Going East

Somebody was busy and dropped the ball on posting the blog. We have covered 11 states since the beginning of the trip.

After Cheyenne, WY we headed east on I 80 through southern NE. The road followed the Platte River valley. It's the same route that the Oregon, Mormon and California trails took. You can understand why they chose this route since it's fairly flat through a river valley. We started to see lots of large corn fields and crossed into the central time zone.

We passed through Kearny, NE and John had to call Lois from CHS and tell her we were in her grandparent' s hometown. How he remembered this is a mystery.

We decided to stay at a State Recreational Area CG south of the interstate. Johnson Lk Park had large grassy areas under some beautiful trees. Most of the time we stayed ahead on those terrible thunderstorms that were plaguing the midwest, but that night we had a pretty strong thunder and lightning storm. It was time to dig out the weather radio so we could track the severe weather.

We rely on our Weatherbug app on our cell phones for local weather. The radar is particularly helpful. However, our weather alert radio gives accurate up to minute weather warnings from NOAA.

John wanted to take a detour to the Blue Ox factory to have them check out our true center that was installed in CA. He didn't think it was working properly. It gave us a change to get off the interstate and take some back country roads. We ended up at Pender, NE, a small town of about 1,000 people. We were able to stay at a nice CG right next to the factory. They let us stay there for free and even drove out to the motorhome to service our true center. More storms, but not severe. We did notice that the newer homes were built up on knolls so they could have tornado shelters under them. I was happy to leave tornado country.

We left northeast NE and took I 29 into Iowa. We had traveled this area before when we were tracing the Lewis and Clark trail in 2009. The road parallels the muddy Missouri River.

We next spent the night on an Iowa corn farm owned by a former coworker of John's. Jay and Elizabeth were very gracious to give us an interesting tour of the corn/soybean farm. Jay has meticulously restored his family's house, barn, corn bin, etc. He's also installed a very large array of solar panels and is creating a tractor that runs on hydrogen.

We enjoyed a lovely dinner in one of the Amana colonies. The seven separate villages were established in 1855 as a commune where everything was shared in common. The villages became privately owned in 1932 and exist today as a tourist area with lots of cute shops.

After leaving Jay's we continued on I 80,crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois. We picked a state park to spent the night called Starved Rock SP. It's so much nicer to stay in state parks because they pick very nice locations. The sites at this park were private, level and under trees with grass all around. The park was probably not 10% occupied. Our kind of camping.

The next day we crossed through the NW corner of Indiana on I 80 to I 94. New time change as we passed into MI.

We stayed at another SRA campground called Ft Custer that was located half way between Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. We had a lovely private site in the trees.

Here is where we had our first difficulty. When we were leaving the CG we couldn't put in one of the slides. We called CoachNet, our RV roadside service provider. They sent out a person who was able to get the slide in so we could continue on our way. We were on our way to spend a week with our friends Pete and Bonnie and felt certain we could get the slideout fixed in Detroit. As it turned out, that was the case.

We spent a week with our friends on their lovely 40 acre horse property. We were treated royally and included in many of their neighborhood parties. The Michiganders are certainly friendly people.

We are on the road again. We passed into Ohio and continued east on I 80 just to the south of Lake Erie. We then dropped down to I 76. Our friends Allan and Sue were raised in East Liverpool, Ohio and we thought we might visit their home town. We got as close as Lisbon, Ohio but didn't make it to East Liverpool.

It was a lot of driving and moving almost every day but we were trying to get to MI and our friends before Labor Day. The rest of the trip should be easier where we plan to spend anywhere from 5-7 days in one area.