Mike, but at the same time it was killing me that my friend for 20 years was gone.
    Diane didn't know what she was going to do to help me get through my terrible depression and anxiety over losing my friend. His death was taking a part of me with him. It's funny, but when my wife's father died that was one of the things I was worried about for her, that his death would kill part of her. However, she remained strong the whole time and now here I was, making everyone around me almost as miserable as I was.
    It was on one of my lowest days when our friends Gary and Janis called and said they were looking at a new coach and wanted to ask some questions about ours. Helping them purchase a new coach was just the right therapy for me. If you read my first blog entry you know that I said they were a Godsend. Now you know why. I lost one friend and God sent me, us, two new ones.
    Diane and I took a short trip with Gary and Janis and we managed to get to FMCA's GEAR rally in Richmond, where we had a really good time, joined the Colonial Virginians FMCA chapter and made some great new friends. Once those two trips were done, I found I was so far behind in servicing and paying company bills that I really needed to work hard for the next few weeks. By mid-July I was caught up, but as a result I was ready for a break from it all.
    We thought about attending the FMCA rally in Bowling Green, Ohio, but we could not be sure to get there on time, so we decided it would be better to find someplace closer. Diane had visited a booth at the GEAR rally that was giving away three free nights at a brand-new motor coach resort in Galax, Va... She suggested we call them. I wasn't all that enthusiastic about it. What's in Galax? I knew it was close to the Blue Ridge Parkway and also it was not too far from where my parents live, so why not go there for awhile? Diane called the resort. Barry, the owner and developer, said come on out and visit us.
    We went to Deer Creek Motorcoach Resort expecting to stay for about three days.
    We stayed for two weeks.
    I fell for the place as soon as we drove through the gate. The whole resort was laid out like a big green map right in front of us. On the far end was a big hill with green grass and many grazing cows that stretched up to a wonderful blue sky. The asphalt access roads are all three times wider than a coach. Most of the sites are not yet developed, but they were all grassed over waiting to be bought and the pads poured. Rock-banked creeks cut across the resort adding to the whole lovely look of the place; plus, they make a great sound.
    Next to the gate is a handsome log clubhouse with a green metal roof and mini golf course. Just on the other side of the clubhouse is a beautiful nine-hole golf course. Just to the other side of the golf course is Deer Creek Rv Resort.
    We parked in a guest lot (number 3), a pull-in right next to a running creek. We hooked up, set up the patio. I grabbed a beer and took a seat and just took in the view. It took all of 10 minutes just sitting there for me to feel the tension and anxiety of the past few months just start to fall off my shoulders. I started to feel very much at home.
    There were not many coaches there -- five, and six counting ours. The owners saw us arrive and soon they started walking over to say hello: Beverly and Dan, Shirley and Sheldon, Ron, Gordy and Judy. Barry, the developer, came by and soon we learned that he was going to pick up his new-to-him 94 Marathon coach in the next few days. He planned to fly with his wife, Laura, to Florida, and drive it back. It would be his first RV. He was a bit nervous but I assured him he didn't have much to worry about.
    We soon found out that all the owners get together on a regular basis at the the clubhouse for a potluck supper most every weekend, if not sooner. To make a long story a bit shorter, I ended up grilling for everyone, twice! Steaks one night, chicken and waffle sandwiches with home frys and grilled corn on the cob another night. The ladies did the shopping, and I did the cooking.
    My parents came to visit us the first weekend we were there. They stayed in the coach. We went to the Smoke on the Mountain State Barbecue championship in Galax. On Friday we antiqued and ate barbecue. It was so good we did the same thing all over again on Saturday. We played mini golf. I also played golf with my parents. My Mom is in her late seventies and my Dad is in his eighties and both had a blast out on the course. It was a great visit, one of the best my wife and I have had with my folks for a long time.
    The next weekend, Gary and Janis drove their coach up and backed into lot number 2. They went with us to visit the Blue Ridge Parkway, Mt Airy, also known as Mayberry, and the Shelton Winery located not far away. Gary and I hit the links as well.
    During the week between visits from family and close friends, I made new ones. I also installed Wi-Fi for the resort at no charge for my labor. Everyone was being so kind and generous to us; I wanted to do something in return. I flew kites (I collect them). Diane and I played Bocce. We went hiking and explored other nearby towns.
    My friend Mike was a devout boater and fisherman. He also loved to golf. I went boating with him once. We talked about going on a fishing trip and staying in the RV. We also talked about golfing together but it never happened. We ran out of time before we could do either one.
    So, I thought about Mike while I was out on the course. Most of the time I was the only one playing. I had the nine holes all to myself, well, almost to myself. I felt like Mike was there with me, on this course of dreams, laughing at me when I shanked the ball really badly.
    We have been back to Deer Creek since that time. We are hoping to buy lot number 3. I am also hoping to improve my golf swing. I am getting tired of Mike laughing at me!
    The following pictures should show you why I think this place is special.







  20. -Gramps-

    The Death of XP

    By -Gramps-,

    Windows XP is now 12 years old. It has been one of the best, if not the best, operating systems to ever be installed on a hard drive. I personally think it is better than Windows 7. However, it is now officially at it's EOL stage.

    EOL stands for End Of Life.

    Let us not morn for it quite yet. As Mark Twain was once reported to have said: "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

    The above is a misquotation. Mr. Twain actually said: "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

    In other words, he wasn't dead yet, even if he, or as the case may be, his cousin, wasn't feeling all that well.

    XP is not feeling all that well in the eyes of its creator. However, that does not change the fact that it is still running on a third of the world's computers, including half of the world's business machines and 90 percent of the ATMs. Some of these machines run embedded proprietary application software that will not migrate to Windows 7 or Windows 8. I have yet to see any Windows 8 computers sitting on a desk belonging to any of my customers.

    If so many computers still run on XP or embedded XP, why the big push to move away from it? I can sum that up in a couple of words: Phones and Tablets, or to use a different two words: Touch Screen. Touch screen devices have a much greater ability to deliver great new experiences. These new experiences, or to call them by what they really are -- apps -- cost money. You either pay to get them or pay to play them, or both.

    What does this mean for all of us XP users? Does this mean our XP pc is going to just one day quit? Does it mean we have to run out a buy a new computer if we want to read our email, stream our favorite movie, shop on Amazon, Skype our grand kids, or do any of the things we love to do? Some people selling computers (and a certain home shopping network will go unnamed here) want you to think so.

    You don't have to do a thing if you don't want to. Well, there is one thing you might have to do: Update your antivirus program to one that has very good real-time protection.

    If you are using Microsoft Security Essentials, the antivirus malware protection that Microsoft offered for free, then you need to replace it ASAP. Microsoft sent out an update for MSE users about a week ago warning of the immediate end to the support of this program and then two days later started supporting it again.

    Now I have learned that virus definition updates will still be available until July 2015. This does not mean you have total protection from hackers. Then again, you never did! I know that for a fact. The thing is, updates for your other programs, such as Microsoft Office, including Outlook, will still come your way. If any of those programs have a security flaw and Microsoft makes a fix, you will be able to get the update.

    So here is what you should consider doing if you want to keep rolling happily along with XP residing on your desktop or laptop. Purchase a copy of a good antivirus Internet security anti Spam program from Norton, or Kaspersky or MacAfee. All of those software makers have promised to continue supporting the system. I am used to using a very good free program but it didn't kill me to move from MSE to a three device license of Kaspersky.

