On the road with Jim and Pat: Hello from Branson, MO

Hello from Branson, MO

Sunday evening October 5, 2008 (First travelogue of this trip)

We have not posted since we returned from our trip to Europe. We arrived home from Europe on 9/8 and left on this trip on 9/21. During that time I thrashed on our new-to-us service truck. It is a 2002 Dodge ¾ ton tuck with a service bed. I then built a large topper for our product and show inventories. I have posted a picture of the truck. It was supposed to have the whole body “wrapped” with our logo and more flames. Unfortunately I did not get the body done in time to get the full job done. At least it shows our product. They will finish the wrap when we get home.

We had planned to leave several days before our actual departure date, but I simply could not get everything done.

Our trip Sunday was a bit short. We left in the early afternoon and made it as far as Pueblo (Wal Mart). We stopped there so we could get the antenna up and watch the races. The next day we stayed in a Wal Mart in Elk City, TX. That was almost 500 miles and I had a problem with my wiring that prevented the Jakes and cruise control from working. That made the day extra long. I got the problem resolved the next day and we made it to the Cherokee Casino in Roland OK. We have stopped there before and it is an OK (no pun intended) casino. The next day we arrived at North Little Rock where we would be vendors at a regional FMCA rally. We arrived on Wednesday, instead of Monday as we had planned and paid for. However, we got a great location (much better than those who arrived on Monday). We had the end position about 2 blocks from the show (much closer than most folks). The truck was in a good position to be observed by traffic.

The show was a mixed bag. They had planned on 500 motorhomes, but 1000 showed up. They really had to scramble for places to put folks. We heard that several people got upset and left. Others who stayed were not pleased as there were lots of problems where they parked people. We had a double booth that displayed our products and a new product line that we are dealers for (http://www.silverleafelectronics.com). This is a very popular product line that displays a very large amount of data that is derived from the engine computer. It can literally be the dashboard of a motorhome. We will represent this company at the smaller shows. The only problem was that we spent most of our time on their product and did not get to focus on our products. We will be doing another show on this trip and we have some ideas on how to divert the customers to look at our products. Or sales were only so-so.

While we were too tired to go to any of the entertainment (didn't sound all that good anyway), we were able to do a bit of sightseeing. Our last evening, we took a modern version of an old electric trolley across the Arkansas River from North Little Rock to Little Rock. We went to a fun restaurant called the Flying Fish. It was Sunday night and we took the last trolley. We were about a mile from the bus, so we walked home. Part of the trip was walking across an old drawbridge that has been converted to a walking path (drawbridge in the raised position). We strolled along the river a bit and then walked back to the bus. We also attended the “Taste Of Arkansas” event that had about 30 restaurants represented. Each restaurant had samples of their best dishes. Lots of fun and food!

We were the only people on the trolley and the driver talked to us quite a bit. It turns out he worked for the NFO in Corning, IA (Pat's home town) several years ago. He gave us his name, but we no longer have that information. Sure is a small world.

We left North Little rock on Monday 9/29 and arrived at the Branson Lakeside RV Park that afternoon for an Eagle Bus Rally. We are located here.

In the next day or so I will detail the rally.