Before Six State began

We had arrived at the Shreveport fairgrounds on Monday; the rally was to start on Wednesday. In 20/20 hindsight, I'm not sure it was advantageous to arrive early, we were allocated the parking spots that were about as far as possible from the rally event areas, and we were parked with very little space between the rigs because they weren't sure how many coaches were coming, so were ensuring that they would have plenty of space for later arrivals. Plus it meant two additional days without dump capability...

But, there were advantages to being there early:
1) We got to get out to go shopping to find a few things we were missing.
2) We had time to go to a laundromat.
3) We got to visit the Norton gallery, that our friends Beca and Clyde de Loach had recommended!
4) We were able to plan our session attendance as we got the schedule early and could determine which sessions we wanted to attend.
5) We could attend sessions at all of the times, including the morning ones on Wednesday.

We were doing pretty well on items for our motorhome; since we were going to try to conserve water output, we purchased some cheap paper plates instead of needing to wash plates. Note to self: cheap paper plates are ok for use in motorhome, but they are pretty worthless if you want to use them outside the motorhome. We also got a current road atlas as the one we had was from 2004 (same year as our motorhome! but missing some crucial road information!).

Thoughts about laundromats:

• you should NEVER spend a quarter that you receive in change, keep it for laundry
• while it is kinda inconvenient to have to go somewhere to do your laundry (so multi-tasking while doing other things at home is not possible), on the positive side, you can do many loads at once (multi-processor versus serial)
• you get to meet folks that you would probably never run into otherwise - sometimes this is a positive statement; sometimes it is a negative statement!

Norton Gallery - oh wow! This was an amazing place. It was free, and their collection was really outstanding - they have a large collection of Remingtons and Russells.
http://www.rwnaf.org/
Beca and Clyde had specifically recommended that we see what was behind the gallery -- which is a beautiful garden area! Amazingly, they do not allow photographs - either in the gallery (which is understandable) nor in the gardens. It was quite a beautiful spot, though, and we enjoyed it and suggested that many other folks at the Rally take it in also. I asked Beca how she knew about this lovely spot - she told me that she grew up one street over from the Art Gallery (which wasn't there then) and all the neighborhood kids spent many hours playing in "Norton's Woods", building forts and digging caves and having "wars" in the rolling hills.

On Tuesday, we went to the Information Desk at the Rally and were able to get our registration packet which included the schedule of events for Wednesday-Saturday. We went back to our motorhome and started planning our days.

While we came up with 3 coaches from Texans on Safari, it turned out that they were parked "across the street" from where we were parked, so the folks on both sides of us were new friends for us to meet. The folks on our "door" side were with others who were parked nearby, so they stayed with their friends most of the time. But, we got to meet the folks on our non-door side, Jo and Don, and really enjoyed getting to spend some time with them. Don is a retired urologist and often speaks at the rally seminars - we hope to get to hear him at a future seminar as he was not speaking at Six State. Jo is a retired nurse and has a knitting shop back in Ohio. We really enjoyed meeting them and their two standard poodles and look forward to getting to see them at another rally or campground in the future!