    I installed it on my very old self-built XP workstation and on my wife's new Windows 8.1 touchscreen laptop.

    Yes, I did run out and replace her old Compaq. I did not do this because it had Windows XP installed on it. I did it because it ran or walked or crawled on Vista Home Premium. Now, there is an operating system with a built-in reason to replace it with something better.

    If you really are looking to upgrade from XP -- some use the word "upgrade" with a bit of reluctance -- to Windows 8.1, then I have a few suggestions on how to go about doing just that. Before I do, let me tell you that I think Windows 7 is not a bad operating system; however, you will not find many or depending where you shop, any new consumer devices with that operating system any longer. It is still the system of choice for business workstations. With a bit of shopping online you can possibly get a personal device with Windows 7, but I suggest that you just move on to Windows 8.1.

    Here is my first and most important suggestion. When you buy a laptop with Windows 8.1 installed, make sure the laptop has a touchscreen. There are some features of Windows 8.1 that a mouse just cant use, not without a lot of trouble anyway. One of those features is closing an application. There is at the present no X at the top of the window, so you close an app or Internet site by dragging the window down from the top with your finger until it shrinks and then spins around backwards. I kid you not. I have not figured out how to do this with a mouse.

    Windows 8 also has a feature named the charm bar. This little ditty of a program appears on the right side of the screen after a swipe of the finger that begins off screen and to the left. The charm bar, or charms menu, has a search button, a settings button which includes the power button, Wi-Fi connections, control panel and a bunch of other icons. The candy bar/charms menu also has a shortcut to the start screen, which displays all those big pretty tiles.

    The charm bar is the intersection of all that Windows 8.1 does and you need your finger to get there, so a touch screen is necessary. Also many of the free games and not free games you can download from the Windows store are touch games. Diane is addicted to one called Tap Tiles and I am finding myself playing a quiz game called Logo and killing a lot of time in the process.

    Second suggestion: The laptop you buy should have at least four gigs of Ram. Windows 8.1 is not the easiest program to manage the memory it takes to make it work. It is too hard to shut down a program and it continues to run in the background eating up resources. This can happen with a smart phone as well but there is a feature in settings called force stop. Windows 8.1 does not make it easy to force stop a program, not without thinking about it. My wife's laptop has eight gigs of RAM and Window 8.1 can use almost half that memory doing nothing but looking pretty.

    Actually I find Windows 8.1 to be quite intriguing. There are some aspects of it I like a lot and some I don't. It has retained enough of Windows 7 to make it possible for me to find my way around deep inside of it and at the same time its metro aps page and start page look good and make it easy to find and start programs.

    One other thing to do: when you buy a new pc, remove all the bloat ware from it. This takes a bit of time but it will make the machine run better, which will make you feel better.

    Remember, if you do decide to migrate to Windows 8.1 then get a touchscreen laptop with at least 4 gigs of ram, but more is better. By the way, if the pc you buy has Windows 8 on it, you should update it to 8.1 before you do anything else. Did I not mention that before? The update is free and some retail places like Best Buy will do it for you.

    In conclusion, if you have an XP laptop right now, don't panic. It isn't going to blow up or refuse to boot up. If you don't have one installed already, then you should purchase a good antivirus program if you intend to keep it for awhile longer. You can take your time looking for a new computer if that is what you want to do. XP isn't really dead, not yet anyway. It is still lingering around.

