SERENDIPITY

When we ramble about between Workamping gigs, we rarely have an Internet signal where we park overnight. If we find a library in a small town, we avail ourselves of their computers to do our banking and check our email. Usually, the banking takes five minutes and the email takes way more than the allotted half hour so it is often backed up for a week or more. Sometimes, we get lucky and hit a larger town’s library that offers a WIFI connection, usually for free. We make a point to purchase a couple of paperbacks from their sales as a way of making a donation.

So there we were Friday afternoon, in Casa Grande, AZ’s beautiful library and I am doing a quick zip through the Inbox. After discarding 37 really important Viagra, free laptop, and proven money making schemes I find all the jokes and forwards that arrived even though I’ve told everyone I’d be offline. Those get zapped unread too. Now down to a manageable 20+ emails, I find one from my writer pal, Jaimie Hall-Bruzenak, dated the previous Monday. She wants to know if we are still in AZ. She says she’s leaving Pine, AZ for Casa Grande to present her seminar at the Gypsy Journal Rally the following week.

Now Jaimie and I have been missing each other by a day, or 50 miles for more than a year. So I fire off a reply telling her we are in town but planning on heading out in the morning for - you guessed it - Quartsite! But I ask where she is and tell her to call me since I’m about to leave the library. Maybe we could at least meet for coffee. Once outside, it occurs to me she probably doesn’t have my number handy so I call her. Unfortunately, she and George were not going to arrive until Sunday. Drats! missed again.

In our effort to equalize the budget after two weeks of playing tourists, we had spent the last two nights at the very inexpensive Pinal County Fairgrounds along with some lovely Canadians who had been there for about a week. The office told us all however that we had to be gone by Saturday because they had 300 RVers coming in on Sunday for a rally.

Saturday morning we drove around to the back of the fairgrounds seeking the larger exit. We spotted a huge rig with a sign that read RV repairs on the side. Since we knew our next stop was going to entail some service work (see Jim's Blog for a tale better told), I suggested Big Jim ask the repair guy’s opinion. He grumbled but did not dare defy me.

As they were talking I saw another man, I’d never met but recognized from frequent pictures coming toward them. I jumped out and asked “Are you Nick Russell ?”
“ How could you tell?” Nick’s silhouette is unmistakable. Sort of like Alfred Hitchcock but only half as tall.
“Is this the Gypsy Journal Rally?”
“Sure is.”
“Dang it!” we aren’t signed up!
“Well you are now!”

So, to make a long story short…(yeah right!), the next afternoon when Jaimie and George came in to register, guess which volunteer handed them their badges!

We had a terrific week, met some terrific people, made new friends, and caught up with old ones like Roger and Brenda, a couple we’d been out to dinner with and toured Fort Smith with in Arkansas, Jaimie and George, and Alice Zyetz and sold a few copies of my book, The Tree at the Top of the Hill.

We even learned a lot, in fact, just yesterday, I impressed the heck out of Sage Words by telling him about some of the seminars. He's a computer geek serving his country with a lot of other Uber Geeks but he didn't know how to change a blog date! ha! I told him how-right after he walked me through the method of adding a picture-again. (If you have been paying attention you'll see I've managed to include a few of the tricks I've been struggling with in this very post!)

We also learned that we had pretty much missed Quartsite's action for the year so decided to save that experience for a future winter. At the end of the rally we headed out the following weekend for Yuma and a free boondocking site on BLM land.

There we relaxed and waited for a new windshield right next to some great blue grass and country musicians those nice people from Canada. The same three couples we’d waved goodbye to when we drove around the back of the building at the fairgrounds!

I love the word Serendipity!

See ya down the road,

Yarntangler