We're Here in the West ...barely

So we left the winery in Illinois (John's wishing we'd bought a couple more bottles; it was good!) and thought we'd go by St. Louis. But then, we discovered it was less than 2 hours away (which is the kind of discovery you make when you don't plan ahead, Debbie, are  you hearing me?).  Neither of us had any real desire to visit a big city and The Arch is about the only attraction for us.  But friends who'd Been There Done That describe it as a less than exciting.

So Debbie dove into her laptop computer, looking for some cheap place to stay again.  At least John won the Routing discussion; we will be in Nebraska tomorrow and actually see some real scenery.  So far this trip has been only slightly more interesting than driving through Kansas.

Except for the big cities.  It fell to John to drive all the way through Chicago through Joliet on Day One.  And here on Day Two, he had to negotiate St. Louis and its crowded suburbs.  With our "toad" on the tail, our total rig is 61 feet long.  We have a greater appreciation for professional truck drivers now.

We compromised on an RV park that turned out to be more residential than itinerant, and the office telephone robot announced that they had taken this week after Easter off, in any event.  So Debbie got her second cheapie of this trip:  a Walmart parking lot.   Not all Walmarts do this, but many allow RV's (and trucks) to use space in their massive parking lots for "boondocking" or "dry camping" (no electricity, no water, no sewer). but that's OK because our coach is totally self-contained.  We'll run the generator while on the road tomorrow to recharge the "house batteries".  Besides, we did have a few things to pick up and where else can you push the shopping cart to your house as Debbie is doing here, and return it to the cart corral with ease?

At least we crossed the Mississippi River!

The Vienna Choir Boy

The highlight of Day 2 for John was getting his computer set up, another thing that got put off in our desire to Just Get Going on Monday.  He'd had it all planned.  We had removed the old tube television from the bedroom and he figured to stuff that cabinet  with cyber gear.  But the PC's "tower" is about 1-1/2 inches too tall.  Didn't think that one through very well.  And why a desktop PC, you ask reasonably.  John would say, "My life is in that computer: all my games, all my music, all my documents.  I have three TB of storage and the mouse fits my hand and is very useful unlike those {expletive deleted}touch pads on the laptops. And my keyboard has special macro keys encoded and besides..."    And like that; he'd ramble on if we let him.

So, anyway, he commandeered the folding desktop in the living room and gets to sit in the recliner while keyboarding.  The picture is captioned as it is because he had brought every wire and cable from his real-home man cave desk setup except the power.  D'oh! 

Another advantage to living in a Walmart parking lot.  The girl in the electronics department with rings in her nose and two in her lips, tried to sell "phone charger wires" until John showed her the back of an actual computer they had on display and said "One of these cables is plugged into every computer --except mine."   She finally got it.  Kids these days. Now we're powered up and the blogging continues.

Oops!

That space in the bedroom's erstwhile TV cabinet now is occupied by the printer that Debbie insisted we bring.  John's going to log every time it is used, all no-more-than-two of them, he's sure.  But before we left, we had shown son David and his son, Joseph, through the coach.  This afternoon, David had texted to ask, "Did you check for stowaways before you left?" 

Tomorrow we begin to get into the real West, maybe.

Launched!

After days of packing, we found we still had "last minute" (= "last hours") of things to do this morning.  Up and moving at 8a, but it was after 11 before we finally hit the road.

And the first discussion of the trip occurred as we headed out of our neighborhood after Debbie won the Who Drives coin toss:
She - "So where are we headed?"
Him - "I thought you knew."
That resolved after a good five minutes.  Y'see, John's a planner.  He spent hours with various route-planning  websites, honing each day's trip down to our target of 3-to-5 hours of driving, staying at nice RV parks with electricity and sewer services and getting West ASAP.  Debbie's a Whimsical vacationer.  She knows we'll meet her brother early in June in California.  And she knows she wants to spend a few weeks exploring the mountainous states in between.  Period.  And she's of Norwegian stock, which is to say more frugal than a West Michigan Dutch(wo)man. Keep that in mind.

The inside of the coach still is not organized, either.

Oh, we knew to put the clothes in the closet, but when you trade your house for extended mobile residency, all the little things like medicines, bandages, potato peelers, batteries, and the traditional kitchen catchall drawer have to be accommodated, as well.  Our coach has 20 cabinets like these in the Living Room/Kitchen area alone.  And more back in the shower/bath and bedroom.  And there is whopping big underneath storage ("the basement") for other necessities like sewer hoses, John's tools and Debbie's vacuum cleaner. Not only do you have to find a place for each item, you have to memorize where it went.  And we're old dogs.  It'll work out eventually/

And so did our destination.  John never did get to see the Alpaca Farm in Kokomo, Indiana, that Debbie had mentioned months ago, but we got to drink wine that afternoon.  In Carlock, Illinois.  No, neither of us had ever heard of it either.