    Derrick
  21. -Gramps-
    One of the things that is on my Motor Coach Bucket List is to travel to as many Major League baseball parks as I can.
    I love the game of baseball. Like motor coaching, baseball has many metaphors for life. I have loved the game much, much longer than I have loved the rving lifestyle.
    I have been to a number of major league games. My first one was a weekday night game in late spring of 1989. It was the first home game of the Cincinnati Reds after the Pete Rose Scandal hit the news. There was another big story about him on the day of the game. Although he was a player as well as the manager of the Reds, he never came out of the team's dugout the whole night.
    The Reds were playing the Mets that night. The highlight of the game for me was a high and hard Darryl Strawberry foul ball that landed a few rows behind me, bounced off an empty seat then careened off the left arm of my seat and landed in a bucket of popcorn belonging to a young lady a few levels below me.
    I still regret not catching that ball that the young lady never saw coming. I know she never knew what hit her by the volume of her scream as the ball knocked the bucket off her lap while scattering popcorn over everyone seated next to her.
    I would have liked to take that ball home to Joel, my four year old son.
    Nine years later, Joel, then thirteen, my oldest daughter Christine, her then husband Brent, Diane and I were sitting just above the left outfield wall at Yankee Stadium. We were munching on hero sandwiches and drinking ginger ale as the Yankees played the White Sox.
    We got a kick out of the Yankee fans heckling left fielder Albert Belle, at that time the highest paid player in baseball.
    The sound of "ALbert...ALbert!" coming from some forty thousand voices at the same time made it pretty obvious that he was not popular in New York.
    We got a bigger kick witnessing then Yankee Darryl Strawberry hit not one, but two, two out-two strike home runs.
    The shouts of "DAR-RYL DAR-RYL!" from the same forty thousand voices made it obvious that he was very popular in New York.
    The Yankees won that night. You got to love the Yankees. You got to love their fans even more. Some may argue, but I believe the Yankees have the best fans in the world.
    Two days earlier we were at a night game in Philadelphia.
    The Phillies were still playing at the old hot and stuffy Veteran's stadium. The Braves were in town and I swear there were more fans rooting for them than for the Phillies. After watching the way Philadelphia played that night, I understood why.
    In 1998 it was hard to love them Phillies.
    In 1997 Joel, Diane and I attended a Baltimore Orioles game and watched Cal Ripken keep his teammates entertained during a rain delay. The Orioles were playing Oakland. Mark McGwire was a member of the A's then and what a batting practice display he put on that day. In just a few weeks he would be traded to the St Louis Cardinals and go on to lead the majors with 58 home runs that year.
    Before the game Joel and I visited the Babe Ruth Museum. That is a place you should not miss when in Baltimore.
    In 1998 I was at an Arizona Diamondbacks home game and watched Randy Johnson, throwing a lot of nasty side arm sliders, strike out fourteen Padres in a row and hit a standup double. It goes without saying that he won that game.
    May 24th 1998 Diane, Joel, Christine, Brent, and I were sitting in the mezzanine section of Shea Stadium watching the New York Mets play the Milwaukee Brewers. At eleven that morning the game was sold out. It was the first Mets sell-out since the last time they were National League East champs ten years earlier. The reason for the sellout was that this was the first home game of the newest Mets player...Mike Piazza. History says that it took some time for Mets fans to warm up to their new catcher. Not so. They loved him from the first moment they saw him on the field just taking questions from news people. The first time he came up to bat, the place went berserk. It was the beginning of a seven year relationship that included two playoffs, one pennant and a World Series against the Yankees. And I was there with my family when it started.
    All these games were great. A couple of them had some real history being made. But none of them were as exciting to me as a game that I was at one hot Saturday in June of 1996.
    It was the game between the Phillies and the Giants. Not the big league ones. This game was a battle between the Phillies and the Giants of the Churchland Little League.
    Joel, my son, was on the Phillies.
    I was the manager of his team.
    I had some experience coaching a team before I took on the job of managing the Phillies. I found out that some experience was better than none but not a whole lot. The part I didn't know about was that managing was a full time job even when you have a full time job. I spent many evenings at practice, putting together my lineup, calling parents to remind them of the Saturday game and where it would be and at what time and most importantly; making sure of who would be there. All this was in addition to giving my son individual Dad time. I threw a lot of batting practice pitches to him in the big grassy church lot next to our house. I also caught a lot of pitches from him in our back yard.
    I tried to be a pretty laid back coach. Winning was not the most important thing to me. Helping my players do their best and make their best better was my goal. I figured if I did that then we would win, hopefully a lot, of games as a result.
    I had four rules for my players.
    Be on time for practices and games.
    Trust the coach.
    When behind don't give up.
    When ahead don't let up.
    That was it.
    I thought that with those rules that all involved would have fun.
    I had to pick up players, drive them to practices and to the games. This was the part of managing that got to me the most. Chris, my catcher, lived with his single mom. She worked very long hours and so it fell upon me to drive to his home, pick him up, take him to practice, and bring him back to our house for dinner. If I didn't do that he would end up at home, alone, eating Fruit Loops or something just as healthy.
    Chris was twelve years old, tall for his age, with bright blond hair, blue eyes, and a handsome face that turned red quick from exposure to the sun. He had a fast swing and a faster temper to go with it.
    Chris resented being on the Phillies. He really didn't like being "down here with the little squirts" to use his words. He gave the impression that the only reason that he was playing was because his mother wanted him to. I didn't believe that to be the only reason. I could tell that he loved the game, although he felt he was out of the league he should have been in.
    You see, Churchland Little League was divided into three divisions; T-Ball, Minor League, which was comprised of teams made up of mostly eight to ten year olds, and the major league, which had ten to twelve year old players. The idea was that the Major League players were ones with a bit more skill. From the major league teams came all our All Stars. The All Stars would make up the dream team that would play in the district tournaments and then if successful go on to the Little League World Series.
    That is the way it was supposed to work, but in reality the coaches sons, and players that coaches really liked, or friends of the coaches sons, or sons of the coaches friends, you get the picture, ended up in the majors and on the All Star teams no matter how good they were or were not. Every now and then an "exceptional" minor league player could get called up to one of major league teams if a spot became available.
    Chris was a good player, better than most, but he had no one to go to bat for him. He had no father to be seen. His mother moved around a lot so even though he had played some organized baseball before, no one in Churchland knew him, so he was never considered for the majors, and being that this was his last year of eligibility to play he was unlikely to be called up.
    As I said, Chris was a good player. He had no fear of the ball at all. Most of my players would back out of the box as soon as the pitcher released the ball. They rarely swung at a pitch. Right handed Chris crowded the plate. His size scared the opposing players, especially the pitcher. Chris gave a look that dared any pitcher to throw it anywhere near the plate. If they did he would quickly smash the ball. He would smash it long and high over the third base side into the outfield. Unfortunately it was the outfield of the T-ball field which made that screaming hit a foul ball.
    The coaches of the T-ball teams didn't care for unseen round white orbs raining down on their dirt kicking outfielders. More than once they told me to do something about it. I asked one coach if he would like me to shout "Fore!" when Chris comes up to bat. He called me a wise guy.
    I did want to do something about it believe me.
    Over dinner I would try to coach his attitude, tell him to not crowd the plate. He had a long reach. Give the pitcher some room and he would get a good pitch to hit.
