Why are we leaving LBI? Look at this beautiful day. And, the beach is deserted! Everyone’s gone home after the Labor Day weekend.
Welll … because it’s what we do!
We *LOVED* our stay at Jimmy’s on LBI … Thank you Jimmy! And, we love being on the road. So, here we go … The beautiful rolling hills of Pennsylvania.
To the Thousand Trails park at Hershey. As full-time RVers, we consider Thousand Trails parks to be our home! As members of Thousand Trails, we can stay up to two weeks at any of the lovely ‘Preserves’ around the country. Isn’t that better than one home in one place?! Here’s the road to the park:
And, here’s our site:
There’s a big RV Show in Hershey this week. It’s actually the kind of event we’d like to present our seminars, but we never made the right contacts to make that happen. So, we’re just going to attend and see what’s there. Oh, and, maybe we’ll check out some of the Chocolate too as long as we’re here. Look at the streetlamps along ‘Chocolate Avenue’ :-)
We’ll be leaving Long Beach Island today – back on the road headed towards the Gypsy Journal Rally in Celina, Ohio. We’ll be giving several computer seminars plus our hands-on Computer Boot Camp there.
But we can’t leave before I give you last night’s sunset:
September 13
Bye Bye LBI sunsets!
I just can’t pick my favorite sunset picture, can you?
September 5:
September 3 (a)
September 3(b):
August 31:
August 24:
Ok, I lied. I think September 3(b) is my favorite. Y’know – this is only a fraction of all the sunset photos I took. If you want to see them bigger, check out our Picasa Web album for August and September.
Hard to believe that fairy tale day at the beach, in the bay, playing in the water, with perfect weather, was just a few days ago. It’s as if the powers-that-be needed to tell us, “Don’t get used to it OK?”
Jim was sick in bed all day on Wednesday and part of Thursday. I succumbed to the sniffles last night.
And the weather! The weather has turned UGLY. We haven’t been buffeted like this since we rode thru Hurricane Katrina in Fort Lauderdale. Oh yeah … there was that night in Louisiana this spring with sideways rain. And the thunder and lightning! I thought Florida had the best thunder and lightning shows. I was wrong.
Here’s the weather map for right now. I drew an arrow to show where we are – right where it’s orange and red!
And, here’s our view of the bay right now.
Here’s the ‘sunset’ last night. See how high the water is up the dock?
A nasty beginning to a nasty day … 9/11
Jimmy says he remembers being able to see the smoke-filled sky over New York from here. Jim and I were on a river barge trip in France on 9/11/01. The only news available was in a language we didn’t understand, but the people were awesome. I remember trying to find a newspaper in one little village we were passing thru and there were none to be had. A person we met on the street learned our story (Americans on a canal boat) and drove many miles to the next lock to hand deliver a newspaper.
You may have heard about the hands-on class we teach from our website, or past blog posts. We call it ‘Computer Boot Camp’ because it is Basic Training for computer users.
We find lots of people on the road are using a laptop for the first time. A lot of them don’t know about the switch on a laptop that turns the Wi-Fi capability on or off. And, they also don’t know what happens when they close the lid of their computer.
Some of these people have been using computers for many years as part of their work. When they were at work and something went wrong – they just called the computer guy. They can’t do that now, and there’s more they need to know. They need to know how to make backups. They need to know about computer security and maintenance.
Jim and I have been in the computer support business continuously since the early 80’s. Since we’ve been on the road and helping our fellow RVers, we’ve compiled a checklist of essential knowledge and skills we believe every computer user should possess. We developed this class – and many of our Show-Me-How Videos – to help people fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
As you can imagine, with the wide variety of information to teach and the wide variety of experience levels in the class, this is not an easy class to teach. To keep everyone on track, we’ve written a workbook and recorded Show-Me videos to guide us through the class. You can click on the picture of the workbook to see the table of contents.
The class is broken up into 3 sessions with 2 or 3 specific exercises to be completed in each session. Much of the class is taught by the videos (that’s why you see the headsets in the photos), so people can learn at their own rate. And, there are many more videos on the disk than what we cover in class – there’s *no* reason to get bored in this class! You can click on the disk image below to see the disk contents.
Here’s the review questions for the class, why don’t you take it and see how you do? If you can confidently answer all the questions, then the class is too basic for you.
If you’re unsure of half or more, then the class would be great for you. And, if you’re in the vicinity of Celina, Ohio at the end of September, you can sign up for the Boot Camp at the Gypsy Gathering Rally. The cost is $99 for the two day class, bring your own computer.
If you have any questions, or you’ve attended one of our boot camps and have any comments, we’d love to see them as a comment to this blog post.
If you know of a rally, or an RV park where they would like us to present our Boot Camp, we can do that too. We need a minimum of 6 attendees, and a maximum of 20. Of course, it needs to be somewere in our vicinity. We plan to spend the winter in Florida.
If you’re interested in the Boot Camp, but you can’t attend a class, you can purchase the book and DVD for $20. Here’s the introductory video to the DVD.
