Travels with Gunther and Kara

As discussed in my last post…on Sunday we decided to forego the trip down to Great Sand Dunes National Park and have a rest day on Monday…so that’s what we did. Didn’t set an alarm…but still were up by about 0730 or so…and did pretty much nothing all day. 

Neil did get a few chores banged out on our list…replaced our door lock which is on it’s last legs, put down plastic wood in the joints that need it in the new flooring, modified our new fridge door trick to keep the door closed and that was about it except for eating dinner. We did have two really good dinners though…grilled pork with grilled pineapple and grilled onion tacos on corn tortillas that he also grilled a little to make ‘em taste even better on Sunday and a steak on Monday.

Tuesday was errand day for us. First up was Neil’s appointment at 0800 at the Rocky Mountain Eye Center…he needed a followup on his left eye vitreous separation that happened the week we were leaving North Fort Myers. That went fine…all is well with the eye and he’s past the primary danger zone for complications…but the opthalmologist told him to keep watching for symptoms for another little while. He asked the doctor if the right eye vitreous was still attached…the reply was that it had already detached some time in the past…but Neil never noticed it. The doctor did notice a small discoloration way out on the edge of the retina in the right eye…he said it could either be a small hole from the vitreous detachment in the past or just a pigmentation spot…but it was healed and needed no worrying about.

After that…a haircut for Neil, nails for Connie, filling our almost empty propane tank, and getting Neil’s wedding ring stretched from 8.5 to 9.5 as it was getting too small for him. His fingers have expanded a bit as he’s gotten older as has the knuckle on that finger so it just needed to be bigger. With all of the done…we went home, had a nap in the afternoon then we went back down to town to the Elks Lodge for Taco Tuesday for dinner…spent an hour or two talking to the bartender and another member then had dinner and came back to the rig.

Wednesday…it was time for the Royal Gorge Railroad tour…a 2 hour train ride through the gorge and under the bridge. We had reservations on the Vista car…that’s the one with the windows on top…for the 1230 trip although Neil spent most of the time out on the open air car taking photos…and Connie came out for a bit as well. We had lunch on the train…Disneyland prices Ima tellin’ ya…30 bucks for a beer and a mediocre sandwich that they split.

We did get some really nice photos though.

Here’s the open air car where Neil spent most of the trip…there’s another one towards the rear of the train. The Vista car we were in is a couple cars ahead of the open air car to the left. 

Heading into the canyon…you can see one of our two locomotives…we had one on each end as the trip is an out and back route…and you can see our Vista car being taller and having the windows on the top. We were sitting towards the front of that car on the left (south) side.

Looking back towards the rear of the train as we entered the canyon…really brilliant blue skies today.

A couple of kayakers resting after finishing the class V rapids on the Arkansas River…4th longest in the US. There is one set of class V that are there all the time and another 3 or 4 when the water is high after rain or in the spring runoff.

Part of the abandoned water pipe that tapped the river to server Cañon City.

Looking up at the bridge some 950 feet above the river.

Looking downstream at the class V white water.

Better shot of our outbound locomotive…the train had one on each end so that since it can’t turn around the engineer can see where he’s going. Seeing both of them reminded Neil of an old story about the meanest animal in the jungle…it turns out that it’s not the lion but the Wild African Duwalley…which has a head on each end. One wag asked if it had a head on each end how would it poop…the answer is that he don’t…that what make him so mean.

Connie took a few foliage shots as we passed.

The side of the gorge…the dark band towards the bottom is a layer of volcanic ash at least 50 feet thick I guess.

The accommodations for the caretakers of the water supply pipe…I guess it’s a fixer-upper. The shack to the right is their dynamite storage shed…seems kinda close to your house to me if the stuff went off by accident.

The upstream diversion point for the pipe…some of the river’s slow was diverted here to supply Cañon City.

Our train whistle scared up a Great Blue Heron.

At the turnaround point…looking back towards the former rear and our return trip locomotive.

The trees have a really saturated green color here along the river. Those are cottonwoods…which according to the docent on the train drink up 1,000 gallons of water a day.

And the return trip begins…we’re about a mile or two upstream of the gorge as we started back.

We spotted a kayaker tacking the class V on the way back…there was also a larger raft with 3 folks on it heading downstream as well.

In the upper part of the gorge…a couple of shots to show you how deep and narrow it really is. At its narrowest it is about 20 yards wide at the bottom with steep walls…the bridge is 880 feet between the two towers as seen in the 2nd photo following.

This photo was borrowed from the Royal Gorge Bridge wikipedia page and is by By Bkthomson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19218575.

And no gorge is complete…naturally…unless there’s a troll under the bridge…so here’s a rock formation named Shrek. It wasn’t quite under the bridge…but close enough for gummint work I say…his face is to the left.

We had originally planed on visiting the Colorado Prison Museum in town on Thursday…but on further review as the replay official would say decided that none of us really cared about it and at $14 for the adults the Fun Stuff© to cost ratio just didn’t make it for us. So we cancelled that…which means today’s activities will be going to Walmart for groceries and buying diesel for Big Red. Then we’ll put the grill, stove, and outside chairs away and get ready for our travel day over Monarch Pass (11,312 feet) to Gunnison for a 3 night stop where we’ll visit Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and it looks like the special event I talked about the other day will happen so I’ll report on that later.

The weather looks good for our transit over the pass tomorrow…there’s been some rain over night the last couple of nights and with the elevation there a little slush on the top of the pass…but today and tonight look better. We’ll carefully check the Colorado road conditions map and web cams and make sure the way is clear before heading out. With only 110 miles to go…we can afford to leave a little later to let any moisture dry up in the sun/wind before we get there. At worst…we have an alternate route planned…about halfway from Cañon City to Gunnison on US-50 we’ll take a left on US-285 south at Salida then a right on CO-114 at Saguache to intersect 50 about 13 miles east of Gunnison. The alternate route is 169 miles instead of 110…and goes over 2 passes instead of 1…but both of those are 1,500 feet or more lower than Monarch is and from Connie looking at the webcams this week both of those have been consistently dry. Neil had asked on one of the RV forums he’s on back in March about possible alternate routes to Monarch if weather made it not optimum…a member there who is a CO resident recommended this and said he had been over it many times with his trailer. Neil took a look on Google maps and the satellite view showed 18 wheelers going over CO-114 so it will be fine if we need to take it…lower elevations and a little less grade.

Interesting things found on the net.

And finally…thanks Captain Obvious.

Cyas.

First things first…as you can see from the title of this post…the name of this town has the tilde or umlaut or whatever you call that diacritical mark over the top…and it’s a Spanish name…so you would ‘spect that it would be pronounced almost like Canyon City with a long O in the second syllable and a Spanish lilt to the pronunciation. (Editor’s note: Connie says it’s a tilde…and upon further review she’s completely correct…but that still doesn’t ‘splain the messed up pronunciation of the way its spelled.)

But…you would be wrong. In Colorado…the name of this city is pronounced Cannon City…like the artillery kinda cannon. 

I know…it don’t make a lik of sense to me either…but it’s their state and I reckon they get to pronounce their city names however the heck they want to.

I digress again though…I hate it when that happens.

On Friday…we only had 110 miles to go to our next stop…the aforementioned Cañon City…so we didn’t really worry overly much ‘bout getting gone from La Junta early. It dawned a nice blue sky clear kinda day and we finally hit the road about 1030 or so for the trip. It was straight west on US-50…and in Colorado as opposed to Kansas…the itty bitty towns are built right on the highway instead of mostly being off to the side a bit…so although the inter town limit was 65…every wide spot in the road it went to 55…then 45…then 35…and we went slow through town until the other side when it went back to 65. We scrupulously obeyed the posted limit in the itty bitty towns though…small town cops got nuttin bedda to do than hand out speedin’ tickets ya know.

We were planning on stopping at a truck stop in Pueblo for a potty break…50 joined I-25 for a mile before getting back off and our Trucker Tools app told us there wuz a truck stop there…but we didna see it. As a consequence…by the time we got to our destination…Connie had to pee something turrible as Charles Barkley would say…and it made her cranky.

We got checked in…there was a slight delay as we had to (a) figure out how to get into the campground at all, (b) Neil had to go a mile down the road and find a place to turn around as by the time we figured it out he was past the turn, and (c) once we got into the campground it was not intuitively obvious how to find the office.

Nonetheless…we found it eventually…and she was even more aggravated by then…and proceeded to our site G5. We were originally s’posed to be in G6 on the end of the row…but they had somebody else in there already and moved us. We probably made out for the best as the way you had to get to the G sites we would have had trouble making the 180 degree turn into G6 while G5 allowed us to make a 90, go about 20 feet to allow the rig to straighten out a bit…and then another 90 into the site.

We hooked up power, unhitched, and put put slides…then broke for lunch…egg salad sammys that Connie had made in the AM…luckily we decided to not be cranky with each other any more and by the time she had lunch she was un-aggravated and mo’ bedda.

After lunch we finished up our setup…lazed around for the afternoon…and had some leftover Oriental Chicken Curry for dinner from da udder nite. Over night lows will be in the high 30s tonight…somebody needs to tell these Colorado folk that it’s May and it is s’posed to be warm by now. O’course…that would be after they tell ‘em that there’s no air in this state…we’re at 6,276 feet here in the campground and Cañon City is about 5,300 feet and just walking up into the bedroom in the rig gets ya outa breath. And there’s no prospect of relief from these high altitudes for at least another 3 or 4 weeks until we get to the People’s Republic of California in late June. I gotta admit though…Utah is worse for not having any air than Colorado is.

We did notice on the drive today that the vegetation is significantly different than back in the La Junta area. There it was all fields and cultivated crops…here it’s mostly scrub grass and prairie…with ranches and cows galore.

A few shots from ‘round the campground for ya.