    I moved him back in the box and told him to wait before swinging and to go for the outside pitch.
    When Chris hit one into fair territory, it was usually a line drive that went like it was shot out of a cannon right at third base or to the shortstop position sometimes resulting in an injury to the unfortunate kid who tried to knock it down and extra bases for Chris.
    Soon the pitchers for the other teams, on coach's orders, all started pitching away from him. This frustrated Chris even more and he started swinging at junk, hitting more fouls and finding himself in many 0 and 2 counts. I told him to take more first pitches. He would try, and he could get the count to 3 and 2, but a sharp pitcher would take advantage of him and he would end up with a backwards K next to his name on the score sheet.
    After hitting two fouls, looking at three balls, looking at a third strike, he would turn even redder in the face, and if he could have he would have broken his aluminum bat in half.
    He wanted more than to just hit the ball. He wanted that big major league home run. He wanted to prove that he should be up there with the big boys.
    He wasn't the only one.
    Joel was my closer and played second base and shortstop when needed. He batted right handed in the forth position so he was my clean up man in more ways than one. He was patient. Joel would drive the other pitchers crazy because he instinctively sat back in the box and waited. He would take pitches that he knew were balls and foul off the pitches that he knew were borderline. Chris was doing great to get six pitches. Joel would get eight, eleven, or more and still walk, but most of the time it only took one to get on base.
    If the ball was close to the plate, Joel was swinging for first base. He would take the knob to the ball and punch it where the infield defense was the weakest and then use his speed to beat it out to first. He was so fast that the infielder would rush, juggle the ball or make a bad throw, and Joel would usually end up at second, if not third.
    Soon pitchers tried to throw around him as well. But it didn't matter, Joel walked when he wanted to and if the pitch was reachable he used his great bat speed to take it to the opposite field. If it was an inside pitch, he tucked his hips in, leaned back and then pulled it to left.
    They could not keep him off the base paths when he got on. His attitude was two bases are always better than one.
    When it came to pitching, Joel was one of the most accurate pitchers on the mound, major or minor. He threw strikes. Worse yet for the batters he faced, he threw inside strikes. The problem was, that chased the batters out of the box and young umpires would lose their reference and call a ball. This bugged Joel. He knew the umpires up in the majors would not do this to him, but he learned to adjust. He would throw low to the back corner of the plate and get the batters to chase and if they were not swingers, just throw hard and fast right down the middle.
    Most of the time Chris was his catcher and he knew how to catch a pitch and make it look pretty.
    Both of those boys could have played with the big kids.
    We won a lot of games as the season progressed. Three games we lost by one run. The third game of the season was our first loss. We got killed thirteen to nothing. For some reason, I think it was a muddy field, we had to play on the T-ball field with a bad pitcher's mound. Unlike the other team (The First Place Mets) we could not adjust.
    My team was upset with that loss. I was upset because they gave up on me three innings in. I did not scold them. Instead I had them all over to my house on practice night for some Nintendo Home Run Derby. My plan was to get some bats moving that usually stayed still.
    It worked. The kids had a great time. They competed against each other. Boys who had poor timing found out that they could swing and hit a virtual ball. I told them that if they could hit what the computer tossed at them, they could hit what a pitcher threw. They just needed to decide to do it. I also reminded them of rules three and four. To make it easier to remember, those rules would now be rule one and two.
    Before each game I would give my little pep talk about teamwork and strategy and then ask my two questions.
    "What's rule number one?!"
    "DON'T GIVE UP!"
    "What's rule number two?"
    "DON'T LET UP!"
    We won our next six games.
    Many years later, after one of the other coaches of the Mets became a next door neighbor, I found out that the Phillies had a reputation for being relentless. I was told that other coaches thought we were mean because we pounded the other team. We never let up on them. We didn't. I told my boys that life is like baseball or vice versa, play fair but play hard. Don't cheat to win but make the other guy beat you, and never surrender. When you lose, and you most likely will, you still have no reason to feel bad if you did your very best. My team took all that to heart and always played like we were one run ahead or one behind.
    By game fourteen out of sixteen, we were 11 and 3.
    Game fifteen was the Phillies against the Giants.
    I didn't know it then, but this would be Chris's last game. His mother would move again before the month was out.
    Chris still wanted that big home run.
    The rules of Churchland Little League state that all players who show up for the game are in the batting line up for the whole game. Substitutions in the field are unlimited and pitchers can throw for three consecutive innings only, but they can play other positions.
    For this game I had ten players out of thirteen show up. A couple of them, including TJ who normally batted first, arrived late so I shifted my line up one place. Joel was batting in the third slot and Chris in forth. TJ was in the tenth position. I hated not having him at the top of the order during our first at bat. He didn't hit a lot but he didn't flinch either, so he tended to get a lot of walks. Matt, leadoff and my starting pitcher, and CJ were both good hitters. Together they gave Joel a really good chance to hit in some runs.
    The day of the game we were the visitors.
    I can see it in my mind, not like it was yesterday, but like it is right now.
    I watch my players arrive. When the Ump gets there I give him my lineup and a copy to the Giants' coach.
    We do some warm up exercises. Since we are visitors we hit the field for some quick infield practice first.
    After we are done, the Giants take the field for some quick drills and then the starters take their positions.
    It is time to play ball. My summer boys are up first.
    Matt leads off with a first pitch double to center field which he tries to stretch into a triple and gets thrown out. CJ strikes out on a 1 and 2 count. Joel comes up to bat with nobody on and two outs.
    This is not the way I want to start out against the Giants.
    Pitch comes in and Joel takes it to the far right field and runs for first like his life depends on it. He doesn't stop until he is standing on third. His pants are still clean.
    Now it is Chris's at bat. I don't know what to expect. I know that it could get ugly. Joel, standing on third, had better keep his eyes open and not get hit by a rocket.
    Chris takes a vicious swing at the first pitch and misses so hard he spins like a top. The pitcher grins at him. Chris turns a bit redder. Next pitch and Chris knocks an ankle breaker back to the mound. It bounces off the rubber and flies past second as the pitcher jumps. Chris makes it to first, Joel scores.
    Little Jeffery comes up to the plate and manages to take it to a full count before he goes down looking.
    Bottom of the first Phillies 1 Giants 0
    The Giants are a pretty fair team so I am going to play my normal game but take nothing for granted. Before Matt heads to the mound, I tell him and Chris to be smart, no fancy curve balls, just play catch.
    The Giants leadoff batter and Matt get into a classic battle of hitter and pitcher. It goes to a full count with a bunch of foul balls. Matt walks him.
    Okay, he will shake that off. I hope.
    The next two batters both hit to my second baseman. CJ makes two great throws to first.
    Matt now has two outs and starts to get a bit anxious for the third so he throws one in the dirt that Chris can't smother. The runner who was on third makes it home.
    The batter goes down looking with a full count.
    Man, my players sure know how to make a coach anxious.
    Top of the Second, score tied 1 to 1
    Shawn leads off for us. He does not like to stay in the batters box. I cured him by laying bats on the ground behind his heels. If he steps backwards he steps on the bats and takes a fall. I know this seems like a mean technique to cure bat fright but it works. This day he stays right there, never takes a swing but ends up on first.
    Jonathan, Zac, and WC are my next three batters. All three of them strike out. Jonathan and WC go down looking at the third strike. The Giants's pitcher throws nine strikes and three balls. Three of those 12 pitches end up at the backstop allowing Shawn to work his way from first to home.
