Warm Welcomes at the Tampa RV Show

Sarasota, FL        High:  71    Low:  48

Welcome to the 2013 Tampa RV Show! We hadn't even gotten inside the ticket gates when we spotted this beautiful coach parked outside. It's on a Prevost chassis, and had the Angola Coach logo on its side. Sparky's last hometown residence, Angola, IN had a custom coach company called Angola Coach that takes older coaches on a Prevost chassis and does a complete refurbishing of the motorhome. This one was so beautiful with its murals on the rear and sides. It was fun to see a coach that had been done in the small town of Angola, IN. Sparky thinks the company was bought out (?) and is now called Panterra Coach and Conversions, still located in Angola, IN.

Attending the Tampa RV show at the fairgrounds is starting to feel like Homecoming Welcome Week. This is our second year attending and it's really fun!...Good friends we met last year, Nick and Ritchie Boersma, made sure we connected at the show today...They introduced us to some of their new friends, Dave and Kathleen Millross...

We ran into campground managers that we had gotten to know well last year...Amy, at Florida Grande in Webster, FL, and Beth, at Sunny Brook in South Haven, MI, two wonderful places to spend quality time in top notch resorts but quite different atmospheres. These two gals are two resort managers who always have a smile for their guests and were really glad to see us today.

Sparky got a sign for the yard--we've been wanting one for a long time...You see these signs all over the place, especially here in Florida. Guess everybody gets them at the Tampa RV show. This size sign was 32.00 and is made from vinyl, so it should hold up really well. The ladies that design and paint them said that the only product you should use for sun/weather protection on them is Crystal Clear varnish spray by Rustoleum. Any other finish might turn yellow over time.

Sparky signed up for every available free stay, special deal and email list she could find. We'll see how that turns out! Lots of spam, probably....But there were lots of places to sign up for freebie stays....Thousand Trails/Encore booth had some GREAT "spin the wheel" deals. We gathered a FULL bag of literature to sort through to dream and plan on rainy days as we worked our way through the booths.

One of Eldy's favorite booths was the "Little Giant" ladder system. Santa didn't bring a Little Giant ladder for Eldy this year, so he's just going to have to bite the bullet and get one. But we didn't get enough information on them today, we're going to just have to go back and catch these guys again tomorrow 'cuz we didn't catch the price today.

There were barbershop quartet guys performing, and other strolling musicians.. Sparky LOVES bagpipers and the St. Andrews Piper Band was playing through the fairgrounds. Love the drum major..Poor guys, we felt sorry for them. They had to be so HOT and uncomfortable!

This troubadour parked himself in front of a Millenium coach....

Speaking of Millenium-- a high end RV company that builds on a Prevost chassis --for discriminating buyers with a LOT of cash to burn...like a million or two....Sparky went inside one and was amazed at the amenities inside and out. One of them had its own pressure washing system built in the cavernous bay....Heated floors.....And look at these sink fixtures....WOW!

They still are too glitzy and gaudy for us, even if we did have the money, we wouldn't pick one of these.....

We got some answers at the show today on the dilemma of what to do with your engine when sitting for long periods of time. Are you supposed to start it up? Add algae killer? Leave it be? And Freightliner said, NOTHING IS RECOMMENDED OR NEEDED as long as you purchase fuel at high volume service stations. Starting your engine and letting it idle could cause the engine to go into the REGEN process (this is on a Freightliner/Cummins system) and that's not a good thing to happen when you are sitting on a grass site. The REGEN process generates temperatures of over 1300 degrees at the part of the exhaust system containing the diesel particulate filter. A fire could start under the coach if you are sitting on a grass site. Stated extremely simply, the REGEN process goes something like this:  Your special engine has a diesel particulate filter or DPF that acts like a “soot catcher”. After catching all this black soot for over a period of time it will then “cough” it all out in one go in a high heat burning process, the REGEN process, a method of "steam cleaning" your exhaust. If it has been a while since you have driven and maintained speeds above 40 miles an hour, then your DPF will not be able to clear itself of the soot, and resulting error messages and engine lockup might occur.

We enjoyed ourselves today at the Tampa RV show, but still suffering from colds and coughs, we got tired quickly.  It was HOT and STEAMY inside the exhibition halls. Many vendors and RV lookers were sweating. We didn't really look at many rigs and that is half the fun! Even if you have a nice coach, you never get tired of looking at what's out there, what the new features and models offer, so we think back we will go tomorrow......Hope we will see some more of our blogging friends!

Thanks, everyone, for the wonderful suggestions on how to beat this awful cold and cough we both have...We really appreciate each suggestion and between the two of us, are going to try different things. Course by the time we work through all the suggestions, we'll hopefully be over the "coughing crud" and we won't know which one really was the winner!  

Eldo and Sparky at School

Elkhart, IN    High:  49     Low:  36       Br-r-r-r-r-r!

Yesterday we went to the grandsons' elementary schools for Grandparents' Day. It's with always mixed emotions when Sparky and Eldo head back to school. We look at it from two different viewpoints. Eldy thinks back about his school experiences as a student, Sparky thinks about her experiences as a teacher when walking into a school. Sparky gets excited to be back in a school, Eldo, not so much so.  :-)  But the grandkids are always glad to see us.

