Daily Archives: July 22, 2010
The Rally – Day 1…
After we got parked here on Tuesday, I was curious how they were supplying us with power. It turns out that rather than powering us directly from the mains, they’re using portable generators set up around the park.
These diesel generators put out 240V at 240 Amps. There’s also another generator behind this one.
.
They then split the 2 phases into 2 – 120 V lines at 240 Amps each.
This means that each generator can power 16 coaches with 30 amps each.
Really neat setup.
About 10 am we headed over to the Expo Hall to start making our way thru the vendor area. They have several hundred vendors here, with a lot that I haven’t seen before at other rallies.
I took along two bundles of Gypsy Journals with me and gave them to vendors that know Nick so they could give them out to customers.
One of the vendors was from the Province of Saskatchewan, and was giving out tourist info on the area. Saskatchewan is one of the provinces we haven’t visited yet, so we picked up some booklets.
Here’s Jan chatting up a handsome Mountie.
About noon we took a break and grabbed a lunch of hot dogs and a pretzel from one of the vendors.
Then at 1 pm Jan attended a seminar on Velcro. I went back to the rig and took a nap. I think I probably had the best time. Velcro? Really?
At 3pm I met back up with Jan and we went to Mike and Terri Church’s talk on RVing in Alaska. Ninety minutes later we were homesick for the place and ready to hit the AlCan heading north again. It was nice to see so many of the places we’d been, and to see all the places we’d missed.
Maybe in a couple of years.
At 4:30 pm we drove over to the nearby Cottage Inn, a restaurant that we passed the other night and noticed how busy it was. It’s a small place, very popular with the locals, and has been owned by the same family since 1929. And the food was excellent!
Home cooking at its best.
Getting back to the fairground, we ran into Lynn and Dave Cross that we had last seen at the Gypsy Journal rally in Yuma, AZ this past March. Lynn and Jan worked the registration table together.
We asked if they were going to be at the Elkhart rally, but they said they were going to be taking a TRACKS RV caravan tour of National Parks. Sounds like fun.
Tonight’s entertainment was Bob Newhart, but first we started off with some rousing songs from a local choir, Master’s Men.
And then it was time for Bob. And he was hilarious! He started off telling a story about how in the ‘60’s he decided to take his family along in an RV as he crossed the country to perform a concert. It sounded like a combination of “RV” the movie,and “The Long, Long Trailer” with Lucy and Desi, and ended with him scraping the air conditioner off the roof as he arrived at the hotel where he was performing.
He finished up with one of his famous routines about a driving instructor with a really bad student. He mentioned in the setup that it was a woman driver, and got some boos from women in the audience.
So he said “OK. How about we made it a Chinese driver. Will that make you happy?” So he sat down and started the routine…in Chinese!
After about 30 seconds of incomprehensible dialog, he looked at the audience and said ”OK. We can go on like this for another 8 minutes, or it can be a woman driver. You chose.”
The audience roared. And it was now a woman driver.
Bob put on a great show. It’s hard to believe he’s almost 81.
Leaving the concert hall, I got this shot of the former Six Flags – Kentucky Kingdom amusement park that is part of the fairgrounds. But it didn’t seem to be open.
A little Googling told me that back in February of this year, Six Flags and the Expo had been negotiating a new lease, and Six Flags had wanted some better terms because with the bad economy they were losing money on the park. Apparently this is the only park where they lease the property and don’t own it outright.
So when the Expo dug in their heels and refused to renegotiate the terms, Six Flags called their bluff and did not open the park this year. They just shut it down and left the Expo holding the bag.
And now the Expo is really hurting, because they not only don’t get the lease money, they also have lost the parking fees which they got. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Tomorrow it’s more seminars, more vendors, and Tanya Tucker for entertainment. Sounds great!
It’s also supposed to be 98 degrees here tomorrow, so we’ll see how the 30 amps and one A/C works out.
Quote of the day:
Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person
q