Looking southwest towards Cottonwood Peak…it’s the snow capped one in the distance at about 27 miles away. Just to give you an idea of how many big mountains Colorado has…at 13,588 feet to the summit it’s only the 195th highest peak in the state. It’s the snow capped peak to the right…the center one is Electric Peak which is 191st at 13,598 feet and the one to the left I could not figure out from looking at the map…although I may have mixed up the center and left hand ones. Neil zoomed in for the second shot.

Pano shot looking southwest from our site…about 120 degrees wide in this shot.

Juvenile Western Blue Bird…this guy was sitting on the fence right across from the rig.

Here we are nestled into site G5. We were originally scheduled for G6 which is on the end to our immediate passenger side but got moved. In retrospect…we would have had trouble getting into G6 anyway due to the way the road makes the turn around that site…it would have required considerable backing and jacking to get in without clipping any of the rocks that border the sites. The folks to our left side are from just east of Denver but he grew up in VA and is familiar with the Fairfax area where we used to live as he headed up there for soccer tournaments when he was younger.

Saturday…we headed off right after lunch for a 50 mile trip back east to Pueblo to visit a couple of museums, walk around the Arkansas River Walk in downtown Pueblo, and…our original idea…have an early dinner at a local brew pub named Brues Alehouse.

The first museum was the El Pueblo History Museum…and it was pretty much a bust. We paid our $9 total to enter but almost all of the museum was devoted to something called the Ludelow Massacre. Back in 1913 to 1914…coal miners went on strike for safety reasons, the mine owners evicted them from their company owned housing so they ended up living in tents in Ludelow…and eventually the mine security people burned down the camp resulting in the deaths of a bunch of women and children. The only thing really worth seeing there was the piece of the Old Monarch…a 388 year old tree that the city council of Pueblo cut down in 1883…the citizenry responded by voting the mayor and entire city council out of office.

Second stop was the Center for American Values…which is a museum devoted to every Congressional Medal of Honor recipient…but it turned out to be just a photo and quote from all of them. It was free…and worth a stop…but really not all that great. However…honoring those who’ve received America’s highest military decoration…it has been awarded over 3,500 times through the years but in the early days it was given far too frequently as over half were awarded during the Civil War. By the time WWI came around…awarding had gotten much more selective and of the 1,600 or so awarded since then over 600 were awarded posthumously. Recipients of this medal…even if they are the lowest ranking enlisted pay grade…are legally entitled to a salute from every other military member officer or enlisted. There was a sign in the Center saying no photography…so we settled for one of this nice flag art just outside the door.

We stopped by Brues…but since we got done earlier than expected at the museums just had a beer and came home. The beer…Valve-3 Amber Ale…was decent but not great. We did get a couple of shots along the River Walk.

We got a shot of Pikes Peak from the side of US-50 on the way home…it’s up near Colorado Springs and is about 47 miles away in this shot. At 14,115 feet to the summit…and we were there a few years back…it is one of Colorado’s 53 fourteeners…peaks over 14,000 feet…and is the 20th highest in the state.

On the way back…we went past the campground a couple of miles and got a few shots at the Royal Gorge Bridge. The bridge was built in 1929 and crosses the Arkansas River 955 feet over the water. The bridge was converted to a tourist attraction and closed to vehicle traffic in the late 1900s. We didn’t go out on the bridge because (a) Connie said the chances of her walking out on it were somewhere between zero and non-existent and (b) it cost $28 and that’s crazy. We did get a couple of shots from the nearby overlook though…and since we’re going on the train trip through the gorge later in the week  we’ll get better photos of both the bridge and the gorge itself from the train.

Dinner was bacon sammys…we were still pretty full from our lunch and they sounded good.

Sunday morning we headed off to Mass then came home for some most excellent blueberry muffins that we brought home from Bleus Alehouse on Saturday…then we headed out about 1330 for our 2 Fun Stuff© items for the day.

First up…the Cañon City driving tour…which includes their Skyline Drive which overlooks the city.

First stop was the local community college…where there is a Stegosaurus statute that was built back in the 1990s by the inmates at the local prison.

Across the road…US-50 and we’re looking east here…is the back side of the ridge overlooking the city. The ridge itself is an upturned Dakota sandstone hogback…the lowest red section is fountain formation limestone. Above that is the Morrison formation which contains a bunch of dinosaur fossils…it is the wavy horizontally lined brownish section. Above that is the Upper Cretaceous Dakota sandstone…which forms the majority of the hogback and is more resistant to erosion. Our path would lead up there shortly.

The arch…containing stones from all 50 states…which leads to Skyline Drive. This is a 12 foot or so wide road…limited to vehicles under 20 feet…and has drop-offs up to 425 feet on both sides. The signs said the speed limit was 15…we were doing less than that…but saw numerous idiots flying up it at 25+…nuts I tellya.

Looking west back from about halfway up the ridge…maybe a third of a mile past the arch. The college and Stegosaurus are back to the rear left from this view…and we’re already a couple hundred feet up from US-50 in the background…Royal Gorge and our campground are another 7 or so miles down the highway which curves to the left just before that large ridge.

Panoramic shot from the top of the ridge…this is about 140 degrees wide and we are looking east down on downtown Cañon City.

Connie took this shot through Li’l Red’s windshield shortly before we got to the southern end of the ridge and went around the switchback to head back down to the city. We were creeping along in 1st gear at maybe 7 or 8 miles an hour…there were actually a couple of sections that were narrower and had steeper drop-offs than in this one…but none of those photos were blog worthy. The road on the far right is US-50 East…just before it makes a 90 degree left turn around the ridge and gets into the city itself…we’re looking south here.

Next up…the Abbey Winery…which is still owned by the Benedictine Monks…we sampled almost all of their 15ish tasting wines and came home with 4 different varieties to add to our wine cellar. We were actually surprised by some of our selections…but we picked the best tasting four of them.

With that we headed home for wine and dinner…we’re having Pineapple Pork Tacos for dinner tonight that Neil will grill everything outside for. One of the wines we bought goes well with Mexican food…so we bought both a bottle for the cellar and a chilled one of that type to have with dinner. Bonus points for it being made out of wines grown right here in Cañon City…many folks have grape vines in their backyards here and the winery buys grapes from at least 30 or so sources to make into this Sangria like wine.

This morning on the way to Mass…we decided to shake up the Jello a little. Our original plan for here in Cañon City was to have 2 free days…we used up the first of those when we had to schedule another eye exam for Neil after his detaching vitreous that was discovered the week we left Fort Myers. Then he came up with the idea of visiting Great Sand Dunes National Park…so we added that on the other formerly free day. The problem is that we have been pretty much on the go ever since we left Fort Myers a month ago…the last time we had a do-nothing day was Saturday the first weekend in May between our arrival in Kerrville for the rally and the start of the rally itself…but even that one we still had the daily happy hour and social stuff. Once the rally was over…it was 3 travel days to get to Lawrence KS…and since then we’ve either had a travel day, a Fun Stuff© day, or a laundry/errands day every day.

We were looking at a 2.5 hour drive down to Great Sand Dunes…then doing the visitor center movie and driving around the park, and other 2.5 hours back to Cañon City plus whatever time we stopped for lunch or photos or whatever. With us planning on leaving around 0700…it was going to be dinner time by the time we got back.

We decided that we hated to skip the park…but it will still be there when we come back out this way…and that we would spend Memorial Day tomorrow doing nothing but sitting around, resting, and grilling dinner. Then we’ve got activities scheduled Tuesday through Thursday…a travel day on Friday…and then 6 stops that are either 1, 2, or 3 nights and all the intervening days are fully booked for Fun Stuff©. Our next chance to really get any rest will be when we get to Carson City NV on June 14…so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and get a rest day in.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

David Pogue…you’ve probably seen him as the tech guy on CNN and several other channels…anyway last weekend he was a participant in the Berks Pepper Jam at some sort of festival up in the northeast somewhere…the Pepper Jam is you pay money to eat whole chili peppers. He posted a photo of the waiver he had to sign for his entry.

While this is Memorial Day weekend which honors those soldiers who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for their country and not Veterans Day which honors all veterans…and no matter which side of the immigration debate you come down on…there’s a lot of truth in this one. I don’t mean to trivialize the immigration problem and both progressives and conservatives have some valid points in their argument. It’s also true that we are putting folks apprehended by the Border Patrol in hotels for lack of detention facilities…and at the same time there are a lot of homeless veterans on the street. While not all homeless are veterans of course…and there are many reasons both good and bad for people to be homeless…Ima just sayin’.

For those of you who’ve heard of Schrödinger’s cat…which basically is a thought experiment usually thought of as a paradox…Schrödinger was a physicist who basically said that in relativistic quantum physics terms it wasn’t possible to observe something without potentially changing the outcome…he said that if the cat was in the box it was impossible to determine whether the cat was alive or dead and in a relativistic scenario opening the box to see might change the answer…anyways…this makes things even more complicated. The equation on the box is how you mathematically represent the conundrum.

Cyas.

Tuesday morning…we had coffee and breakfast…then set about getting ready to travel the 220 miles to La Junta CO. It was still raining on and off so Neil went in and out and finished up everything but power, slides, and hitching while Connie did the inside stuff.

We picked a lull in the rainfall…finished up the outside stuff…and hit the road a bit before 1000. Our route for the day was straight west on US-50 with just a single scheduled stop on the way.

That stop was in Syracuse KS about 15 miles before the CO/KS border…there’s a mural on the wall of a building opposite a truck stop there that we wanted to stop and see.

We found a place to park the rig…it was a pretty small truck stop…and had some lunch. Afterwards we took in the mural…there were a couple more but they were 2 blocks down the street and it was still drizzling…and this was the largest one as we drove by the other two on the way into town…so we skipped the other ones.

