The Rally Experience

Music & Memories Rally
Beaver Motor Coach Convention
Moultrie, GA

Here’s what you do at a motor coach rally.

Arrive. Find the coach with “Rally Master” displayed across its front. Get assigned a parking space. Set up. Be told you’re late for the meeting. Rush to the meeting. Enter a roomful of strangers and be told you’re late. Be told to wear your badge or you’ll be fined.

This sounds like fun!

Stand in the back of the meeting and be told you’ve missed all the important things, but not to worry. Worry.

Go back to your camper and swipe a washcloth across your sweaty face and rush off for social hour. Meet people there whose names you immediately forget. Get free drinks. Okay, things are looking up.

Sit down to dinner at 6:00. Good thing we passed on lunch. Stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Sit down and wait until your table is called for dinner, then cheer like you did in high school because you get to the buffet line before other people and will therefore have more to eat than they will. Watch as the free drinks are stowed and the iced tea is offered. Shucks. So that’s why that lady whispered that I should order drinks two at a time.

Meet your tablemates and swap bus and hometown information. I actually met someone who went to my high school. Since the majority of the people in campers are not from my neck of the woods, this was something of a miracle. She wasn’t that interested in swapping stories about old times. Mustn’t have been one of the cool kids. Then again, neither was I.

After dinner, listen politely to the announcements, then to the two-songs-too-long concert by the local high school’s jazz band. These kids were pretty good, if you want to know the truth.

The next day, pass up the opportunity to make “sleeve pins” and/or attend a Red Hat Luncheon. Sleeve pins, for your edification, are pins you put beads on and then use to hold your sleeves up. Since I don’t anticipate long sleeves any time soon, I didn’t go, preferring to stay home and write about Lamar Keck. You can read about him in the blog I did yesterday.

I didn’t go to the Red Hat Luncheon out of respect to my Ladies’ Night Out friends, with whom I have made a blood pact to never ever admit to being over 50, which automatically precludes wearing a red hat to any gathering of any kind. I found out later that nobody wore a red hat, so I could have gone, but I didn’t.

I will attend the Texas Hold ‘Em Lessons this afternoon and the Prime Rib Dinner afterward. I may be a snob, but I’m no fool. The entertainment following dinner is by the “Nawlin’s Po Boy’z.” I’ll stay for that, if only to see who would deliberately misspell three words in a row if they’re not related to Toys “R” Us.

So there you have it. Rallies are mostly about meeting like-minded people and enjoying talking about this life we have chosen. They’re also about rules, of course, and being typically middle-American, they are about loyalty to god and country too, and patriotism, which if you think it’s lost its glow, it hasn’t. They’re about fun activities you can take advantage of, walking the thousands of dogs that seem to be traveling so much more these days, getting your rig washed, dumped-out and tuned up, line-dancing, karaoke, making sleeve pins and learning about motor maintenance.

I haven’t discussed plays, books, movies, concerts, music, the Times Crossword puzzle, or even the Internet with anyone. We don’t have any of that here and even the phone service leaves much to be desired. Still, it’s fun of a sort I haven’t had before. I’ve met some nice people, and even remember a couple of names.

Which will serve us in good stead tonight at dinner, when we announce we’ve lost our heating system and can anybody give us the name of a good mechanic.

Betty