    Bottom of the second Phillies 2, Giants 1
    Matt walks the lead off batter after a 3-1 count. I am hoping that he will settle down a bit. Chris jogs out to the mound to talk to him.
    I don't know what he said but it works.
    Matt strikes out the next batter, and then takes the second one to a full count before getting him too. The third batter goes down with a backwards K on four pitches.
    Top of the Third we are ahead 2 to 1.
    TJ, last in the lineup, leads off with big stand-up double on a 1 and 0 pitch.
    Now we are back at the top of our batting order.
    Matt takes a ball and then puts a hard grounder back to the mound. He gets thrown out on a not so close play at first but advances the runner.
    CJ is up. He is a smart hitter and almost always takes the first pitch. He does just that this time as well. It is a ball. He smacks the next one to third base, it will be a long throw to first and he beats it out. It is a bad throw that scoots out to right field, CJ pushes it all the way to third while TJ makes it home.
    All my parents are screaming now. Things are getting hot.
    Joel is up, and everyone is yelling at him to bring CJ home. Joel works it to two balls and two strikes and goes down swinging hard.
    Two outs, with a man on third.
    Chris is up and the pitcher just stands there looking. Chris takes a couple of hard practice swings.
    Chris gets five pitches. Two of them are foul balls, one of which takes off behind our dugout, into the woods, never to be seen again. The other one scares the poop out of the T-ball parents sitting in the bleachers on the third base side of the T-ball field. They have their backs to our field and never see what drops from the sky. He takes two balls that are so outside even he doesn't swing at them. The third one that he doesn't swing at is a strike, in the opinion of the umpire anyway, (who, in my opinion must be drunk or blind).
    Chris is really red now. I tell the boys to hit the field.
    Bottom of the Third
    Phillies 3, Giants 1
    Again Matt walks the first batter. This is getting monotonous.
    I once asked my pitchers and players this:
    "What is the most important first pitch in baseball?"
    I got all kinds of answers.
    "Curve."
    "No-fastball, its gotta be a fastball!"
    "Breaking Ball."
    I told them it is a strike. The answer should be obvious. Pitchers need to throw first pitch strikes. I don't care if the batter looks at it, swings and misses it, or fouls it off. I just want the first pitch to be a strike. A pitcher still has the mental advantage, even with a three two count, if the first pitch is a strike.
    Matt has the advantage with the second batter. He throws two strikes and then three balls but the sixth pitch freezes the batter.
    One out, two to go, play is at second.
    The third batter is the same sad story with one different player, another walk. Now the Giants have runners on first and second.
    Hot and Cold Matt, you never know which one is throwing next. The hot one hurls the next five pitches. He gets another one looking.
    Two down, one to go and we are back at the top of the Giants order.
    After the next three pitches, I know Matt is trying to kill me. They are all balls. The batter has the brains to take the next pitch. Matt fires it down the middle for strike one. Next pitch is off the corner on the outside. Chris never moves his glove. The Ump calls it a ball. It looks just like the last strike he called on Chris. As the batter is trotting to first and the bases load, I am reminding myself that it is against the rules to kill an umpire.
    Matt throws a high ball to the next batter, and Chris stands to get it. He tosses it back to the mound while my parents and players are yelling encouraging things to Matt. I could use a few good words myself about now.
    Matt throws a low outside pitch. The batter golfs it back to the mound and it makes this high bounce straight up off that darn rubber. Matt can't field it. Runner is very safe.
    The Third Base runner scores and we still have bases loaded.
    "Play is at any base!" Joel, at short, yells to the rest of the infield.
    My outfielders are asleep, because nothing has gone out there yet.
    Matt fires off another pitch, inside, at the knees of the batter. He hits it right back to Matt who gets it on one bounce and throws to first.
    Thank God, inning over. Joel needs to start warming up.
    Top of the Forth
    Phillies 3, Giants 2
    Little Jeffrey is up again. I can count on one hand the number of times Jeffery has been on base. He plays outfield and I am lucky if he is looking at home plate when the batter hits the ball.
    Today, however, he seems to be getting into it a bit more. I just wish he would swing the darn bat.
    He hits the first pitch. It spins high up on the first base side and smacks the bleachers right next to his dad...You would have thought it was a home run. Every one rooting for the Phillies starts yelling like they have lost their minds.
    I think the noise must have unnerved the pitcher because he throws four straight balls. Jeffery struts to first base like he owns the world.
    Shawn is next. He takes the pitcher to a full count then goes down looking.
    Jonathan stands by the plate and glares at the pitcher while he takes three balls, two strikes (in some kind of order) and then stares at the last pitch, a pretty strike.
    Two down. Man the bottom of my order doesn't help me very often. Zac is my last hope.
    Sometimes things are hopeless. Five pitches later, Diane my scorekeeper draws a backwards K next to Zac.
    Three down without trying to foul off the last strike, come on, give me a break guys!
    Bottom of the Forth
    Phillies 3, Giants 2
    Joel is nice and warmed up. I watch the players as they move out on the field, grinning as they run. They believe in Joel. He rarely walks a batter. He makes them work for it. I hear the Parents saying "We got em now."
    Maybe, but I don't want to let up. Joel knows that and he reminds his team not to let up as they run past him. "Good boy," I think to myself.
    Joel wastes no time. He hurls at the Giants number 4 hitter, three inside fastballs waist high. He freezes the guy in his cleats. His bat never moves.
    The Second batter takes a swing at all three pitches but gets nothing but air.
    Two down, one to go.
    The next batter up catches everyone by surprise. He bunts to the first base side (it could have been an accident) on the very first pitch. WC, now catching, can move pretty fast when he wants to, scoops it up and throws it to the stretched out TJ at first, just in the nick of time.
    The forth inning is over, pretty darn quick if you ask me.
    Top of the fifth and my summer boys are up again. I look though the dugout fence at their hot and sweaty faces. I tell these great kids of mine that Joel needs some protection. Get him some runs.
    Chris yells "What's rule number 2?!!!"
    "Don't let up! Don't let up!"
    WC leads off.
    WC is a short stocky kid who doesn't like batting in the bottom of the order. Most of the time I put him in the ninth spot. He can hit and he can get a walk. The only bad thing is that he has a habit of throwing his bat. The first time the umps will issue a warning, the second time they will call him out. WC throws his bat at least once a game but if he gets a hit and controls himself he can get us back to the top of our order and when that happens WC will usually score a run. Today WC is not batting at the bottom but we still need him to do his magic.
    WC likes to swing his bat, so he fouls a few pitches and makes the pitcher work until the count is three and two. On the next pitch he sends a blooper over the third baseman's head, runs three steps, drops his bat and makes it to first base. It is obvious that he likes the sound of his team's cheers.
    TJ comes up. TJ gets more walks than anyone on the team. He knows that it his job to get on base so he is an extremely patient batter.
    He forces the pitcher to go to another full count but comes out on the losing end this time.
    Ian, who came to the game during previous inning is up now. Ian is my youngest player and is scared stiff of the ball. If he stays in the batter's box and gives the pitcher any kind of challenge we will be doing good. He manages to get a piece of the second pitch. It is the first time he puts the bat on the ball during a game. I am proud of him even when he misses the next two.
    Two outs with one on, but we make it back to the top of the lineup.
    As Matt steps out of our dugout I stop him and call Joel over.
    "What do you guys think of the pitcher?" I ask.
    "He's throwing a lot of pitches, most of them balls. He looks nervous or something," is Joel's response. Matt nods in agreement.
    "We will try to make him work a little harder." I look over at Matt. "Play with his head a bit, step out between pitches, fix your gloves, or adjust your helmet, make him think about his next pitch longer than he wants to. Got that?"
    "Okay Coach."
    Matt walks over to the plate just as my friend the ump impatiently yells "Batter Up!"
    Maybe Matt didn't get it, I don't know. He hits the first pitch for a single. Okay, I'll take it anyway I can get it.
