Tuesday 28, Wednesday 29 July

Waffles for brekkie at the hotel in Elgin on the outskirts of Chicago, followed by some girl retail therapy while we still have the car.  Got a call around 11am from our new BFF, George, to say the coach is all done, no other damage and it’s ready and waiting for us.  Best news ever!  We can be on the road early pm and make it to the FMCA Rally back up in Madison, Wisconsin.

Uneventful drive north and we arrive at the rally venue around 2.30pm and find where we are to collect our welcome kit and our site number etc.  Then we start the long wait to be escorted to our site.  The helpers all scurry around in their golf carts without any obvious (to us) plan.  I guess they know what they are doing as there are nearly 2,000 coaches registered at this rally (the 92^nd) so there must be some kind of plan.  We are just anxious to get set up and find where our new buddies from the Safari Rally in Baraboo are camped. 

So the rally is huge, we are packed in pretty much like sardines with just enough room to extend the slides and awnings.  All good though, we are not spending much time at the coach.  We are parked on grass, reasonably flat, with 30 amp electricity, no water or sewer so we are monitoring carefully our water usage and black and grey water holding tanks.  They started parking the RVs from 8am Monday with some staying overnight in the holding area on the Sunday night, for a Wednesday start.  They were still coming in on Wednesday.  There are over 400 chapters of the Family Motor Coach Association, with over 75,000 members. 

There are numerous seminars every day Wednesday through to Saturday and these are held in 12 seminar rooms, so can be up to 12 sessions being run simultaneously.  What to choose??  Today Wednesday is a pretty free day for us, no prior commitments so we choose ‘Everything you thought you knew about Sealants” from 10.00-11.15 am first .  It was a tad disappointing, the presenter, the owner of RV Life, made it sound like neutral cure (non-acid) sealants are a new phenomena, but he does sell some clever sealant removal stuff called “Release” so we will call by his stand tomorrow, when it opens and see what it is about.

This afternoon from 3.15-4.30 pm we will attend “Stop Messing up your Holding Tanks” seminar then at 5 pm the new motorhome preview opens with music performed by the Frustrated Maestros. This is a much larger version of the old “A Pier Band”, probably about 60 members in all, from all walks of life.  There are several chapters involved and they all practise independently and then they come together at these sorts of get togethers to perform.

Thursday and Friday morning we are enrolled in the RV Driving Safety Programme which runs from 8 to 11 am so that restricts what else we can see.  But we will have time to attend the Tyre Safety, RV Maintenance, Fire Safety and Caterpillar Maintenance seminars – phew our brains will be mush!  There are some girly things too, hobby classes, Ladies Social, Microwave & Convection Cooking, Fighting the signs of Aging etc. but no time for those  There is a session on ‘RV’ing Down Under – Australia and NZ’ but it is at the same time as other seminars so won’t get there unfortunately.  Hope they didn’t tell any lies!   We have found that a lot of people have been to either Oz and/or NZ before and a lot more express a wish to.

We have 5pm happy hour with our Safari mates from the Baraboo Rally and there is live music every night.

Friday was our shopping day, Kim has given his ‘man card’ a hiding, starting with the Tyre Pressure Monitoring System which senses/reports tyre pressure and temperature on the fly, special rust and corrosion protection stuff, a power surge protection system which reports and protects against power fluctuations etc., aerosol cans of special foam fire retardant specially for RVs and which apparently supersedes the old ABC extinguishers.  It doesn’t leave any residue and is harmless to people and pets.  Kim was feeling pretty happy with all his new toys and some are already on the coach, but then he went to the Caterpillar seminar and now has a whole new set of worries and wants : )  It never ends….

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The Friday night entertainment was by a band called New Odyssey, a group of three guys with 30 instruments between them.  They did a Beatles set where they played all 30 instruments, pretty impressive!  It was sufficiently good stuff that we bought the CD and the DVD.  The only problem is they finished at 9 pm – all these old RVers go to bed pretty early!  It is quite noticeable that there are no young people at the Rally, I’ve only seen about 5 kids and absolutely no one under 50.  It’s quite nice to be on the younger side of the scale!  The nights are therefore quiet, the only noise is the continuous hum of everyone’s AC units and far off generators.