Connor and Papa

Because there's always a student who has no grandparents there and feels badly,  and Connor and Trevor have two of us there when we show up, Sparky always goes to the underdog to help out...the one kid that looks really sad or is even crying because they don't have anybody there on this special day. And there were at least two or three in both the boys' classes today, so Sparky became a "foster" grandma for a little while today. Trevor and Connor didn't mind...Eldy hadn't seen some of the new technology in the classrooms, like this electronic, interactive whiteboard which now takes the place of chalkboards in the classroom. Sparky really enjoyed this piece of technology in the last couple of years that whiteboards came into use towards the end of her teaching career.

The classrooms were packed! Sparky was shocked at that, because parent/grandparent attendance at school functions where she used to work over the years was often poor. LOTS of grandparents in both classrooms today!

We went to Trevor's Grandparents' Day first...Trevor had a hard time putting his Pokemon book down during a lull in the craft activity. Papa is a little peeved....Trevor's teacher reminded him that he doesn't get to see his Papa every day!

Trevor became a little more involved with Papa at that point.....

Trevor's class did a little song about vowels and there was a little disagreement over who was going to start it off....But they got the job done!

Everybody did a little craft activity and had to write a little something about their grandparents. The boys did a great job. And of course, we had to go visit the school Book Fair, which involves a struggle between buying a book that the kids can read versus one they are going to look at the pages and pictures for about five minutes, and then get bored with it. Buy Pokemon Strategies Game book or an age/skill appropriate reader? Sometimes we end up getting one of each! Last year Sparky endured scathing looks from a VERY disappointed Trevor after picking what SHE thought a young boy ought to be reading! After we completed our "homework" for the day, Sparky and Eldo headed over to Elkhart to meet Eldy's friend of 49 years, Mike.

Mike and his wife Barb, shocked the heck out of Eldy with a surprise visitor to their house, another old school chum of almost as many years, Paul and his wife, Sheila. Somehow Sparky missed getting a shot of the couple together, but we all had a wonderful time and amused ourselves in different ways...How many guys does it take to find out the Jimtown's high school football game score?

While the gals played a good old fashioned game of floor checkers....

We had a great time at school today and we had a wonderful time with old friends this evening....As we get older, we appreciate our friends so much more as we are all mindful of how lucky we are to still be here and to be able to share the wonderful connections, memories, and presence of good friends. We treasure these times very much......

Meeting Up With Friends

It was another hot day in Houston and Elkhart, IN, and all over....So what else is new? I went for a bike ride before it got really really hot....You can ride outside the park a little bit and see a little bit of Texas that you don't normally see inside the city limits...Is this a Texas Longhorn? Sure looks like one to me! But what do I know, I'm a city girl!

Another part of the day was spent with the most adorable grandson ever, can't post any more photos publicly in the blog, darn it! -- to respect Kerry's need for privacy and the baby's too. I spent some time helping Kerry with some schoolwork questions, which is right up my alley and snuck a couple of photos in for a special digital scrapbook I am making about the baby. Where there's a will, there's a way, when it comes to Grandma taking photos.

Not having thought about instructional methods for awhile, it was fun to get back into the thought processes at least initially, and give Kerry some spin on educational jargonese in answering essay questions. The questions that she was having to deal with were frustrating to say the least! It reminded me of endless test questions when I was in college, where the questions were ambiguous, and the right answers even more so. What I remember doing to pass some of my classes, was stating the obvious then repeating it in a variety of different ways. I used to be pretty good at writing. I could write a couple of pages and not say a whole lot! (And that's a good thing? wonders E.) Well, it was at the time! I felt badly for her today at having to go through some pretty ridiculous assignments that seem to be missing the point. The questions were poorly stated and not clear at all as to what they were asking! I honestly think that's part of what's wrong with teacher training today, it's not focused and to the point and what young people really need to be successful in today's classroom. I did my best to throw out some educational terms graders love to hear, and hoped it helped.

"What do you think they are asking, Mom?" she'd ask. I gave her my best answer, and she'd decide,
"M-m-m-m-, I don't think that's it," and struggle on to the next one. It made me so glad that I am not having to go through all that rigamarole again and just starting out trying to find a teaching job! That will be the hard part. No school budget is exempt from cuts and more cuts, and it's getting more difficult to stay at one school for any length of time, it seems. I just hope that she will be able to find a job when the time comes, to help support her family.

Dana

Tonight we got to meet up with one of my old schoolmates from grade school, Dana Beebe. We used to sit together through the grades because our last names were alphabetically close together, Baughman and Beebe. He follows our blog and lives in the Houston area. He and his significant other, Stania, met us at our RV park and we went out for a delightful dinner although we unfortunately picked a noisy spot at the Woodlands to eat...Bar Louie's. We had eaten there before, and at a much earlier hour when it was quiet. The place gets transformed at night! The yuppie crowd (do they still use that word?) was there along with VERY loud, live entertainment so we had a hard time hearing each other. But it was great to see them again. Dana does a lot with the Boy Scouts every year, taking groups of boys on Boundary Waters canoe trips out of Ely, MN. Ely is where Sparky learned a whole lot of wonderful skills at Camp Northland, the year she was 13--how to sail a small boat, how to canoe, portage, do crafts, etc. and that experience along with Girl Scouts was one of Sparky's most favorite, positive memories of her childhood. Scouts was where Sparky learned to build a campfire, got to know nature and where she developed a lifelong love of the outdoors. It was also a wonderful antidote for a difficult childhood.

Sparky forgot to get a photo of us at dinner so the photo here is Dana's. Thanks for joining us, Dana and Stania! It was wonderful to see you again. Next time we will pick some place that is more quiet!

Tomorrow, it's the DREADED DENTIST for Sparky......