    CJ is up next. He fouls the first pitch and then takes the next two. The count is 1 and 2 when the next pitch comes straight at him. I know he's going to duck but he turns around and takes it right in the middle of his back. He drops his bat, bends his back one direction and then the other, groaning and moaning. The ump asks CJ if he his okay. CJ says he can still play. He hobbles to first. I swear he gave me a sideways grin as he passes me.
    That did it. We now have the bases loaded with two outs. Joel is now in the box. He has that look in his eye. He wants more than just a base hit, he wants extra bases, as many as he can get. I know what he wants. He wants the biggest home run you can get. Joel wants a Grand Slam.
    Sometimes you almost get what you want.
    The Giants pitcher was just too nervous. His first pitch is in the dirt, the catcher scrambles and WC steals home while Matt and CJ advance a base.
    We have a two run lead with one inning to go, plus there is a time limit, but at this point that is way off yet.
    The Giants coach calls his pitcher over to the third base path.
    I can guess what he is saying. "It's okay; this is still anybody's game. Just go out there and throws strikes."
    Yep, that's what I would have said with all the confidence that I could muster, while hoping that it works.
    It does for awhile, sort of.
    Joel looks at two close balls then fouls off two pitches in a row and then looks at one more ball. It's a full count. He then hits the next pitch hard down the third base side where at the last second it curves foul.
    I think to myself that the pitcher better not throw one there again. He does.
    Joel kicks and slams it hard. It's a rope over the third baseman's head and keeps going until it rolls into the farthest point in left field that it can go. Joel does not look where that ball lands. From the moment he makes contact his feet start to move toward first. He glances at the first base coach who yells at him to keep going. Joel flies around second, all the time watching TJ's father who is coaching third base. His arm is spinning like a windmill and Joel gets the message.
    All of us are yelling at him.
    "Run Joel, Run!"
    He rounds third into foul territory and keeps on pumping for home. I see the throw being relayed from the outfield and it is going to be close. Joel looks at me for the slide sign. I give it to him, better safe than sorry.
    He slides across the plate with an inside the park homerun, beating the throw by, well, quite a bit. His teammates are yelling at the top of their voices. It is quite a moment.
    The score is now Phillies 7, Giants 2
    "Don't let up!"
    "Don't let up!"
    I did not remind them of rule number two. Chris or someone started that cheer themselves. I don't stop them. They know it is still anybody's game to win.
    I look over at the Giants dugout and almost feel sorry for the coach. The pitcher looks dejected but not defeated. That is good, after all the game ain't over till it's over.
    I herd all the guys back to the dugout as Chris heads to the batter's box. Chris is really pumped up. I can see it in his face. The first pitch comes in low and outside.
    Ball one.
    The pitcher winds up, lets go and the ball follows the same path.
    Ball two.
    Chris steps out of the box, glares at the mound, takes a swing and steps back to the plate.
    The pitcher throws a high breaking ball. It looks like a softball pitch.
    Ball Three.
    Chris gets red in the face and yells.
    "Come on, give me something to hit!"
    I have to do something and do it fast.
    "Time, Blue!"
    The ump calls time and I motion for Chris to come over.
    I lean in close to him.
    "I want you to show a bunt."
    "I don't want to bunt." He responds.
    "I want you to show a bunt and if the pitcher puts it down the middle pull back and kill it. Can you do that?"
    "Fake a bunt? I don't know coach."
    "Hey, batter we don't have all day."
    I push Chris back towards the plate...the ump wants to go home.
    Chris steps back in the batter's box. The throw is a fastball outside. Chris drops his bat and heads for first.
    "Hey batter, that was a strike."
    Slowly Chris turns and looks at the Ump like he is out of his mind. The pitcher starts laughing at him. Chris's face becomes as red as a tomato.
    He goes back to the plate. He takes his stance. Then something clicks. He squares off for a bunt. He shows this great big and very ugly wiggy-waggy bunt. The pitcher looks at Chris like he has gone crazy and fires a fast one right down the fat part of the plate.
    I know what is coming next because I can feel it in the air. The hair on my arms stands up as Chris gets this unmistakable look on his face. It is the look of complete victory. He pulls back and smokes the ball harder than he has ever hit one in his life.
    PING!!!
    That ball heads for dead center field, climbing the whole time. Every eye, both on our field, the T-ball field and the major league field, where the sound of the bat hitting the leather can be heard, is following the path of the ball. They watch it as it bounces off a car in the parking lot way beyond our centerfield fence.
    Chris makes his victory lap around the diamond. My team is going crazy. They meet Chris at home plate, slapping his back.
    Chris finally has his Major League Home run.
    Phillies 8, Giants 2
    But it ain't over till it's over.
  22. -Gramps-
    Nickolas, the family pupster here!
    I asked Dad if he would let me post again. Last time, I hijacked his blog and posted on the sly. This time he said okay.
    I wanted to leave him and Mom a note. They may need what I write here one day.
    I am almost 85 years old now, in relative terms, and so I can say that chances are I have a little bit of time left, but only a little.
    I don't worry about the end of my life. Mom and Dad do that for me. They comment on how white my face is compared to how it used to look. They talk about how slow I am to get up from my nap in front of the TV. They don't like for me to wear myself out going up and down the coach steps.
    They concern themselves with how hot I am, because I pant a lot. Mom bought me this slick blue water-filled pad to help keep me cool. I am not crazy about it but I sleep on it, and that makes her feel better even if it doesn't do much for me.
    They really worry about a tumor that is growing on my left side. They talk about how much they hope it isn't cancer, but if it is, what they can do about it?
    Mom and Dad, especially Dad, could stand to learn a bit about life from me.
    Like I said, I don't worry. I don't worry about that lump or much of anything else.
    I don't give much thought to the squirrels that I can't chase around the back yard anymore. Actually, I never worried about them when I was younger, either. The moment one takes off up a tree, that's it for me. I find something else to think about-like breakfast.
    I can say for sure that life is far too short to spend time worrying about anything, except dinner.
    I love both of my people a lot. They have always given me a good life. I still have a good life even if things are changing. I can't hear much of anything anymore. I used to hear the brakes on Dad's old truck three blocks away. Mom was always amazed when I went to the door to wait for him, long before he pulled up in front of the house. Now I am sometimes surprised by him at the door instead of the other way around. But that is okay. I still follow him to his office desk, furiously wagging my tail, and he never fails to give my back a good scratch.
    Sometimes Dad is so tense when he gets home at the end of the day. I know it is my job to do something to help him, so giving the dog a good back scratching does as much, if not more, for Dad as it does for me.
    There was a time when Dad and Mom were saying something about Dad having a kidney stone. Dad was in pretty bad shape. I saw him on his knees next to his bed. He was sweating and moaning. The pain was so intense that Dad was starting to panic. I jumped up on the bed to be near him. I kissed his nose and then lay down.
    He put his hands on me and buried his face in my side. I did what I was supposed to do, I soaked up his pain. It took a little while but Dad calmed down and I could sense that he started to feel a bit better. I usually stick close to Mom, but Dad needed me, so I stayed right there with him for the rest of the day.
    During our last trip out in our coach (I like to call it the Bus) Mom and Dad watched this movie about a person who helps to heal horses. This person is called a horse whisperer. Dad says that I am a Human Whisperer. I am not sure what that means, but if being a Human Whisperer means being there for my people, reminding them that life should be lived mostly in the present and that love and kindness are what keeps us going, then that is what I am.
    I love my people. They are like gods to me. They are bigger and stronger than me and I trust them to look after me. I hope my love for them is a reminder that there is a greater power that is stronger and bigger than they are who loves them, too. I think it does.
