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.