Driving All Day

If I'm a little over 5' tall, the corn is 10 feet!

Thursday, Aug. 30, 201

Today was a day for driving-- I don't even have any photos except one! Just as we left the campground this morning, I asked Joe to take my picture next to the corn. It looks much shorter from the highway, because of the embankment of the road. But we were right next to the cornfield, and elephant's eye height (or higher!) it certainly is!

Also before we left the campground, I checked my email for the football tickets for tomorrow--I bought them through Stub Hub and they were due to "arrive" in my email today. Sure enough, they were there. To make sure that they could be scanned from my phone, I called the MSU ticket office, but the guy there said that these are "print at home" tickets. He said if they could not be scanned off the phone, then they wouldn't be able to help us at the gate. So we realized we'd have to find a way to get them printed from my email, and we don't have a printer with us.

Luckily, email and internet have greatly evolved since our early RVing days. We decided that we could probably get our job done at Staples. So we checked our Next Exit book, and discovered that 9 miles down the I-80 in Peru, Illinois, at the exit there was both a Staples and a Walmart. So we first went to the Staples. In the parking lot, we set up the computer with our own wi-fi system, downloaded the tickets into the laptop, and then transferred them onto a thumb drive (I brought several with me.) Then we went into the Staples, found a copy machine, put the thumb drive into the machine, told it to copy the file with the tickets, and voila! For 22 cents, we had our printed tickets in our hand! We were just as pleased as punch.

Tonight's campground location

After that, we went to Walmart. Joe rested while I bought water (we were TOTALLY out), eggs, milk, and a couple of other items. When I got back to the RV, he made us some lunch. Then we drove 2 more miles to a Flying J where we filled up the gas tank. And finally, we hit the road for good. Joe still didn't feel great, so I drove all day-- through the rest of Illinois, the horrible south-of-Chicago traffic, and up into Michigan. We stopped once we crossed the border and I had some dinner. Then we looked about one hour's worth of driving down the road, and found a very nice county park in Kalamazoo County, which is where we are now. It would be a nice place to stay for a day--there's a lake, walking paths, etc. But tomorrow morning we will get up and finish the drive to East Lansing.

GAME DAY TOMORROW!

The Night Before We Leave

Aug. 17, 2012

It has been a busy day for both Joe and me. Mo came home yesterday and we are now trying to dry out the cab overhead while packing clothes into the closets in the back. The mechanic is very happy with the state of our vehicle, and I am afraid that it would keep running forever but the house will fall off from deterioration and sheer age. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to spending the next two weeks living in our little vacation home on wheels.

Our newest addition is a new "traveling laptop". Our rugged laptop which has accompanied us on so many miles has finally died, and the new one arrived just 3 days ago. So along with the usual "leaving home" stuff, I am loading software (or trying to) into the new computer, and getting used to the keyboard. This blog is going up from "Len", the new Lenovo. It is a bit disconcerting to have NO "favorites" bookmarked, NO programs installed, etc. I sure hope I can make friends with this machine quickly.  Also, Blogger has changed their dashboard and it all looks a little bit different. I hope that they are correct that it is more user friendly!

And so the evening winds down.... packing, paying bills, washing dishes, finishing paperwork, and all the other things we do before departure. Hoping to leave by 10am, and heading for Harpers Ferry, WV for the weekend. I sure hope I can get my itinerary notes into here, or we'll be flying blind. But I guess that will just be part of the adventure.

