We didn’t do much the last couple of days in Carlyle; mostly stayed home and chilled out. The one bright spot was dinner…Neil grilled some country ribs we had for a couple of days then yesterday he grilled a thick London Broil made in pepper steak style; an old recipe he stole from his mom that has always been one of our favorite ways to grill beef. The best part about that was that we had leftovers which we intended on having for dinner after our travel day today.

Connie did try her hand at fishing for crappie on Sunday…but didn’t catch anything. Too bad…Neil was looking forward to cooking her bounty and some fresh fish would really have tasted good. Guess we’ll have to hit up the grocery if we want any though.

This morning we got up at 0530 with plans to leave at 1000. Connie woke up feeling lousy but we got busy about 0800 anyway with packing and leaving preps. To our surprise…and we have no idea how this happened with her feeling as poorly as she did all day…we were hitched up and on the road right about 0920…40 minutes earlier than we thought we would be on the road given the time we started working on leaving. 

We discovered that we hadn’t put any cokes into the fridge for the travel day…so Connie stopped at a gas station and bought us a couple…there wasn’t any parking so Neil went on up the road another couple of miles until he found a place he could pull over. She showed up shortly thereafter and then we headed out. Straight up MO-127 from Carlyle to I-70 then west about 140 miles. We stopped once we got past St. Louis and filled up BAT…we had enough fuel to actually get here but have discovered the last couple of trips that stopping at a truck stop before leaving the highway (a) makes it easier to fill up than having to fit into a smaller station and (b) we don’t have to drive BAT out to buy fuel. This saves us money overall as even a 10 mile 1 way trip to buy fuel costs us $5 or so and that’s essentially wasted fuel as he’s not pulling the house. Having enough fuel for at least 125 miles or so on campsite arrival means no stop until after we get back to the highway on the way to the next stop.

Leaving I-70 we headed about 12 miles or so south to Hidden Oaks Campground right outside of Fulton, MO. There’s a hilly, bumpy gravel road on the way in but we negotiated it no problem and parked in site 7. We met the owners (well, Neil met the man and Connie his wife when she went and registered us)…and we had a pretty easy job parking. We got utilities setup but it was hot so he left the flag and sign until tomorrow. We quickly got the A/C turned on then had a shower. After that we fell asleep and had a late afternoon nap in our recliners waking up about 1845 just as it was starting to get a bit darker. We have no satellite visibility here since it’s a fairly heavily wooded campground but we got our batwing antenna properly  aimed west toward the transmission towers. It feels like we’re back in the old days before cable and satellite…we have 3 network channels and 1 religious channel available.

Connie has some fun stuff planned for the rest of the week…but Neil has no details yet…we’ll talk about them in the morning over coffee. She doesn’t have much work piled up since all of her student paperwork for the summer is done.

Here’s a shot of our setup…pretty sweet, eh? Well separated sites and although they’re gravel it was a pretty easy leveling routine today. 

Cyas.