We continued westward…passed through a pretty significant rainstorm, went on the detour in Garden City through the middle of town and eventually proceeded on to La Junta. Connie’s GPS had her go past the campground and make a detour…we weren’t sure that the rig would have been able to negotiate the turn so we turned a little earlier than the campground as directed by the RV GPS. It had us turn south then onto Country Road 24 paralleling 50 about a half mile to the south, go west a couple of miles and then take a right on CR 26.5 to get back to 50 east for the right turn into the campground. As we were on County Road 26.5…which was basically a paved goat track…Neil told Connie on the radio that there would probably actually be a cut through to get into the campground. Turns out…there was, and in addition we could have gone another 100 yards past the campground and turned left at the light for Walmart then left again onto Frontage Road and right into the campground…thereby missing the goat track entirely. Oh well…no trip is complete without the “adventure portion of the tour”.

We pulled into the La Junta KoA and quickly got checked in…then proceeded to site 43…a nice, albeit muddy as it had been raining for 2+ days in La Junta…gravel pull through that was almost completely level. We got unhitched and setup…then rested in the afternoon as we were a bit tuckered out.

We headed out for dinner about 1630…which was 1730 body time as we had just crossed into Mountain Time at the CO/KS border and we were hungry. It was Neil’s birthday…so Connie was in charge of picking out a good place to eat…she chose Felisa’s Mexican Restaurant in town and told him it was the best place in town based on recommendations. 

The Margaritas were a vast improvement over the last ones I reported on…and it might have been the best place in town based on reviews…but it wasn’t good. The food was seriously over-salted…at least the service and cocktails were fine. We were both pretty full when we left so we just watched bedtime until bed time. Overnight…it got down to 38 degrees…somebody needs to tell these Colorado folks that it’s late May for heaven’s sake…it’s way past time to be warmer. On top of that…both Canon City (our next destination), and the road over Monarch Pass (2 destinations down the road) were getting snowed on. Ridikilus as Daffy Duck would say.

We were up about 0330 MT…or our pretty much normal 0430 body time…we turned on the furnace to warm the place up…it was in the upper 50s…and slept until about 0630. Connie got up and made coffee and Neil breakfast…then we worked on various things until lunch. 

After lunch…we headed out to do some Fun Stuff…one of our two stops here in La Junta was the Koshare Indian Museum and Trading Post…it’s right here in town. We paid our $3 admission each and wandered around, then Connie hit up the gift shop for a couple of items. All in all…not a bad little museum but it was pretty small.

This is a really nice stained glass piece…too bad it wasn’t lit from the back. I removed as many of the reflections as I could…but Photoshop and only do so much even though Neil had the flash off.

Some of the native fauna. I think the one on the left is telling the other two “I told you to watch out for those guys.”

Bison…some folk wrongly call the animals that roamed the plains way back when about 60 million in number buffalo…but they’re not. They’re bison and not even in the same family as the buffalo…think Cape Buffalo…is.

Beaded Indian dress from the early 1900s.

All in all…a pretty decent little museum and definitely worth the price.

We headed home…and as the temperature was up in the upper 60s…opened the door, windows and turned on the fan for awhile. We’ll have to close up later as it is going down to the mid 40s tonight but the next two days are supposed to be even a little warmer than today.

We had noticed up at the front of the KoA here in La Junta a nice little coffee and pastry place and decided we would get some breakfast there…so after we had a couple of sips of coffee on Thursday morning we walked up there. They had blueberry scones and several types of muffins advertised…but on getting to the window the young lady therein said she was out of everything but breakfast burritos. We were disappointed…but nonetheless picked up a bacon/egg and a sausage/egg burrito and headed home for breakfast. I can tell you now…they were not Good Eats…we choked down as much as we could but we’ll not venture there again. We sat around and watched the end of today’s bicycle race…stage something or other of the Giro d’Italia…which is like the Tour de France ‘cept it’s in Italy…there was a thrilling sprint finish between 5 or 7 guys. All of the main contenders for the overall race lead finished 10 or 12 minutes back.

Finally…about 1100 we headed out for today’s Fun Stuff© which in retrospect turned out to be fun stuff©…but it was educational as we learned one thing we had no idea of before.

Our destination was the Granada CO Relocation Center…also known as Camp Amache…which is the ruins of one of the Japanese internment camps…although concentration camp would be a more apt description. We had a couple of drive by stops on the way and Granada is about an hour east of La Junta.

First up were two quick stops in Lamar CO…first up is the Petrified Wood Building. It’s now part of a used car dealership…but it was originally built as a gas station built by local lumber dealer W. G. Brown in 1932. As the walls and floors were constructed of petrified wood that came from somewhere in CO…it can…I guess…truthfully make the claim that it’s the oldest structure in the world as the age of the petrified wood is somewhere around 175 million years.

While I would never recommend visiting Lamar CO just to see this building as it’s kinda tacky…if you’re here then why not…and one of the things Connie and Neil are interested in seeing on this US-50 journey is strange little tourist attractions it fit right in. It was raining by the time we got there…drizzling actually rather than full on rain…so Neil hopped out and got a couple of photos.

Next up…we stopped for lunch a block down the road at Subway…it was a typically Subway meatball sub…then we headed off to the Lamar Depot and Colorado Welcome Center. Connie gathered up some brochures and such for our remaining time in CO and we got a few photos.

This is a memorial to the Madonna of the Trail…or the pioneer mothers who helped blaze the trail.

The original…albeit slightly relocated… water tower for the AT&SF Railroad in Lamar.

And a better view of the restored steam engine from across the street.

On the way to Lamar…we passed a sign for the exit to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site which was dedicated in 2007. As none of us had ever heard of the Sand Creek Massacre…Connie proceeded to google it…because after all…google knows all. Turns out that in 1864…we had no idea that in addition to the Civil War there was also some Indian warfare going on out in the west…this massacre happened.

Essentially…by the terms of the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie…the Indian nations…Cheyenne and Arapaho mainly…were given possession of territory between the North Platte and Arkansas River from the Rocky Mountains to western KS…at the time of the treaty no white people wanted this land. With the discovery of gold in the Rocky Mountains in 1848 leading to the Pikes Peak Gold Rush…naturally the US decided to “renegotiate… this treaty…or essentially tell the Indians it was null and void and that the Indians needed to give up more land…not our government’s finest hour by any means. Some of the Indian groups…those whose leaders advocated peaceful relations with the white man…accepted this and a group of them set up a village on Sand Creek. IN 1864 however…a US Army Colonel named John Chivington headed to Sand Creek and attacked and massacred an Indian village…his 700 or so men surrounded the Indian village which contained primarily women and children. Despite the US flag and a white flag of peace flying over the village as specified by the new treaty…Chivington’s men butchered and executed almost the entire inhabitants of the village. An investigation concluded that Chivington had ordered what would basically be considered war crimes by today’s standards…but he had left the army by then so nothing happened.

Anyways…we got to our actual destination for the day…the remains of the Granada Relocation Center or Camp Amache as it was known. After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941…about 7,300 US citizens of Japanese ancestry were forcibly relocated to this camp…in total between 110,000 and 120,000 US citizens were relocated under this program. Today…this would be considered intolerable…but in 1941 the government believed that US citizens of Japanese ancestry were…despite their oath of allegiance to the US…still would serve as saboteurs or spies or whatever in support of the Emperor of Japan. Not actually true…as many of the interned men went on to serve with great distinction in the European theater during the way…but with the mass hysteria of the day it was done.

There’s nothing really left of the camp…just some foundation ruins and the roads that were in the camp. After striking out at the Visitor Center…it wasn’t clear whether it was open before Memorial Day or not and it turned out to be not…we headed back slightly west of the town of Granada to the gate of the historical site. By this time…it had been raining fairly steadily for an hour or two and as we turned off the main road the historical site roads were clay. No gravel on them…just clay. We slip-slided away for a mile or two before coming to our senses and deciding that we didn’t need to be there in Li’l Red…it would have been easy to slide into a ditch we couldn’t easily get out of and we saw zero other vehicles inside the historical site…so discretion was the better part of valor as they say. Neil found a place to turn around and we headed back out…making sure as we approached each turn to carefully scout the intersecting road so that we didn’t have to actually stop to look before making the turn…we were seriously concerned that if we stopped we might not get going again if it was even a little bit uphill. No worries though…we made it back out to the highway and stopped on paved road before pulling out and heading home for the day.

We did listen to the entire audio driving tour of the camp on our drive home…and again I have to say…not one of our government’s finest hours.

We did spot some black tailed deer shortly after entering the historical site…Neil rolled down the window and got a couple of photos. Since we were in Li’l Red…it served as a blind and even through they were only 40 or so yards away they essentially ignored us.

This group of 3 was standing in the road…there was an additional group of 3 to 5 off to the right a bit but they were in the trees and Neil couldn’t figure out the exact number and they were mostly obscured by the trees anyway.

One of the group walked to the right into the trees and Neil zoomed in for a closeup of the other two. Black tailed deer are named for their black tail just like the whitetail deer down in the southeast…but they more resemble mule deer as they’re larger in size than most whitetails…these two are probably 170 pounds as opposed to 120 or so for a whitetail…and they have the same larger ears that a mule deer…which is found mostly in the west…has.

The road they’re standing on was way, way better than the one we were driving on at the time…and once we made the turn off the main camp access road onto the road leading between the resident blocks it was even worse. We were glad we turned around.

On to interesting things found the net.

This is what happens when you order non OEM parts from a dealer on the internet sometimes.

David Pogue…who’s one of the tech guy gurus you see a lot on Yahoo, CNN and the like…anyway he posted this waiver for a hot pepper eating contest he entered last week.

And finally…no matter what side of the illegal immigration/undocumented people debate you come down on…you have to admit that this one is true and unjustified. It was clearly prepared by somebody who thinks illegal immigration should be stopped…and I’m not sure that the “thousands of veterans” isn’t an exaggeration…but the sentiment is true. Why are we not taking care of our own citizens who served the country during wartime at least as good as we’re taking care of those that deliberately violated both US and international law by coming here.