Charging Across the Country

Day 2: Sunday Aug. 28

My title tonight is a pun. It refers to: 1) Our steady progress from eastern Ohio this morning to Spring Green, Wisconsin, about 30 miles northwest of Madison, tonight. It was a gorgeous day for a drive. If you can believe it, we saw our first herd of buffalo this morning--in Ohio! Just along the Ohio Turnpike, who would believe it? But most of Ohio and Indiana is much of a muchness--kind of a flat, pretty in a nondescript sort of way, landscape. The corner of Illinois we are forced to endure is mostly very expensive Chicago-area toll roads until we get most of the way to the Wisconsin border. Wisconsin, otoh, is simply gorgeous. I loved it last year and loved it again today. There is something that really speaks to me about this landscape--all the green farms, dairy cows, white farm buildings, and gently rolling terrain. So beautiful. We barreled along all day and made good time, logging a total of 573 miles. This is a lot, even for us--although on our second day in 2007, we drove for 648 miles by getting up at 6:30a.m and drivng until nearly midnight. Today we started at 9:10am and stopped at 7:50pm. It was more than enough, for me at least.

2) We wouldn’t get far without charging a lot (well, three) expensive fill-ups of our gas tank. It seemed that with every 50 miles, the price of gas went up another 10 cents/gallon. The Chicago area was the worst--it got all the way up to $3.99; luckily we still had half a tank at that point and did NOT top it off. Our last fill-up last night, in western PA, cost $3.59/gallon; this morning we paid $3.69 in Ohio, $3.79 in Indiana, skipped the $3.89 and $3.99 in Illinois, and came back “down” to $3.65 just at the Wisconsin border. That price was actually $3.63 for us, because it was a Flying J station and we have a loyalty card for RVers, which gives us 2-cents/gal off (it amounted to $.48, LOL!) But each full tank approaches $100, ouch!

3) And finally, charging refers to all the electronic cords which are surrounding me at the moment. My phone is charging, my computer is charging, and the iPod Touch is charging off the computer. I *love* my iPod Touch-- it earned its keep today. First, it did what it was supposed to do--played music. The Mo Report includes the refrigerator being more or less fine, although the pilot to the gas line blows out on the highway (not so unusually). But the CD player, which was temperamental last summer, refused to work at all this morning. So whenever we get tired of playing Radio Station Roulette, we relied on my iPod for music.

Even more important, however, was what it did this evening when we finally had to decide where to camp tonight. This afternoon, we made reservations for a tour of Taliesin tomorrow morning at 10:15 a.m. So where to spend the night? Last year we were here for 3 nights and stayed in 3 different places--two state parks, both beautiful, and one private campground, with lots of “facilities” but not so beautiful. The latter, however, is only 10-15 minutes from the Frank Lloyd Wright visitor center where our tour leaves from. And, it has wifi. We decided to choose the practical over the beautiful (especially after we missed a turn which took us toward the parks.)

At this point, we tried to program Magellan, our GPS, with our true final destination. But although I had the campground name (in our log book, which I keep daily for every long trip), the name was not in the AAA data bank, nor was it in the AAA camping book. Now what to do? I have an old copy of the Trailer Life Campground directory, and was just about to go dig it out, when I remembered: THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT! I looked at my iPod and there was the Woodall’s Directory, which is published in TWO paper volumes, each several inches thick, but which is stored on my cute little iPod with the Woodall’s App. There was the campground, with the address for the GPS and the phone number, so I could call and warn them we were arriving. And in truth, we would not have been able to find this place without that address.

So now we are parked in a nice grassy spot away from everyone else, with lots of electricity to charge up all our indispensable gadgets. Joe just made us a yummy dinner of cheesey-scrammies and kasha. There is a hot shower handy, and a lot of places for a dog to be walked in the morning. And the wifi has so far been excellent, at least for my little iPod. I hope this blog uploads as smoothly as my email downloaded on the latter. It is now almost 11 local time, which is midnight DebandJoe time. But we can sleep in for a while, and have a quiet anniversary morning before going to our tour and then heading west again. And I promise to get my camera out tomorrow--that will give me another gadget to charge, I suppose.

Note to blogwatchers: we will be Ontheroad for the next couple of days--so if you don’t get a daily blog, do NOT worry. We will probably be Walmarting or something of the sort, and there’s no guarantee we’ll find wifi on the way.