    Many years ago we were on a camping trip, in a tent; this was before we got our fancy bus. It was a beautiful fall day and Dad grilled T-bone steaks for their dinner. The smell was great. I knew that they would share the best part of these wonderful smelling things with me.
    They would give me the bones.
    I was so excited to get one. Dad looked at me, happily chomping away, and then he looked at the mountains around us and the woods with all its bright colors.
    "This is just a bone," he said.
    "What?" Mom asked. "What are you talking about?"
    "This life and this world is just a bone" Dad said."This is just a taste of what God has in store for those who love Him. We should learn to love life and Him more."
    When the end of my life finally comes, just before I take my last nap, I hope the last thing I see is the love for me in the eyes of my people. I hope the last thing I feel is my Mom rubbing my head and my Dad scratching my back. I hope the last thing I do for them is to whisper that I love them and that life is good, keep on living it well, and thanks for giving me such a good one.
    Nickolas
  23. -Gramps-
    Today I would liked to have posted a blog about how much fun it has been since Diane and I retired. I wanted to tell you about our adventures in the coach, describe all the new sites we have seen etc..
    http://www.myrandomviews.com/blog/2015/7/10/the-human-whisperer
  24. -Gramps-
    It feels good to be writing again. The last couple of weeks have been very busy for me. ….I know, some people don’t have the time to read about my life; they have one of their own. That is what one person told me in the form of a reply after I posted a blog entry. I had to ask myself, why did they read it then?
    Well this week has been phone system training classes and meetings of all sorts. Last week Diane and I spent three really great days at our home away from home at the Deer Creek Motorcoach resort. We were there by ourselves the first night. The second day our friends Neal and Shirley arrived. They spent one night. We went out to dinner together and talked about the resort, caught up on what all the other owners were up to. The next night, Sunday night to be exact, we went out to dinner with Laura, Barry the developer’s wife. That sounds funny. Laura is just as responsible for Deer Creek being there as anyone else and I thank her for that.
    Our time there was really good. Teddy, our new Cocker Spaniel, for those of you who don’t know, really took to the place and every one took to him. Teddy really enjoyed a long hike we took on part of the New River Trail that runs through Galax. It was about a four or five mile hike and it took a major part of the wind out of his sails. It tired me out as well.
    Sunday morning was windy. I managed to get in a round of golf and then I pulled a large multi celled, multi colored, nylon octagon box kite out of the basement of the coach. This kite is really big…when assembled it will fill up the back of a Jeep Waggoner. I know, because I tried to stow it in the back of one and I had to semi-take it apart, the kite that is, to make it fit.
    The kite has about thirty five pounds of lift when there is enough wind to get it off the ground. There was more than enough wind this particular day and when it gusted, there was too much. I found that out the hard way. At about 300 feet in the air the seventy five pound test line the kite was at the end of….broke. The kite blew away from me at a high rate of speed as it slowly drifted back down to earth. It landed in a very large rolling cow pasture that is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. I went after it as fast as I could, rewinding my line as I ran. I lost sight of it. I ran back to our site and hopped in the car, drove to the pasture but I couldn’t find the kite. Which hill did it blow over? I drove back to the coach where Diane was standing outside. She saw the kite go down and she and Teddy were waiting for me. I grabbed a pair of binoculars, maybe they will help.
    Back to the pasture we went, on foot this time. We walked around to a gate, which I climbed over. I started wondering around looking in the direction the wind was blowing, trying to find this very large but now invisible kite. As I was meandering around, the owner of the pasture was driving toward me in his Jeep. I ran over as he rolled down the window.
    “I think I know where it is…hop in”
    He obviously knew what I was looking for. Greg, that’s his name, was watching the ACC championship game and happened to glance out his big window just in time to see my kite fall to earth.
    After a short drive and that is better than walking in a heavily used cow pasture, we found it in a low creek bed. It was unharmed.
    During this time Diane was having a conversation with some people across the street from the gate; Teddy and a small dog were getting to know each other.
    Greg taxied me and my kite to the parking lot of our clubhouse, where Diane was standing on the mini golf course.
    She was as happy to see my seventy dollar kite as I was.
    So there you have it…our Deer Creek adventure in a nut shell.
    The next morning we were off to Greensboro. We arrived at about eleven where we dropped off our coach at the Workhorse repair center. The water pump, along with the fan clutch assembly is or was under a recall. Also the dash air conditioner was no longer working. The techs would need at least a couple of days to fix all these problems so we decided to stay with my Mom and Dad for a couple of days. We made a quick trip to Camping World were we spent a surprisingly small amount of money and then made the drive to my folks place.
    Two days turned into four. That seems to happen a lot, time expanding itself, when a coach needs to be repaired. All three of us stayed in my Dad’s cabin. It was a bit more primitive than our coach but it still felt like we were rving it….sort of. The only bad thing that happened was the cabin had a new water heater. The thermostat was set a bit too low. It had about two minutes worth of hot water. Diane found that out real quick. Have you seen the shower scene in Ground Hog day? It sounded a bit like that only with a higher pitch! Before my shower I grabbed a screwdriver out of the car and turned up the temp.
    We visited some cousins while we were there. My cousin Sonja has a really nice huge house than Diane had never been in before, so we got the tour. Great place, but I prefer something smaller, with wheels.
    Mom and Dad took us to this really good Greek/Italian place in Lexington called Cristo’s. I had roasted stuffed green peppers with a Greek Salad. Diane had beef gyros that looked pretty tasty. Dad provided most of our other meals, which were good as well.
    We didn’t do much while visiting besides sit and talk. The situation in Japan was the biggest topic of conversation. I thought that owning a motorhome is a good thing if you have a natural disaster that wipes out your stick house. Of course you would have to have a lot of advance warning in order to drive the rv to someplace safe. We have, on occasion, had large hurricanes hit this area and after the last big one I was impressed by my neighbors living in a Bounder while the rest of us suffered in the heat, with no power to take a hot shower or have a cold beer. Not long after that we bought our first coach, also a Bounder. There had to be a connection.
    Speaking of connections. The day before we left to pick up our coach, Janis and Gary called. They were on thier way to A Thousand Trails resort not far from Lexington. They wanted to know if we were still at Galax. When we found out we were just about a half hour away from each other we made plans for dinner at the best place in town. So that night we went back to Cristo's for the salad and pizza buffet.
    It was good to see them again. We had a great visit which I appreciated very much. They are heading out west and we don't know when we will see them again. I wish I could follow them out there...wherever there is.
    After four days and a number of phone calls back and forth, we were notified that our coach was repaired almost. A part for the AC was in but not installed. Diane needed to get back home because our daughter Jeri was flying up from Florida to attend a wedding in Richmond. Diane was going to go with her.
    So Diane dropped me off at the dealer, then she and the pup drove home. Five hours later I followed all by myself in the coach.
    It was a piece of cake without her, almost. I made a couple of wrong turns that I will blame on the Ms Garmin. I arrived home around nine thirty at night. Diane may have been worried (she called me twice to see where I was) but I did just fine, don’t let her tell you different.
    The next morning Diane and Jeri took off for Richmond, Joel left for Fredericksburg, and that left Teddy and me to fend for ourselves. We ate, we slept, and I looked after my grand boys for a night. We did just fine. Don’t let Diane tell you any different!
    Gramps
  25. -Gramps-
    It was an amazingly (is that a word?) fun thing to watch that ball zoom over the fence, but I, we, still have a game to win.