While I realize that many of the folks pouring across the border in the past year or so consider themselves “refugees”…the truth of the matter is that (a) they’re economic migrants which doesn’t qualify as a refugee under international law and (b) a “refugee” under international law is required to stop and request asylum from the FIRST country they get to that isn’t the one they’re refugees from…in this case it would be Mexico and not the US. Despite this…and despite the fact that Mexico has offered all of the recent “refugees’ asylum in Mexico and guaranteed them jobs…they continue to violate international law, proceed to the US border, cross illegally, and turn themselves in to US Border Patrol so that they can be taken care of. I understand that the US is the gold standard where probably 98% of all the people that want to immigrate want to end up…but we need to take care of our citizens first and enforce existing law.

Cyas.

For those of you old enough to remember the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons along with Boris, Natasha, fair maiden Nell and Dudley Doright of the Mounties…that title should bring back some old memories.

Saturday morning…we went a little slower than normal…we only had 125 miles to go to our next stop in Dodge City KS and we didn’t want to get there too early. We were still on the road by about 0930 and our route for the day was straight west on US-50. We only stopped twice…once at the sign for the middle of the United States and once at a truck stop for a snack and short walking around break.

The center of the US…well according to the folks in Kinsley KS…it’s Kinsley KS. While I can’t begrudge the city the desire to have something worth seeing in their tiny little town…whether it’s the center of the US or not is clearly debatable.

I took a look at it on Google Maps…and from Kinsley to San Francisco is either 1,596, 1,584, or 1,645 miles by road depending on which road you pick. From Kinsley to New York City is 1,489, 1,513, or 1,527…again depending on how you go. 

As the crow files…New York is 1,347 miles and San Francisco is 1,268 miles…at least according to Google Maps and depending on exactly where you click on when finding the distance…I used the marked circle for SF and NYC for those numbers.

Then there’s the whole argument about the center of the US. As noted in an earlier post…the geographic center of the lower 48 is up near Lebanon KS but the exact point depends on how you calculate the geographic center. Although the methodology for doing that is precise…it’s based on coastlines and what the coastline is depends on what data source your map is based on, how precise it is as to the exact profile of the coastline…and even dependent on how you define the coastline. Is it the mean low or high tide mark…the lowest low tide or highest high tide mark, or whatever. However…all of that pretty much smoothes itself out over the large size of what you’re trying to find the center of.

Anyways…I guess ya could carefully choose your end points and straight line vs a road route…but the sign in Kinsley says it’s 1,561 miles to both NYC and SF…for a total of 3,122 miles NYC to SF. Straight line distance on Google is 2,557 and road miles between the two is between 2,902 and 3,075 depending on distance…kinda hard to make that match up to the 3,122 from adding the numbers on the sign. Unfortunately…the sign doesn’t give any worthwhile details regarding how they came up with those numbers…not to mention why SF and NYC to measure between. Just between you and me…ifn I wuz to be doing it…I would draw a straight line ‘cross the middle…say between about the OR/CA border at the Pacific and extending to the Atlantic along NC some place…which would be 2,611 crow files miles or 3,159 to 3,233 driving miles…but that’s just me.

But again…I digress and as regular readers will recognize…I’m more than willing to head down whatever literary, historical, or useless little knowledge rat hole comes to mind as I sit down to write ya these missives.

No matter though…the sign is the sign…and since it says it’s the middle of the US of A…Ima not going to disagree with ‘em…I’ll just post the photo here for ya and ya can make up your own mind regarding the numbers and validity of the claims thereon. According to roadsideamerica.com it’s the midpoint of US-50…but since 50 is 3,017 according to Wikipedia and it’s 3,073 according to the green highway mileage sign…that doesn’t really work either. However…the variation in 50’s length from 3,017 to 3.073 is due to the fact that 50 used to extend all the way to the Pacific at San Francisco…that discrepancy can be explained but neither of those adds up to the 3,122 based on the sign.

Continuing on down the road towards our destination…this is what Kansas looks like…as you can see there’s lots of bugs to smash themselves to death on your windshield and it’s really flat. Luckily…once we got to Dodge City…Neil broke out his Awesome cleaner. Awesome is this natural based product that you dilute and use to clean stuff with. It will take off bugs, road tar, and just about anything else you might need cleaned up…in other words…it’s awesome…hence the name.

We arrived about 1230 at Gunsmoke RV Park on the west side of Dodge City and quickly got checked in, pulled into site 92, and setup for the next couple of days. After an afternoon nap…we headed out to Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe…it’s a relatively new building that was dedicated in 2001…it was actually a pretty nice church. The local bishop was celebrating Mass…the only other interesting item was the lady we saw there that had brought her pet…er, emotional support animal she called it I guess because it had one of those Service Animal vests you can buy from Amazon for $19.95 on it. It was this little rat dog…on a leash but poorly behaved as it wrapped its leash around a couple of folks legs on the way up to Communion…so clearly it was not a trained service animal. Both Connie and Neil really hate people that buy those vests so as to have an excuse to take their pet where it shouldn’t be or on National Park Service hikes that prohibit pets. They can’t possibly leave their precious little rat dogs behind…so they abuse the law and make it more difficult for folks that have a real need for a service animal like a seeing eye dog or an epileptic seizure detecting dog to take something they need along with them. Here’s a shot from the parking lot of the incoming thunderstorms as we left Mass afterwards. Those are the storms that were responsible for the overnight winds discussed in the next paragraph.

We headed out to dinner at the Central Station Bar and Grill…same place we ate last time we were here in 2014. Having looked back at our blog entry from then…Neil noted that he had a steak, Connie had tacos…and Neil shoulda had the tacos. So with that in mind both of them ordered Albert’s Tacos…toasted corn tortillas filled with ribeye, sautéed onions, and cilantro…and sliced avocado for Connie of course. Along with the tacos…and the inevitable chips and salsa we sampled beforehand…we had a couple of Margaritas. The tacos were outstanding…the cocktails were…well, they sucked…which was surprising for a Mexican place. Margaritas are supposed to contain tequila, triple sec, and lime juice…Sprite is never supposed to be an ingredient and you’re actually suppose to put booze in them. They were weak and tasted strange.

We got back to the rig and watched TV until bedtime…keeping an eye on the developing storms around us. We missed the thunderstorms (mostly) and hail…but it got pretty windy…25 knots and gusts to probably 35…and stayed that way until the wee hours of the morning. We were rocking and rolling in our 23,500 pound rig…I can only imagine what the 6,000 to 8,000 pound travel trailers around us were going through.

Sunday morning…we got up a bit later than normal, had some eggs for breakfast, then wandered over to the laundry room to get 3 loads done. We spent a pleasant 75 minutes or so talking to a newbie RVer lady who lives with her husband in Alaska during the summer and will be RVing down in the lower 48 in winter…they are on their first RV trip from Knoxville TN up to Seattle where they’ll store the rig for the summer. Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day after the overnight wind and occasional showers.

After laundry…we had some lunch and then headed off to our first Fun Stuff© destination in Dodge City…the remnants of the Santa Fe Trail route where thousands of wagons crossed the prairie along the banks of the Arkansas River to get to the west of town about 8 miles.

Everybody’s heard of the Oregon Trail that was used by settlers…but there was also the Santa Fe Trail which was also used by settlers as well as commercial freight operators to get to the newly opened western US. The Santa Fe Trail essentially operated from about 1821 to 1880. Like the Oregon Trail…it wasn’t a road as such…just a general route over which the covered wagons traveled…contrary to popular belief they didn’t proceed in a convoy nose to tail but spread out a little to lessen the dust they had to breathe…while remaining close enough together to quickly form a circle when necessary to defend against robbers or Indian attack. What’s left of the trail has been long overgrown by prairie plant life…but in some places you can still faintly see the remains of their passage…usually shown by slight gullies that when viewed from a distance are more obviously a path where something passed. 

Here are some shots from the site.

Shot of the trail remains…it’s the grayish line almost horizontal across this shot but rising slightly as it goes left to right. The slight trail was easier to see by eye than it is in the photo…you don’t have the depth that helps delineate it better in the photo.

Connie got some flower shots…of course.

Another shot of the trail…it’s running vertically in the center o this shot as the wagons came up the slope.

Neil spotted a Kildeer.

After that we headed back for town…and Neil pulled over to get some photos of this fine truck for sale. As you can see…it’s got no windshield or windows…and when he looked in the window it’s got no seats, steering wheel or dash either.

And no paint that isn’t rusted away.

And oh yeah…the bed is in really fine shape as well.

Zooming in on the For Sale sign…you can see that Jim has it for sale, it’s a 1948 Ford pickup, he wants $1500 for it, and ifn you’re interested his phone number is right there for ya.

Right at the city limits of Dodge City coming in from the west there’s this cool sculpture to welcome you to town.

Back at home…we did a few chores on our list Sunday afternoon before dinner and watching TV until bedtime.

By about 0200 Monday morning…another line of storms came through and although there were a few thunderstorms it was mostly just rain and cold…only in the mid 50s for the high temperature today. Nevertheless…after breakfast we headed out for our remaining Fun Stuff© item here in Dodge City…the Boot Hill Museum. It pretty much rained all day though…quite a wet day for Fun Stuff©.

This is a museum dedicated to the original Boot Hill cemetery in town as well as a bunch of famous folks who happened through here…Wyatt Erp, Bat Masterson among them. The museum includes a recreation of the Long Branch Saloon owned by Miss Kitty, Marshal Dillon’s office, and various other locations from the long running series Gunsmoke. Although not filmed here…Matt was based in Dodge City and many of the business names and designs were copied from the original locations along the original Front Street in Dodge City.

