Remember how we said we wanted to get north out of the heat? Nebraska decided to help us out. 50s during the day and 40s at night, with a little rain, okay it poured, thrown in for good measure. No, this isn’t normal Nebraska weather…they ordered it just for us!
To show we are true northerners, and know just what to do in chilly weather, we fired-up the woodstove!
Only a northerner would travel with a wood stove attachment!Darrin tending the fire.And me slaving over the hot stove preparing dinner. Check out my pretty purple curtains!
Those of you who grew up camping in state parks, know what we mean when we say we did the “Sunday wood clean-up after all the weekenders left”, so the heat from the woodstove was 100% free.
The west has really big mountains, New England has smaller mountains, and Missouri has rolling hills, very much like a kiddie rollercoaster. Up and down…up and down.
Up an down, up and down, with a few “thank yo ma’ams” to boot.
Missouri and Iowa also have water towers. Every town, and sometimes every corner, has their own water tower with their name printed on it in huge letters, and sometimes the mascot of their school team. All of the water towers we have seen look freshly painted and full of town pride.
And last, but not least is the huge crop of windmills they are growing in western Iowa!
There were a ton of these everywhere we looked for a while. The funny thing was out here they didn’t seem like a scar as they do at home when they put them on the mountain ridges. I can’t say why.
We were cooking breakfast this morning and Darrin said “Hey, it looks like we are having a Braudis Breakfast!”.
I said “What’s that?”.
Apparently, a Braudis Breakfast is a 3 course meal that Darrin and his winter camping buds look forward to when planning their January forays into the wild. Chris Braudis takes the breakfast cooking reins and Mike and Darrin sit back and enjoy the good eatings.
In this case, I am sitting back and enjoying Darrin whipping me up a delightful breakfast, so I guess he is Chris and I’ll do my best to imitate Mike!
Here are some pics of Darrin cooking, notice our really cool kitchen set-up!
Darrin concentrating over the stove, which sits on a drop down shelf attached to the backdoor. Behind him is our kitchen drawers and the fridge.And viola…The Braudis Breakfast! Yum!Sorry Bill🙄😁
Well, our GPS took us on another adventure! This time onto a back road in MO with two infamous swinging bridges. Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of swinging bridges, I think of the walking bridge I used to have to take after school to my paino teacher’s house. It went across a small creek, the boys would try to get it swinging to make the girls scream (usually didn’t work since we were country girls who didn’t frighten easily) and sadly a big storm washed it away never to be replaced.
But, I digress, these bridges were nothing of the sort. These bridges were straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, steel cables, horizontal boards that moved and bounced under the car and skinny slats to drive across that were in no way wide enough for the Rover’s tires, the whole works. I expected to see a whip come shooting out of the trees to swing us all to safety as we plummeted to the raging river below.
Of course, we could have turned around and found another route, but that wouldn’t have been half as interesting or blog worthy! Our trusty Rover got us through, thank goodness since there were half a dozen Missouri boys fishing on the bank underneath and watching our progress. I’m sure they went home with a good story about the funny car that passed over their bridge.
Wait for it…
Holy crapolla…I wanted to take more pictures but I was too busy holding on!
Well, it was bound to happen. Not knowing my own strength, I twisted the lock on my door right out of its little Rover pin. Luckily, I travel with my mechanic😊. He rigged it to make it work, sort of.
We contacted Trevor at Rovah Farm outside Little Rock who was more than happy to help us get the parts we needed. The hard part was mailing them to us somewhere along the way, no easy feat when you don’t actually know where you are going.
Finally, we were able to find a future destination, Lake of the Ozarks State Park in MO. Trevor got the parts in the mail, even figured out the cheapest shipping rate. We let the park know they were coming (the staff was super about it, keeping the parts locked in the office until we got there), Trevor put tracking on them so we would know when they arrived and voila, 3 weeks later my mechanic picked them up and we have new door locks!
The new door lock!
Thanks Trevor! I’m sure we will be in touch again soon!
Oh, and my mechanic fixed the leak over my door….with Gorilla Tape!
After our brush with military intelligence, we decided we needed a vacation! We stumbled across Huzzah Valley Resort in Steelville, MO.
What a find!
It is basically a family rafting campground on one side of the road and a ‘young’ persons rafting/party place (they call it the “zoo”) on the other side of the road, something for everyone.
We took the weekend off and read, slept, swam in the crystal cold river, and genuinely relaxed. We have been pushing the miles lately to get north of the heat (this northern girl has been a puddle of goo) and decided we needed a break. We camped right next to the river, a football field away from the bathrooms (my only complaint, Darrin’s complaint might be the distance we had to walk to the store to get an afternoon ice cream ).
The first few nights we basically had the place to ourselves, except for the rafters coming down the lazy river. Over the weekend, a few more people arrived, but the place is well set-up to tuck people away into small areas, the staff is super nice, and the security team was constantly making rounds (one night when we were the only ones there, the security guard drove his round in record time – we decided he was trying to do it during the commercial of his favorite show).
We highly recommend the place to all travelers, but be warned, they are already fully booked for the summer season!