    The Last Inning (The Giants and the Phillies-Part Two)
    Once again, I have to corral all my players back into the dugout. They are still whooping and hollering and Chris is really pleased with himself.
    "Did you see that coach, did you see that? Blam! Right over the fence. Sorry I hit your van, coach."
    I hadn't noticed that the ball bounced off MY car!
    "Hey, that's okay," I said. "I'm just glad that you hit it out of the park, it was great. Now take a seat and let's win this game."
    Chris ducks inside of the dugout, but before he sits down he grabs the wire fence, gives it a good shake like a caged animal and yells at the Giant's pitcher.
    "Hey Pitch! That's what you get for laughing at me!"
    The whole park hears that outburst.
    I can't let that go, so I turn around.
    "That is not necessary, Chris. We don't gloat. It is not good sportsmanship. You will apologize to the pitcher now."
    "Sorry Pitch!" Chris yells again.
    "Coach, you need to get your team under control!"
    "No problem Blue, I am taking care of it."
    I ask myself, "What is the ump's problem? He seems to be a bit slow today."
    "Chris, after the game you make sure you shake the Pitcher's hand. Understand?"
    Chris, looking a bit deflated, sits down.
    The ump walks over and hands something to Chris.
    It is the home run ball.
    "Great hit, kid."
    Chris's face lights up.
    "Thanks, Ump!"
    The ump nods and says "Batter up!"
    I send Jeffery to the plate and tell him to go get a hit.
    Jeffery, grinning, jogs over to the batter's box.
    "Play Ball!" yells the ump as he pulls down his mask.
    Jeffery stands there and takes six pitches, three are strikes, without moving his bat a bit.
    Bottom of the fifth
    Phillies 8, Giants 2
    I do not want to let my team relax too much. This is Little League. Earlier in the season the Cubs scored seven runs on us in the top of the first. We beat them 20 to seven. We could have scored more if the 13-run mercy rule had not stopped us. Things can happen, so I just want to shut the Giants down and end this.
    As Joel heads out to the mound I tell him to keep on pitching the same way he's been doing it. He nods at me.
    The Giants leadoff is a big lefthander. Joel throws the first pitch a bit outside, and the batter fouls it back. Joel throws to the same spot. This time the kid looks at it.
    Ball one.
    Chris, who is now catching for Joel, shifts and gives Joel an inside target. Joel throws; the batter swings and takes it for a base hit over CJ's head to right-center field. Both Jeffery and Ian make a mad dash for the ball.
    I swear, because they argue over who is going to get it. By the time they figure it out, the runner is way past first.
    Ian tosses to CJ, who turns toward third, but there is no play.
    The leadoff is safely on third.
    "Shake it off Joel, no big deal, just get the batter!"
    Giving up a triple does not faze Joel. He throws his next three pitches for strikes. The batter goes down looking at the third one.
    One down and two to go. Play is at first but we have to guard the plate.
    The next batter goes for the first pitch. He hits a high pop over the first base line. Chris is on his feet in a second, follows the ball and catches it in front of the bleachers. He turns and looks at the third base runner.
    Two outs and one to go.
    I don't know how Joel is doing it, but he bears down and throws three hard inside fastballs. He makes the batter look like a deer caught in the headlights. Three pitches, three strikes, backwards K.
    The Inning is over.
    That triple was the best hit the Giants have had all day and Joel made sure it counted for nothing.
    Top of the Sixth
    The Score is still Phillies 8, Giants 2.
    Shawn leads off. He fouls the first pitch (good for him!) and then takes four straight pitches, all balls.
    Jonathan is up next. First pitch is a ball, second pitch outside for ball two. The third pitch hits my batter right in the helmet. It doesn't bug him a bit as he jogs happily to first.
    The pitcher and Zac get into a bit of battle. Zac fouls off the first two. The pitcher throws two for two balls. Zac fouls off another one and the pitcher heaves two more pitching errors. Zac heads to first.
    WC virtually repeats Zac's at bat and earns a walk with no place to put him.
    Shawn comes home.
    Phillies 9, Giants 2
    TJ walks on five pitches, and Jonathan scores run number 10.
    Ian, well Ian just stands there and swings and misses the last pitch he gets, the third one.
    The Giants have one out on us. They are now facing the top of our order with bases loaded. Not good for them. Not good at all.
    The Giants pitcher knows things are not good and that knowledge must make him really nervous. His first pitch hits Matt in the side, and he reaches first as Zac crosses home plate.
    Phillies 11, Giants 2.
    Matt is on first, TJ on second and good ole WC on third. CJ, who is on deck, moves to the plate.
    I am standing behind the backstop just in front of the first base side dugout. I can see WC on third base and I am watching him and my other runners. They are set and ready to run on contact.
    CJ can hit and I know he wants this one bad. He fouls the first pitch. He hits the second one to the outfield past first base but it lands foul.
    Everyone on my side of the field is yelling so loud it hurts my ears.
    The next throw is in the dirt. The catcher scrambles for the ball. The pitcher runs in to cover the plate.
    My third base coach is waving WC home, but he hesitates.
    What is he waiting for? Run!
    WC breaks for home but that seconds hesitation may cost him.
    The catcher throws the ball to the pitcher, who steps in front of the plate just as WC runs into him. They go down together. The pitcher comes up showing the ball.
    "He's out!" Yells blue.
    WC gets up and starts arguing with the ump.
    "He was holding me!"
    I walk over as my third base coach comes running in, grabs the umpire and points back to the Giant on third base.
    "Ump, he grabbed my runner's shirt! WC would have been safe!"
    The Giants coach is now out of his dugout and we have a real "situation" here.
    "Come on, Ump, this is crazy."
    My base coach is not going to take this.
    "Ump, I am telling you. My guy was interfered with."
    The Ump looks at everyone.
    "I didn't see it. The runner's out!"
    WC looks very unhappy. He pulls off his helmet and tosses it toward third base.
    The Ump takes one look at that and tosses him out of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct.
    My base coach just shakes his head. My parents and players are booing the umpire.
    I tell everyone on the bench we still have one out left and the bases are loaded.
    I tell WC that he did great the whole game, but he should not throw his helmet or his bat.
    He tells me he is sorry.
    I was feeling bad about the Giants situation, but after treating WC like that, I have lost my sympathy.
    First base is open, with two outs.
    I grab CJ.
    "Look, it's 1 and 2, with two outs. Get on first anyway you can."
    "You got it, Coach."
    CJ is a team player. I know he wants the big home run, but now he settles down to business.
    The pitcher doesn't. He throws four straight balls. CJ is on first, bases are loaded again.
    "Way to watch em CJ!"
    Joel is up. He wants to round the bases and he will wait for the pitcher to make a mistake again.
    It is a battle, but Joel has the first pitch advantage. It is a ball way outside. The second one Joel fouls off. He fouls off the third. The count is 1 and 2. The fourth pitch comes in, low and inside, ball two.
    Joel steps out of the box. He adjusts his gloves, takes a couple of swings and steps back in. Here comes the pitch, way high for Ball three.
    The Giants coach calls time. His pitcher walks over to the base path. I can't hear what is being said but both the coach and his player look agitated.
    They don't want another walk, they only need one out, so they need to put the ball in play and get the easy out.
    Here we are again, 3 and 2. Pitcher throws and Joel fouls it. Pitcher throws again, same result.
    The tension is thick in the air, spectators on both sides are yelling to their players. Everyone is on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next pitch.
    This game is really fun. My son is up to bat. What could be better than that?
    The next pitch is slow and hangs over the plate. Joel hits it and runs for first. My base runners take off at the same time. It is a long, slow fly into left right field. It lands between the two outfielders; both are running for the ball. By the time they get there Joel is halfway to second base. TJ crosses home plate. The Giants second baseman is frozen on the base path. Joel pushes him out of the way and crosses second. Matt, between second and third, needs to pick it up or Joel is going to run into him and CJ. I see the throw coming in as the second baseman wakes up. He takes a couple of steps into the outfield to catch it. Joel is almost at third. Matt and CJ make it home.
    My players start pouring out of the dugout.
    The Giants bench is yelling to the infield.
    "Throw it home! Throw it home!"
    Joel rounds third. He might not make it! The throw comes in but it is way too high. It sails over the catcher's head.
    The Phillies rush home plate and surround Joel as he crosses it. The folks in the bleachers are jumping up and down. The guys practically carry Joel off the field.
    Phillies 15, Giants 2.
    We have a 13-run lead. Mercy Rule is in effect. The game is over.
    Not quite yet.
    The Giants coach rushes out of the dugout yelling at his catcher, who has retrieved the ball, to tag the plate. He is claiming Joel didn't touch home. Joel says he did. Joel's team was all around him, so I couldn't see the plate at all.
    The Ump just stands there.
    "Blue, I'm telling you he didn't touch the plate." says the Giants coach.
    I am thinking that I would never pull this kind of stunt on his team. There is no way that the ump is going to call out a kid who just scored an inside the park grand slam.
    "Runner's out!" The Ump yells.
    "Come on Ump, he ran all over that plate and everybody knows it!" My third base coach is getting mad.
    The Ump has made his call.
    "Play Ball!"
    Back in the dugout I lean down to Joel.
    "You did step on the plate didn't you?"
    "Yea coach, I did. I know I got a home run ... but its okay, we are having fun, let's just play ball."
    "So what you are saying is; let's give them one more at bat and show em what we are made of?"
    "Yea, coach, we don't let up, Joel will get em!" says Matt.
    I am very proud of my team and we are having fun.
    What could be better than that?
    "Okay. Phillies hit the field!"
    They run out of the dugout with a yell. A couple of parents come over to me, including Diane.
    I walk with them back to the bleachers and shrug my shoulders at the parents.
    "Hey coach, what are going to do about that?" one father asks me.
    "Nothing, the guys want to keep playing."
    They did. With his team yelling the whole time and the Phillies fans adding to the noise, Joel worked three Giants batters, including two from the top of the order, to a 2 and 2 count before he struck them all out. The last two went down without swinging. With the last out the team gives Joel a hugh cheer.
    The game between the Giants and the Philles is now officially over.
    Phillies win 14 to 2.
    The scorekeeper from the Giants walks over to Diane to compare scores.
    Diane looks at him.
    "I don't know how you are scoring it, but my son got a grand slam."
    "Yeah, he did and he also got three up and three down, quite a kid you have there."
    "Thank you" is her smiling response.
    Joel got his grand slam (off the record), and Chris got his big home run. I coached a game that, obviously, I would never forget.
    Years later, a few days after Joel was graduated from William and Mary, Diane, Joel, Nickolas and myself were staying in our motor coach at the Stone Mountain RV Resort outside Atlanta, Georgia. One day, during our stay, at around 5 p.m. Joel and I were sitting just above first base at Turner Stadium (named for my old boss) in Atlanta. We were watching the Braves take on the Florida Marlins. It wasn't a very exciting game but it was a beautiful June night. Like that time from years before, I was at a baseball game with my son. We were having fun.
    What could be better than that?

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