Some beautiful Indian clothing on display.

And a shot of the cemetery…which was only in use for 7 years. I guess they filled it up and had to open another one someplace else.

This sign talks about the known burials in the cemetery as recorded in newspapers around the state…seems a lot of folk got shot in bar brawls or fights over cards and similar circumstances. Nobody ever died of natural causes I guess.

After finishing our museum tour…Connie stopped in the gift shop for a few items then we headed home via the Golden Arches drive through for a quick lunch and Walmart for some grub. Our original plan was to head out for a steak dinner…but Connie was feeling poorly…she’s getting over her cold but isn’t quite there yet and we travel again tomorrow…so we’ll just stay in and have something here instead. No reason to go back out in the rain.

Tomorrow…another 210 miles westward to La Junta CO…hopefully the rain will have stopped by the morning so we won’t have to hitch in the rain…that’s no fun at all.

Interesting stuff found on the net this week.

Neil and Connie fit perfectly into this demographic.

The power of marketing.

Singles ad.

And a riddle for you…what does this one mean?

Why…the Czech is in the mail…of course.

Cyas.

Thursday morning we started our pre-underway stuff at 0800 and were rolling out of the Lawrence KoA right about 0930 for our 198 mile trip down to Hutchinson…well, actually South Hutchinson…KS for a 2 night stay at Lighthouse Landing RV. The route was mostly a retrace of our previous trip from Wichita KS to Lawrence KS…at least until we crossed I-135 which we took previously north out of Wichita.

When we got to the intersection of US-50 with I-135 north of Wichita…we headed south 2 miles on the combined highway then exited back off onto US-50 for the last 30odd miles to Hutchinson. We arrived around 1300.

Before we got there though…we made 1 stop in Emporia KS…well actually it was 2 stops as Neil proceeded directly to the Flying J there where we had lunch while Connie stopped for a photo op.

Turns out that right outside downtown Emporia across the traffic circle from the local high school…there’s a silo. Now I have no idea whether it’s a corn or wheat or a whatever silo…but that’s not really germane to it’s importance. What is important is its color scheme…which is the whole reason we stopped and why this particular silo has its own designation on Google Maps.

Yes…it’s a silo painted to look like a Coke Classic can. Pretty neat, huh?

Here’s a closer view.

The silo is located just SW of the traffic circle where the high school is…we came into the circle from the east. Neil got a view of it…then since there was no rig-worthy parking nearby…proceeded a half mile south to get back on US-50 then west a half mile to the Flying J. Connie pulled off…got the photos…and met him for lunch.

After lunch we continued on down US-50, past the short merge with I-135, and then back onto 50.

Arriving at Lighthouse Landing RV…we found the office empty…so Neil called the number on the door and talked to Jennifer the manager. She said to just “proceed to your site and come in tomorrow morning to pay”…but we didn’t know our site. She said that it was #3…which turned out to be a nice pull through right near the bath house. We quickly got setup…turned on the A/C as it was in the upper 80s…and settled down for the evening.

Connie’s been battling allergies the past week or so…as has Neil…but hers has developed into a cold or something…so we stayed in for the afternoon and evening…Neil used the last of the pork from Kansas City BBQ (except for the package we froze)…and made a noodle, pulled pork, and BBQ dish…it tasted pretty good but most of all it was easy.

An interesting side note about Hutchinson KS…it’s just about 128 miles from Lebanon Kansas…what’s important about Lebanon KS you say? Just outside it…and again this is a spot that is findable on Google maps…is the geographical center of the lower 48 states.

What’s the geographic center of all 50 states you say? According to the US Geodetic Survey…who are also responsible for the above determination…there’s not a precise way to determine this because of variability in how you do the calculations…but they generally accept a spot 17 miles west of Castle Rock SD as the 50 state center. Belle Fourche SD (29 miles SW of Castle Rock) disputes this claim and says that by their calculations…or rather the calculations they paid somebody to make to disagree with Castle Rock…is the actual geographic center of the 50 states…but I digress.

Friday morning…we were up early for breakfast then left about 0940 for the 10 minute drive to our first Fun Stuff© stop for Hutchinson…the Strataca Salt Mine and Museum.

Strataca is both a tourist attraction and a working salt mine. Salt was discovered here in the early 1920’s by a guy who was actually looking for oil. He sold the rights to a local family who’s essentially been mining salt ever since. The salt deposits here are about 400 feet in height and the bottom is about 650 feet below ground. The deposits were laid down over about 1.6 million years about 190 million years ago. Back then…all the current continents were essentially in the single large continent known as Pangea and over what is now TX, KS, and OK there was a large inland salt sea. Geologists…and don’t ask me how they figured this out because nobody explained it and I have no idea…have figured out that the inland sea was about 5x times more salty than even the Dead Sea is…which is about 9 times as salty as ocean water. Over the 1.6 million years it took to lay down the salt beds…the sea periodically dried up to mostly dry and then was flooded again. As it dried up…the salt concentration got so high that some of the salt precipitated out. Then on the next wet period…mud and silt were washed into the sea and laid down on top of the salt…resulting in layers of salt and mud that varied from an inch or so in thickness all the way up to 4 or 5 feet…totaling about 400 feet in height. The beds are over 150 miles wide and 200 miles long.

There are currently several businesses operating in the salt bed. First is the Hutchinson Corporation which produces rock salt mostly used for roads and other non-culinary uses…this salt is harvested by mining the rock, sending it to the surface, and crushing it. Second is Strataca which runs the museum. There’s also a company which produces food grade salt…this is not mined as rock but by drilling a well down into the salt bed, pumping in water to dissolve the salt into a brine solution, then pumping the brine to the surface. There…it’s dried into salt that is milled and sifted into table salt, kosher salt, and other food grade products. Lastly is the Underground Vault and Storage Company…USV…which uses the constant 68 degrees and 40 percent humidity to store long term everything from computerized medical data to original prints for the Wizard of Oz movie to paper document storage.

We spent about 2 hours touring the museum portion of the salt bed at a depth of 650 feet…including a couple of train rides out into the sections of the mine that were mined back in the 30s and 40s…the rides and sights were pretty cool but the recorded narration was pretty cheesy.

OK…on to photos from the mine.

Plaque to Old Number 2…this was an engine owned by the Hutchinson and Northern Rail Road…H&N RR…which has the distinction of being the railroad with the shortest total track length…a whopping 3 miles…in the US. It was built and owned by the mine owners to move filled railcars from the mine site to Hutchinson where they transferred them to the national railroads for distribution.

Old Number 2 itself…which came back to it’s original site about 40 years after the death of the H&N RR.

Close up Neil took of some of the layers…this shot is about 4 feet from top to bottom.

Connie actually got a much better shot of the same area…she zoomed out to get some scale into it and it’s a much better photo than Neil’s is…but don’t tell her or it will go to her head:-)

Salt loading vehicle…the salt is mined by undercutting it at floor level with a machine that looks very similar to a 10 foot long chain saw parallel to the floor. Once the wall is undercut, drillers come behind and drill holes in the wall to a depth of 10 feet. These are then filled first with a blasting cap then air packed with ANFO which is a mixture of ammonium nitrate (fertilizer essentially) and diesel fuel. It’s like wet sand and mostly inflammable and non-explosive compared to the dynamite used originally. You’ll recall that ANFO is what was used in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing back in 1995. Best of all…ANFO is about 1/20 of the cost of dynamite and can be made on site from it’s two components rather than needing to be shipped in and stored. Once set…the miners light the fuse and in the ensuring 4 minute delay withdraw about 200 yards. The blast is sequenced with low center charges going off first, followed by low sides then the top…this results in the best performance in bringing down a section of wall. After the dust clears…this machine…essentially a low bulldozer…picks up the salt in its bucket and moves it to a conveyor belt for the 1/2 mile (currently) trip to the skip which moves it to the surface for processing. Back in the day…carts were hand filled…then machine filled…on narrow gauge mine cars which moved on rails to the skip.

This is a single salt crystal from one of the thicker layers…with Connie…again…doing her best Vanna White impersonation in front of it. The green Airport Road sign hanging from the roof shows the location and direction of Airport Road…650 feet above us…from where we entered the mine property. This is a singe chunk weighing a bit over 6,000 pounds.

On the train ride…this is an air barrier erected by early miners to close off mined out and unused sections of the mine to provide better air flow to the in use sections of the mine. 

The throne…alongside some trash piles that you can’t see. The rule is that “whatever comes into the mine…stays in the mine”. No trash is carried out and miners and their mechanics are experts at salvaging and reprising parts from one machine to another.

This is a sample of things stored by UVS…there are a lot of Hollywood props on display…Batman’s costume, the Men in Black sun glasses…although not a de-neuralizer.

Example of how the salt was mined. Pillars were left in place periodically to support the roof as the mine chambers were expanded as salt was removed.

This is a map of the entire mine complex showing which areas were mined during which time periods. The museum is in the purple, green, and blue portions which were mined in the 30s and 40s. There’s nothing really important about this map…except for some printing down in the lower right hand corner…which is the whole reason it is posted here. 

Just in case you’re eyes…like mine…just ain’t good enough to read the lower right hand corner…here’s a closeup. Dirty Jobs…somebody’s gotta do ‘em.

We came back topside…and after a couple of quick stops for gas, lunch, and some circuit breakers for the rig headed off to our second destination for the day…about 23 miles east of Hutchinson in Halstead…where we went to Riverside Park to see the swinging bridge and the ‘waterfall’ over a dam there.

