On The Road Again

As I write this message, we are listening to Willie Nelson. Not the music, but the dried-up old hippie himself, live and in person. For free. Believe it or not, as I type these words, right this very second, Willie is singing "On the Road Again". No shit.

As my faithful readers have realized, I have been grossly negligent by not updating this journal for several weeks. I have no excuse, except that we have been just so busy and worn out. I know, you say: "Hey you guys are retired! You're just tooling around the country in your motorhome, not a care in the world, no schedule, no worries. How can you be too busy and tired to take a few minutes and let your friends know where you are and what you're doing?" Well, the truth is, motorhome rallies are just plain hard work. Between the meals, socials, happy hours, seminars, service calls, more happy hours, concerts and so on, there is not time to do anything else. We have been getting up early, moving all day and then crashing late. We have just finished our third back-to-back rally. We've been rallying straight since July 1. Too much fun! Finally the rallies are over, and now we can spend some time relaxing, recharging and catching up on business. I will give a brief update tonight, and then post some back-dated reports over the next few days.

We are currently camped at the Grand Casino in Hinckley, MN, operated by the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe Indians. We had actually hoped to be at St. Croix State Park about 10 miles to the east, but they were full for the weekend. Dang. So we started looking for other places in that same area, planning to get to St. Croix State Park after the weekend. That's when we discovered the Grand Casino, which it turns out has a pretty nice RV park. When we called, they were full for Friday night (tonight). It turns out Willie Nelson was playing here tonight and the place was sold out. But they did say we could stay in their overflow area for $5.00. Cool. So here we sit on a hill overlooking the amphitheatre, listening to Willie and surfing on the net over the WiFi. Sweet. It's actually been a good week for concerts. Last night we saw Gary Puckett (formerly of the Union Gap) and the night before that we saw the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Last week we saw Janie Frickie. Dorcas scored autographs from all of the members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band . One of the band members liked my T-shirt, which had a cool quote from Benjamin Franklin.

Mini-contest: correctly guess the Ben Franklin quote on the T-shirt and win public recognition in this space. Hint: it involves an alcoholic beverage and a religious figure.

Trivia note: Gary Puckett, Bob Dylan and Roger Maris were all born in Hibbing MN, population 17,071.

That's all for now. I'm going to kick back and enjoy the music.