Thursday, September 11, 2014

Annual Meeting Ending

The end of the Annual NOMADS gathering is coming to an end. The final banquet and entertainment will be held in just a few hours and everyone will be on their way home tomorrow.

The meetings were inspirational, provided spiritual growth opportunities and a lot of fellowship. Training classes in various skill areas were conducted and did acquaint everyone with new ideas.

There were 317 attendees at the gathering. The main fundraiser, a community charity auction yielded $50,390 to be used to support activities in the future.

One point that was made is that we all need to work at recruiting younger members. Membership in the organization is slipping and many of the active members are older than 75 so if we are to continue younger folks must be recruited.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Annual Gathering First Day

The first day of the Gathering was a very interesting day. There is a large group in attendance this year and the meeting hall was overflowing both at the morning Bible study and at morning session. We had an excellent speaker at both sessions and his presentation was quite unique, but effective. The afternoon session was devoted to the auction and I am sure there amount of money that was raised was more than last year as the bids seemed to be higher. The business session was also conducted with the Board of Directors.

After the long day, we all traveled to a local restaurant (McFarland's) for dinner. The meal was good and the company was great.

The weather has been anything but fall like we expected. The temperatures were very high yesterday and the humidity made it worse! It has been so bad that Greta does not even want to go to the dog area, she just wants to stay under the AC.  

Monday, September 8, 2014

NOMADS Annual Gathering

The Annual  Gathering of NOMADS is an event that brings old friends together and allows the members time to have some fellowship, spiritual growth via Bible study, and meetings to conduct the business of NOMADS. It also provides the members with the opportunity to learn about new construction and repair techniques that will help them on future projects.

Our original plan was to travel to the Annual Meeting on Saturday arriving on Sunday, but a last minute change was made. Linda and I were asked to help with the Rock County Farm to Table Party on Saturday night so we delayed our departure until Sunday morning.

We had a safe and uneventful trip through Illinois and into Missouri. We made an overnight stop at Cuba, Missouri. We parked in the Ladybug RV park. The park was quite unique in that it looked like a church camp ground more so than an RV resort. We did find out the campground also served as the location for the Deer Creek Church. The folks were friendly and even gave us a discount when they saw our NOMADS sign. We did have a full service site (water, electric, and sewer) but we were directly under a tree so the TV reception was zero. Oh well, that was good, no TV we could go to bed early and get some rest. Greta was disturbed several times during the night by the animals moving in the area.

On Monday we continued our journey to Branson. We arrived at the KOA site just before noon and learned we were the last to arrive. As we entered we were greeted by our first NOMADS team leader and were made to feel welcome again. During the afternoon several people went to various shows, but Linda and I rested and visited with friends. We are looking forward to a great program and meeting many of the people we have worked with!