Hey…I know it’s not much of a waterfall…but give me a break…this is Kansas. Kansas is the state that is literally…flatter than a pancake. Yes…this has actually been scientifically proven. Back in 2003…a trio of geographers bought themselves a standard IHOP pancake and took it into the lab…where, undeterred by the “No food or drink in the lab” signs liberally displayed there…subjected it to a topographical analysis conducted by a laser microscope. They then compared their profile to an east to west profile of Kansas taken from a 1:250,000 digital model of the state’s official elevation data…and calculated a flatness estimate for each profile. A flatness level of 1.0 means perfect, platonic flatness. The pancake registered a flatness level of 0.957…which seems pretty flat…at least until you compare it to Kansas’s flatness level of 0.9997…or damn flat as the geographers said. That seemed to be the definitive answer until 2014…when another couple of geographers analyzed their methodology and determined that in order to be NOT flatter than a pancake Kansas with it’s 644 kilometer width (about 400 miles) would need a 9,908 meter tall mountain to be less flat than the pancake as measured in 2003. Since the highest mountain in the world is only 8,848 meters tall…every state in the US is “flatter than a pancake” by their definition.

This second pair of folks…in their study…used a different methodology based on how much and how far a person of average height could see if he/she looked in a circle. Using their method…the actual flattest state is FL…at least according to them. 

So Kansas might not actually be as flat as everybody thinks…but again I digress. Sorry ‘bout that.

After we got the shot of the waterfall…we were walking back to the car and Neil spotted the flood gauge thing near the river…you can see the dirt marks near the 21 foot mark from recent flooding along with the levee across the river that protects downtown Halstead.

How recent was the flooding you say?

Well…here’s a photo of the entrance sign to the park.

The river is to the left just outside the sidewalk you can see at far left…and the bridge above is at back center. The entrance to the park is about 20 on the flood gauge in the previous shot.

This was the view taken from the same spot by Greg Miller from KAKE TV in Wichita a mere 10 days ago.

At that time…the bridge was almost completely submerged and the dam was under about 12 or 15 feet of water…which came just about up to the road where these two shots were taken from.

With that…our work here is done as they say. We headed home, had some fish filets for dinner and lazed around until bedtime. Tomorrow we’re off to Dodge City KS…where we’ll spend 3 nights at the Gunsmoke RV Park.

An interesting new possibility has arisen in our US-50 travels…it’s too soon to tell but if it pans out I’ll be posting about it here in a couple of weeks…so stay tuned for further developments on that front.

On to interesting things found on the net this week…these come to us courtesy of an email from our friend Gail along with a few additional ones Neil found on the web.

Apparently…millennials are now traveling unsupervised…and this list of complaints has been forwarded to the Thomas Cook travel agency by dissatisfied millennials.

• On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food.

• They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax.

• We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish.

• We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price.

• The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room.

• We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow.

• It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to siesta in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time — this should be banned.

• No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared.

• Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no hard boiled egg-slicer in the drawers.

• I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.

• The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun.

• It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair.

• I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends’ three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller.

• The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the resort.’ We’re trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service.

• When we were in Spain, there were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners.

• We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning.

• It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.

• I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes.

• My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you all responsible and want to be reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.

• A tourist at a top African Game Lodge over looking a water hole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel inadequate.

Ah…the joys of youth who know everything.

Cyas.

We arrived in the Kansas City area where we will…finally…get to start our US-50 coast to coast trip. After a pretty quick transit from Fort Myers to Kerrville TX for the NHOG rally…we had another 900 mile 3 day trip to the KC area…where at long last it seems we’ll actually slow down a bit. Connie and Neil were talking yesterday that we really haven’t had a day off since we left Fort Myers on April 26…it’s really been fun but it’s also been pretty busy and we’re actually glad that the rally is over, our last multi day transit for awhile is over, and we’re ready to get down to some Fun Stuff©.

So…US-50…let’s talk about it a bit. I just looked it up on Wikipedia…and according to the sign at the western end in CA…it’s 3073 miles to Ocean City MD from there as based on the green road sign…although wikipedia says it’s 3017 miles and the sign in MD that says CA is a slightly different number (sorry I can’t find a photo of it right now but we’ll get one for ya later). 

Our original goal was to go coast to coast on this road…we lived in Fairfax VA for 30something years right off of US-50…but given the rally in Kerrville TX we decided to do it in two parts. After the rally…we would head north to the KC area and go west from there to the terminus of the highway in northern CA. Then…instead of retracing our route we would head north to Oregon and catch US-20 eastward through Idaho, Nebraska and various other north central US states. On getting back even with KC we would cut south, pick up US-50 again and take it to the east coast in Ocean City MD. As we planned the trip…we discovered about 100 miles in WV that…to put it mildly…just ain’t rig worthy…so we’ll skip that part and head around the bad part to the north before getting back down to the highway in the DC suburbs. We’ll leave the rig in northern VA and take a 2 day overnight tip to get the last 100 or so miles out to the Atlantic…mostly because there aren’t any real good RV parks over on what Marylanders call the Eastern Shore.

Here’s a shot of the overall route of US-50.

Since KC is on the east side of KS…as you can see we’ll do about 60% of the route heading west from there. Then after coming back east  farther north…we will cut down through Columbia MO to rejoin 50…the small part we’ll skip is in WV and western MD. We’ve been on that road before…just not with the rig. There’s no real stuff we want to see there and taking the rig over those roads is just what we would call ‘round these parts as “choosing poorly” as the aged knight said in the movie.

Part of the western part of the highway…that part going through NV…is known as “The Loneliest Road in America”…we’ll certainly see that. For most of the trip…we’ll not be on limited access highways like interstates…although in some areas 50 is the same road as the freeway…for instance in northern UT. We’ll traverse some mountain passes over the trip…but we’re really looking forward to mostly being off the beaten path on what what Robert Frost called “the road less traveled by”.

Our average travel distance this summer will be somewhat less than we’re accustomed to…we have a whole bunch of travel days in the 120 to 150 mile range. We’ll also be staying less…on average…at a site than we usually do…this is driven partly by what we want to see in the area, the fact that it’s mostly small towns, and the need to keep up a schedule so as to arrive back in Fort Myers on Nov 1. Our last stop heading westward…the highway doesn’t actually go all the way to the Pacific any more as it stops in West Sacramento CA…but we’ll go and visit the rest of it out to the water anyway…anyway our last stop westward will be in the Sacramento area. From there…we’ll head north to Foster OR for the Independence Day weekend and while there head 90 miles further west…without the rig…to Newport OR to get the western end of US-20. Our original intent was to do the whole 50 route followed by the whole 20 route back to Boston…but the rally and calendar really prevented doing that unless we skimped on time at various locations…hence our overall route modification.

We will manage to hit a whole bunch of relatively unknown tourist destinations, a number of national parks we haven’t visited yet, Monarch Pass in CO, and various other Fun Stuff© sites.

I gotta couple questions about our current leadership inside the Beltway in DC…three of ‘em actually. Consider the last two Presidential administrations…each had a President of one party and at least one house of Congress controlled by the other party.

• Why is it that when the Attorney General ignores a subpoena from the opposition controlled house of Congress…in one case it’s described as a brave push back against the extremists on the other side and in another case it’s a constitutional crisis. Seems to me that it’s either one of the other. In the first case…the AG was held in contempt of Congress…ignored it…and nothing happened. In the current case…the AG has been held in contempt by a committee and assumably will be so held by the full House…he will ignore it…and it’s a constitutional crisis requiring impeachment of the AG.
• Why is it that in one case when a President signs an Executive Order because “the opposition in Congress won’t pass my policies”…and that’s just fine and dandy…but when the other side does it…it’s a gross unconstitutional over reach.
• Why is it that when one case a Presidential Executive Order to establish policies which overrides a previous administration’s Executive Order…well, again that’s just fine and dandy because EOs can always and easily be overturned by another administration…but in the second case there are lawsuits over it…and you get idiot judges issuing stays of EOs because “they were issued arbitrarily and capriciously”. 

From my standpoint…what’s good for one side oughta be good for the other side. Unfortunately…it all comes down to politics and the media…most of whom are progressive/liberal/socialist/choose your preferred term here…conveniently ignore what they said in the past because it doesn’t fit their political beliefs. What the hell happened to the media…who used to be responsible for reporting the news, in other words telling you what happened…instead of trying to make the news. Walter Cronkite…who was far, far left…almost out to the socialist definition…never ever let that come through in his nightly news broadcast. He simply said “that’s the way it is” at the end because his job was to report…not make…the news. Honest journalism these days is about as hard to find as a politician who believes in compromising with the other side so that each gets some of what they want and moves the chains.

Anyways…back to Fun Stuff©. We arrived in Lawrence KS just SW of Kansas City just about 1300 today and quickly got pulled into site 17 at the Lawrence/Kansas City West KoA. This is an older campground but suffices for our purposes. Tomorrow we’ll head out to a railroad museum in Ottawa KS followed by dinner at a local brew pub. 

Here’s a shot of the rig sitting in site 17 here…as I said it’s kind of an older KoA campground and doesn’t have much of the “it factor”…but it’s convenient to where we need to be and the folks are friendly.

Our intrepid explorers as they set off this AM for the first Fun Stuff© of the summer.

We set off about. 0915 or so for a 20something mile trip south back down US-59 to Ottawa KS to visit the Old Depot Museum. We originally…well, actually Connie and not we as Neil had no real idea beyond the name but he sorta agreed with her so mebbe it actually is we and not just Connie…but whatever…we arrived at the museum and there was a caboose out front on a railroad track so we/Connie…one of those choices as noted above…anyways it mighta been a railroad museum. Once inside though…it became clear that while the museum was located in the old train depot it is really more of a Kansas museum with a very slight emphasis on eastern Kansas and the Ottawa area.

Exterior shots from the museum…the Depot building was built in 1888 and used for 70 years before it was abandoned by the railroad. After sitting unused for a few years the county historical society bought it and established the museum.

These are grain elevators…also known as Kansas skyscrapers…they come in two main styles…either concrete or steel sides.