But for $47, Debbie had signed us up with a group called Harvest Hosts that is an association of wineries, farms and such like all over the country.  The deal is, you get to park your coach at such a place --for "free" (Debbie smiles here)-- while passing through, but they sort of expect you'll buy something, too.  So we found the Sunset Lake Winery not far off our route near Bloomington, Illinois.  Three RV's could find space in the parking lot, but we were just one of two, having met Lenny and Penny from Pittsburgh who plan to join an RV caravan (think wagon train on the Oregon Trail) headed to Alaska.  He said they'd have 37 RVs on the trip, a doctor and a mechanic, too.  Just for perspective, Alaska is really Out There: better than 3,000 miles just to get to Anchorage by land.  If we ever decide to visit John IV (in Kenai) via something other than an airplane, John III is convinced this "caravaning" would be the way to go, especially in the backwoods of a foreign country.

So-- Oh, Wine! 

The vineyard has a tasting room and our hosts were a nice couple who had just sold the place and plan to take off on their own trip in another month or so.  We tasted five and very much liked a dry white Weiss Eiche (White Oak), so we bought a bottle, grabbed some cheese and sat on their porch on a beautiful sunnyish afternoon looking over the lake, the not-green-yet trees, and 16 wind turbines visible from that vantage point alone.  It seems we'd driven into a forest of those sometimes productive low-energy generators. 

Six weeks before this year's first wedding!

We're thinking St. Louis, MO, tomorrow.  Let's see how that goes.

T-minus-1/2 Fingers Crossed

...and, just as NASA would, we instituted a Hold at T-minus-3.  The idea is, of course, that we're headed out West.  And we tell people that's our destination.  And Debbie fleshes that out: "We'll figure it out as we go."

But we couldn't go immediately because of a mysterious electrical issue in our "towed vehicle", which will follow behind closely everywhere we go.  Some people who have one call it a "dinghy", but it seems lately most call it a "toad" [get it?].  So we have a Honda toad and The Book says as long as we don't exceed 65 it will be happy.  Once we figure out why the battery keeps losing charge.  Or maybe it was just a fall hiccup and the thing is Good to Go this spring.  The techs say it is.  Debbie worries. John says, "We'll deal with it. They have Harbor Freights everywhere these days, don't they?"

But with a wonderful weekend of sun, we finished spring cleaning the coach, transferring 30 years of possessions from the house, cleaning the house, and we think that we are GtG, as well.

One last chore that this wickedly wobbly winter (and John's lack of planning) left him:  empty the gas from the snow blower.

Usually it's a ten minute noise while people's windows are shut against the last of the winter cold.  Today the furshlinger thing ran 52 minutes on a windows-open kind of day and showed no sign of running out of gas.  So we shut it off before they ran us out of the neighborhood.

Then Greg and Katie stopped by to wish us well and didn't mention the noise and then Dave and Theresa rode their bikes by and didn't say anything about it, either, even though they stopped to chat for half an hour.  It's that kind of neighborhood.

We told them our 40-foot long home on 6 wheels is a step up from backpacking, which John misses, but then he also misses being younger.  And, bonus!  Debbie does not have to specialize in one-pot meals anymore.

Manistee River Trail, between
Hodenpyle and Tippy dams.

See you later.

T-minus-4

Welcome

This is something of a There And Back Again work in progress as many friends and family have asked us to be kept up to date on our first multi-month trek. As such, we expect it to be not too artistic and fairly direct.  So-- 

Snapped by a friendly tourist at
Lake Of The Clouds in Michigan's
UP October. On "permanent vacation",
expect John not shave too very often....

These are the voyages of John & Debbie with a tentative launch a few days later than planned.  But then, that's the way Things usually work.  Especially as this trip is only roughly planned.  

In fact, other than a specific date that Debbie's set with her SoCal brother and a tentative target with John's, we have no plan except to drive across the Mississippi for the third time in our lives and see what's there, and --   yeah, well that pretty much sums it up.  

Here's what we're driving:

It's a relatively palatial 40 foot long Tiffin Allegro Bus.  Something of a step up from our usual camping gear: backpacks, luxurious Thermorests under our sleeping bags, and Platypus bags holding the water to reconstitute our dried food prepared in the kitchen (a 6x4 blue tarp) on the ground outside our small tent.

The snow is a gift from Aunt Michigan to remind us to come home again.

Just ten days ago or so, our front yard looked a bit more inviting.  But it is spring, so the  white stuff melted the next day, just in time to give us "mess issues" with packing and other preparations.

We'll take pictures inside and out and provide much more detail as we go along.  At least we have six new tires!

ps: this is our first-ever blog. We'll get a better handle on that as we go along. Check back sometime.