No one camping over there!And no one camping over there! Those are the bathrooms waaaaayyyyy over there across the sunny, hot, open field.
The nice cool brook over ther! A nice place to take a few days off and stay cool in the 90 degree heat.
On one of our favorite mountain biking routes back home there is a sign that says “If your GPS tells you this is a road, it is wrong. Turn around!”. We always laugh when we get to it, partially because it is at the top of a very long climb and we are punchy, and partially because it is obviously not a road.
Today, our GPS led us astray. What we thought was a thru road to our campground turned out to be the training fields for an army base, I kid you not. We drove straight into maneuvers on Fort Campbell, training grounds for the 101st Airborne Division. The first tan Humvee we saw made us think we were near an army base, the second, third and finally field tents gave us pause. The locked gate that should have let us pass back into town, after driving 15 miles or so, finally made it clear we weren’t where we belonged. We backtracked and slowly made our way off the base.
We did receive quite a few odd looks, the Rover must have made them wonder if a special British force was joining them for maneuvers. The funny thing is no one even paused to wonder if we belonged there. They all just waved and went about what they were doing.
Now we are waiting for the black helicopters to come and take us away for debriefing! “Honestly Master Sergeant we didn’t see anything!”
First of all. Hi to Dennis our new flying buddy! Found the pictures of you, the Miati and the teardrop travelling. Very cool! Hope you enjoyed the Oreos 😊
We are now in TN. Much cooler (temp wise) and a whole lot more mountainous than AL. Although we did hit 1 road as we were coming out of AL that was quite fun, Route 33. Look it up on the map. All of those switchbacks are straught up. A very old cool road. Just the kind we like.
We are now sitting in a state park that is on one of the former rivers turned lake by a humongous dam. I had always heard about the TN dams and all the controversies around relocating people, but wow it is huge.
Old river, now a lake, side of the dam.The other side of the dam where the spillway is. I am standing on the dam. Fishing boats everywhere. (Sorry about the fingers)🤔
Our campsite is on the lake side of the dam. We are perched on a wooden platform above the lake. Because it used to be a river it is very steep down to the water. It is a bit like camping on a pier, but we are over the bank and the lake is in front of us. Nice breeze and a good view through the trees. We even found, ok someone told us, how to get down to the water to swim. It is nice cool water similar to swimming in a lake at home in August. This girl needs to be in the water, I get grumpy when I dry out.
Our nest in the trees.
Here is the rig. We are looking a bit like the Beverly Hill Billies with our awnings and laundry. The water is behind me.
New England version of the Beverly Hill Billies.
Hugs to everyone at home, especially Bill and Erika who had a momentous day! Onward to the future and a winter without drafts and frozen pipes!
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Today we drove through more of the Alabama country side. We are currently camped in an overflow area at a county park near the TN border and it is slightly raining, a huge improvement from the earlier storm. During said storm, we found a few new leaks in the Rover we hadn’t noticed before (it was pouring). The leaks were the top of my door and into my clothes locker. See a theme here? Darrin has some work to do before the next storm😉.
Where we are set-up is a very busy boat ramp/fishing area and we are quite the novelty. It is fun to watch the guys in trunks crane their necks to get a better view of our rig. None of them stop, they just drive slightly off the road to look. Quite entertaining.
Our rig tonight. You can see a bit of the lake in the background. What you can’t see are the guys down by the dock staring up at us or the trucks going by slowly.
A few of observations from our time on the road so far:
1. The old corner store at every crossroad is long gone. The buildings are slowly falling in or being reclaimed by the vegetation. We went through quite a few rural areas where the store that was probably the busy hub of every road crossing has long been deserted. The derelict buildings reminded me of the book Fried Green Tomatoes. These were probably replaced by the new main street which are newly deserted for the Walmart like stores, which are now being challenged by Amazon like stores. What’s next?
2. Every state is clear cut happy. In Florida, they were clearing to build everywhere and in Georgia and Alabama they seem to be clear cutting for no visible reason. Whole hillsides have been cut down to nothing. Very depressing.
3. Alabama has beautiful license plates.
4. There are still people who will go out of their way to help you. Tonight a guy from the RV next store went driving around the park to find the guy in charge so we could get a spot and get set-up inbetween rain storms.
Tomorrow we hope to be in TN and sit for a few days…so I can dry my clothes out. 😊
Large farms, red soil, no palm trees….we aren’t in Florida any more!
Hello Georgia!
Still freak’n hot! This northern gal is a puddle of goo.😓
Passed huge farms growing, I don’t know what since everything was just being planted or was barely up, all with beautiful red soil, huge cattle farms and some very fenced in, very well protected properties with very large intimidating metal driveway gates (not sure what was going on behind them, we kept waiting for the blind girl from The Village to come climbing over). Oh and a few big farms that still call themselves plantations.
Huge farms with red soil.
Tonight we are camping in an Alabama state park, on a lake in which us northerners were the only ones swimming (it was too chilly for the southerners. It was 88 degrees out!). A very nice place. The best part is our 1962 Land Rover found a contemporary. They had a nice chat about the good ole days😂.