There is a nice display and information on the bloodshed led by John Brown…of Harper’s Ferry fame later on…over whether Kansas should be a free or slave state. When it was admitted to the Union the law specified that the citizens could vote on which one they wanted to be…there were numerous battles, massacres, and violence on both sides of the issue throughout the couple of years immediately surrounding admission to the union. Unfortunately…that display allowed no photography so Neil didn’t take any…but suffice it to say that John Brown was not a nice man at all…nor was his family. He later tried to capture the federal armory at Harpers Ferry MD…but failed and was hanged for his efforts.

Inside the museum there’s a very nice model railroad setup…I think it’s HO scale but our buddy Tom Hargis from back when we lived in Fairfax VA would be a better judge of that than me…he’s a train guy.

This soda fountain was in the building downstairs when it was abandoned…it was moved upstairs when converted to the museum.

Reproduction of a school room from when the depot was in use…Connie actually had desks like this when she was in grammar school. Neil asked her if that was before or after the days of the one room schoolhouse…she did not find that amusing and said that her grammar school had 2 sections for each primary grade.

Reproduction of a hardware store from the heyday of the depot building…all the artifacts are from old stores in the county.

All in all…we spent about an hour on the tour…well worth our $4 admission each (55+ price).

We headed back home and lazed around for the remainder of the afternoon…venturing out for dinner and brews at the Free State Brewing Company. At Free State…we found only one seat open at the bar…Neil had Connie take it and was going to just stand around with her until another one opened…when the young fella at the next seat said “here, take this one and sit with your wife…we’re leaving in just a bit”. Shocking I tellya. We had some OK but not great brews…of the two stouts Neil had one was over hopped and the other had almost no flavor. Connie’s blueberry sour gose was good as was the red ale she had afterwards. Dinner was gooey baked cheese with marinara sauce and some really great ciabatta bread followed up by a cup of asparagus soup for her and cheddar ale soup for Neil.

Wednesday morning…we headed off about 40 miles east to Independence MO to visit the President Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum…which actually turned out to be pretty interesting. We paid our entry fee…$8 for Connie and free for Neil as a retired military guy…and spent a couple of hours wandering through reading the exhibits, watching some short videos, and learning a lot more about our 33rd President than we knew before hand.

This is the eternal flame in the courtyard of the Museum…it’s in honor of all fallen military members.

Sculpture of President Truman.

Walkway leading out to the graves of the President and his wife Bess as well as his daughter Margaret and her husband.

Gravesites of Bess to the left and the President to the right.

On the way out…Neil got a nice pano shot of the entire museum/library building. The two wings stretch out and back from the center lobby with a circular meeting room/office area connecting the ends of the two wings…the courtyard with flame and graves is in the open center. 

We headed out from there back towards home about 1220 with just a single stop in mind before we returned…lunch and dinner.

There’s this BBQ chain in KC now named Kansas City BBQ with a total of 4 or 5 sites…most of which are large restaurants that can easily seat several hundred diners. The original location…which used to be named Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ…is in downtown and is literally in a converted gas station building…although it does still sell both gas and have a small convenience store as well. The original was founded by a guy who was known as Oklahoma Joe…when he retired he sold the place 17 years ago and the new owners “rented” the name as they put it for some time period. Don’t know any of the details but a couple of years back they renamed the chain to Kansas City BBQ…there’s a sign in the building that basically says the owners are from KC…never want to leave KC…wanted to rebrand to signify that they think BBQ in the city is the best around…and didn’t want to rent the name anymore. This place is so good…that back in the day Anthony Bourdain put it on his list of “9 Places to Eat Before You Die”…it’s that good.

Is it the best BBQ ever? Neil doesn’t think so…but it’s certainly in the top few of all the BBQ joints in all the towns we’ve tried. Cooking meat over  smoke has been done since caveman days…and it’s good all over the world. It’s also different all over both the USA and the world…KC is mostly pork with heavy smoke…TX is almost always beef or sausage with smoke, rub and maybe a little light sauce…NC is pork with vinegary sauce…AL/MS/GA is pork with a sweet sauce (except up in central AL where there’s a sub-category with a white mayo based sauce)…then there’s Memphis, Japanese (believe it or not), Mexican…Neil’s eaten burned/smoked meat all over the world…and it’s all good. There’s practically no such thing as bad BBQ in our opinion.

Anyways…back to the story…we had eaten at the original on our first trip to KC back in the day and at some of the larger branches out in the southern ‘burbs on subsequent trips…but since we were close to downtown and only had Li’l Red instead of Big Red and the rig…we stopped in for lunch and dinner. We got 8 ounces of hot beef brisket that we (mostly) ate for lunch on the way home and a pound of cold pulled pork that we’ll have for dinner tonight and tomorrow night then freeze whatever is left over for another day.

Here’s a shot of the line inside the building at almost 1300.

It starts on the right at the entrance door, winds around the massive, maybe 30 people table area and then backdown the rear side of the tables to the ordering counter at center/right in the rear. Fortunately…once we got into the door a bit we spotted the “Pickup orders here” sign…Neil had Connie hold our place in line while he checked if it was pickups only or also did takeout order taking…the fella there said that “if you’re taking it out of the building you can order from me”…so we did, picked up a coke from the convenience store and hit the road for the last 30 or so miles back home.

That concludes our Fun Stuff© here in the KC area. We’ll head out tomorrow morning for the 195 mile trip back down KS-59, I-35, and US-50 to Hutchinson KS…most of the route is a backtrack along the same roads we took from Wichita KS to the KC area. After a 2 night stay there…gotta go and see the salt mine ya’know…we’ll head out for 2 more 2-3 night stays before we spend a week in La Junta CO over the Memorial Day weekend.

Interesting things found on the net this week.

Saw an interesting article in the weekly newsletter This is True…which comes in both a free and premium paid version and can be found at http://thisistrue.com. It’s one of the oldest internet publications…coming in at 1300 weekly editions so far. The author…Randy Cassingham…takes real, actual news stories and rewrites them without changing the facts in a sometimes humorous, sometimes educational format…I highly recommend subscribing to at least the free version. He coined the term “obliviots” which you can obviously figure out what it means…and specializes in what he calls thought provoking entertainment.

One of his weekly features is known as the “Honorary Unsubscribe”…which describes the life and honorary unsubscribe from the newsletter of a person who should be famous but isn’t. This week’s honoree is Fleming Begaye Sr. who died May 10 at age 97. Fleming was a full blood Navajo Indian who dropped out of high school to join the USMC during WWII…and was one of the Navajo Code Talkers of who you might have heard. Check out the full story here.

You should also check out the newsletter…it comes weekly and Randy doesn’t sell your email address. He does have some This is True items for sale including the famous “Get Out of Hell Free” card modeled on the Monopoly Get of of Jail Free card.

When you need just a smidgeon of help.

Ever wonder about the invention of the dishwasher?

For the math nerds…

For the non math nerds…in trigonometry…the sine of an angle divided by the cosine of the same angle results in the tangent of the angle…you should probably be able to figure it out from there.

Finally…There’s a place in The Netherlands where an aqueduct [the Gouwe aqueduct in Gouda] sometimes gives you the opportunity to spot a 101 meter long yacht navigating over a highway…photo credit to @DutchYachting on twitter.

Oh…just in case you’re a non math nerd who didn’t get it…the sine of gerine divided by the cosine of gerine equals the tangent (or tan) of gerine or tangerine.

Cyas.

Sorry ‘bout it being 9 days since my last post…but rallies are hard. Follow that up with 2 hard travel days and we’re plum wore out…but Ima gonna try and catch ya’ll up anyways.

After my last post which detailed our floor installation with pictures…we worked on a few more rigs fixing stuff on Friday and through the weekend. Our sole contribution to Fun Stuff© was dinner out at a local Mexican restaurant…named Taqueria Jalisco…and it had the best Mexican fare we’ve had since 2 years back when we were in Springdale UT and ate twice at the Bit and Spur Saloon just south of the entrance to Zion National Park. Taqueria Jalisco was right up there with it though…Connie had Carne Asada and Neil a steak dish…the meat was seasoned perfectly and had been marinated in something really tasty beforehand. Both were outstanding and we had leftovers that we made burritos out of later in the week.

Starting Monday…we were hitting it pretty hard every day…the hard part about a rally is that you’ve got to be “on” and “social” starting early in the morning with really no stop until mid evening. What with breakfast, rally presentations, happy hours, and catered dinners…it’s quite tiring…not to mention the running around fixing more rigs…I think we were up to 7 or 8 by the end of the week.

We had 3 catered dinners…Mexican one night, Texas BBQ one night, and Italian the third night followed by a pot luck dinner on Friday to close the rally. Cole and Sharon (Phil’s widow who now owns the company) came out for a couple of days and we caught up with both of them.

Thursday was a free day with no formal rally activities…although there was still rig repair stuff going on. Afterwards Neil and Connie headed out to the Pier 27 River Lounge where they had a couple of Alaskan Amber Ale’s each, some grilled oysters, and fried mushrooms.

Friday after dinner…we had the much anticipated RV Trivia Game…each rig formed a team. There were 62 multiple choice questions regarding RVs, roads, and sites you may or may not have seen. Then we passed our score sheets to our neighbor for scoring. Neil and Connie’s final score was 47 right out of 60…and they turned out to be the winners by at least 3 questions over the field. For their efforts they won two brand new folding camping chairs donated by Camping World. Once we get to Lawrence tomorrow I’ll have Neil break them out for you.  Here are a couple shots from the rally.

The windmill at Buckhorn Lake Resort…it functions but doesn’t actually do anything useful…however with the wind in Texas it was rarely not spinning pretty madly.

One of our intrepid rally masters…Jim Fiste who helped Neil with the floor.

Friday afternoon…we skipped one of the early afternoon seminars and did all of our getting ready to leave stuff…as we were leaving early Saturday morning for our 900 mile 3 day trip to Lawrence KS to pick up US Route 50 and start the real Fun Stuff© portion of this travel season. We started preps at 0700 Saturday AM and were on the road by 0830…340 miles later we pulled into Wichita Falls RV in Wichita Falls TX for our overnight stop. We quickly headed out to Mass then out to dinner at the Half Pint Taproom…which had about 60 brews on tap. We sampled a couple of really great stouts and shared a most excellent Sausage and Mushroom Pizza for dinner…then we had a couple of left over Pecan Pie Brownies (our contribution to the pot luck at the rally Friday evening) before bedtime. Sunday we were up at 0500…again…Neil went out and got some donuts from Texas Donuts for breakfast…we started at 0715 and were on the road at exactly 0801. 366 miles later we pulled into Air Capital RV in Wichita KS…headed out to O’Malley’s Irish Pub…which wasn’t actually either a pub or Irish…it was more of an Irish themed bar. However…the wings were excellent, the Guinness and Smithwicks brews were typically outstanding…and in honor of Mother’s Day we each had a shot of Green Spot Irish Whiskey…topped with a few drops of water to smooth out the harshness and mellow the flavor.

We’ve got one more travel day to Lawrence KS tomorrow…but thankfully it’s only 190 miles so we’ll start no earlier than our standard 0800…which we might slip to 0830 since we’re already hitched up and only have power to disconnect. We’ll be at the KoA in Lawrence 3 nights and Connie has 2 days of Fun Stuff© scheduled for us.

Just a couple of interesting things from the net this time…Ima tired and ready for the recliner.

Cyas.

OK…as promised the other day here’s the longer version.

We left Lake City FL last Saturday for the trip on I-10 and I-75 to Foley AL. Traffic was much better but we inadvertently didn’t get the fridge properly blocked so that the door wouldn’t bounce open slightly. Well…it did…and a water bottle fell down and jammed it from completely closing…so we ended up with the freezer at about 13 and the fridge at 50ish when we arrived. No worry…we just fixed it…or so we thought…for our next travel day.

Foley was great…we ate at Lulu’s and Acme Oyster House…a couple of our favorite places…well at least Acme is but we really went to Lulu’s so that we could buy more hot sauce from their gift shop. It’s only $5 a bottle there and mail order is $8 plus shipping so we got 3 bottles for a total of 4 in the pantry…that should last us awhile.

We dumped and flushed our tanks after sloshing them around half full with vinegar and Dawn in them to get the crud off the inside…and this pretty much restored our tank level indicators to proper operation. Standard beginning of travel season stuff…they just get gunked up over the winter.

Monday morning…we headed out early for our 380 mile trip to Vinton LA for an overnight stop. Unfortunately…just west of Baton Rouge…I-10 was completely closed on the westbound lanes and had been that way since we left. We had hoped it was just an accident since we knew about it at 0800 when we left…but alas it was apparently either a really serious one or something else as it was still closed. We got shuttled off onto an at grade US highway alternate route. The only problem was that we were joined by about 50,000 of our closest friends and the traffic was pretty bad. Adding in the extra 50 miles the detour caused…and we didn’t get to Vinton until well after 1800. We ate dinner and pretty much nothing else…although we did have to clean up after another fridge partial opening.

Tuesday morning…we were up and out early again…and finally an uneventful travel day. We pulled into Buckhorn Lake Resort in Kerrville TX about 1500 where we’ll be for 11 days including the project below and the NHOG rally which starts on Monday. Luckily…the third time was the charm and we figured out the fridge problem and have it solved now. We’ll also ask around during rig open house walkthroughs next week to see what other creative solutions folks have found to this problem. RV fridges have latches that hold the doors shot…but unfortunately they’re smaller than residential ones and don’t really keep your ice cream hard. Residential models are larger and do keep your ice cream hard…but don’t have a good way to keep the doors shut on bumpy roads…so folks get creative with solving that problem. We thought we had been creative enough…but apparently not so we’ll be looking to upgrade our securing solution.

The reason we got to Kerrville early was to replace the carpet in our living room slide with the same hardwood in the rest of the rig. The carpet was…naturally enough after 7 years…pretty ratty assed and needed to go. Luckily our friend Jim Fiste had already done the replacement in his rig…and knew all the tricks. He told Neil that if we brought the materials with us he would help with the install. So we picked up the $800 or so worth of materials and carried it along with us from FL.

Early Wednesday morning…well actually 0900 but Neil and Connie were up early to move all the stuff on the slide into the bedroom to get it out of the way…they started the project.

Here’s the before shot after they pulled up the carpet. You can see the nasty stained carpet which they laid out for a work surface.

Next was laying out the pieces to figure out the right pattern…there are slight color and knot/grain variations in each piece so you need to make sure it looks right before proceeding. As you can see…the third piece in that Jim has his hand down on is a little light…so they pulled that one up and used it elsewhere. You also make sure that the seam overlaps don’t line up perfectly during this process…marking which ones need to be shortened.

Next up…make sure you like the pattern…get Connie’s approval for any additional plank swaps needed…and then you notch out the board closest to the inside to go around the edge and rip the outboard one to the right width.

Next up…pull everything up and lay it out on the carpet in order and start glueing it down…Jim spread glue on two broad widths at a time starting at the outboard edge then lining up the planks with pencil lines that they laid out on the underfloor. Repeat until done, then add the overlap stair nose trim at the inboard edge of the slide, walk around to seat the planks, and weigh down the stair nose with tool boxes, weights, and everything else you can think of and wait for the glue to dry.

They finished up around 1530 and after a shower and the 1600 happy hour at the clubhouse they headed out to Taqueria Jalisco for dinner…and had the best Mexican food they’ve had since 2017 out west in Zion National Park.

Afterwards…Neil and Connie move enough stuff to get to the bed to sleep…and reassembled their recliners but closer to the TV than normal for the evening.

Thursday morning it was just a little more cleanup. They cleaned up a few glue spots where it oozed out of joints and reinstalled the vertical trim pieces on the slide and the project was done…and man does it look good…way better than the nasty stained carpet there before. So far we’ve had 6 or 8 NHOG folks come by to gawk and tell us they’re going to do it themselves.

After that…Jim headed off and the adults put the slide back together…they bought some dark brown small carpets to go under their recliners and the dinette table to keep from scratching the floor.

And the finished/reassembled slide.

Lookin’ mighty fine I tellya…mighty fine.

Friday…we actually didn’t even set an alarm to get up so we slept in all the way to 0700 before coffee, breakfast, and re-leveling the rig. Neil ordered us a new door latch…ours is failing the same as the previous 3 did so we’ll get the part next week and install it I guess.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

You don’t see this every day. Dashcam capture from Ontario where a student pilot was in a plane that lost power. Fortunately the instructor pilot took the controls and managed to avoid crashing on the highway…he made it onto the field to the right before setting it down…but hey, any landing you can walk away from is a good one…right?

No explanation needed for these.

Cyas.

Just a quick update for tonight so you’ll know where we are. Really tired after our pretty rapid transit from FL to Kerrville TX and we had a couple issues on the way…all minor and mostly just traffic/road closure types. I’ll report more in the next post…but here’s a quick synopsis.

We had a nice 2 day 510 mile trip up to Foley AL where we stopped for 2 nights…nothing to really report there.

We left Foley yesterday AM for a 2 day 380/380 mile transit from Foley to Kerrville TX with an overnight stop in Vinton LA. First day turned out to be almost 450 miles…I-10 was closed just west of Baton Rouge LA for unknown reasons…it was closed when we left Foley and was still closed 6 hours later when we got to Baton Rouge. We ended up on the detour which was a much smaller road along with 100,000 or so of our closest friends who were also heading west on I-10. Instead of arriving at 1500 like we thought it was about 1830 when we got to Vinton LA. 

Luckily today’s transit to Kerrville was much better…long but pretty normal with no real issues…a couple of traffic problems along the way but nothing significant.

We quickly got set up in site 6075 here at Buckhorn Lake Resort for the NHOG Rally that starts next week…in the meantime Neil and his buddy Jim…and probably several more who will wander over to help…will redo the flooring in our Living Room slide. Had a nice happy hour with a bunch of early arrivals for the rally…then some fish for dinner and it will be early to bed for us as we’re whupped puppies.

More later…

Cyas.

Yup…travel season is officially underway. We were up early this morning, finished stowing, disconnecting power and water, and hitching and rolled out of the campground shortly after 0930 for our 281 mile trip…we arrived at Casey Jones Campground in Lake City FL about 1530 and after a minimal setup…power only, put the slides out, and put the front jacks down to take the weight off of Big Red’s hitch…we rested for a bit. After that we ran over to the local Texas Roadhouse for a quick steak dinner…we saved baked tater, baked sweet tater, and some corn to make soup out of for Monday’s travel day meal…then made a quick stop for a couple of groceries we forgot to pick up, filled up Li’l red with gas and were back home by 1830.

It’s about 80 outside now but there’s a nice breeze so we left the windows open and the fans on…it will be upper 50s overnight so we’ll not need any A/C.

Traffic on I-75 was heavy…and filled with too many jerks to count. We suffered through a couple of construction backups but neither was very long or stop and go and also a couple of short backups where various highways (I-4 and US-301) break off from 75. Other than that…and the jerks of course…it was pretty smooth sailing here.

We’ll head out again tomorrow for a longer day…about 340 miles…to Foley AL. We’ll stop there at Anchors Aweigh Campground and do a full water/sewer/power setup since we’ll be there two nights.

Short blog only today…but wanted to let ya know that we’re underway and that means that Fun Stuff© to report on ain’t too far in the future.

Interesting stuff from the net.

Millennial job search for those that have…well, we’ll call them less than fully useful college degrees.

Early version of google search.

You think you have potholes where you live? How about these in Michigan.

Cyas.