John Martin day 2

This morning's adventure was a hike. There is only 1 trail so our options were severely limited. I left a bike at the campsite and we drove to the trailhead. The trailhead has a marker indicating that the Santa Fe Trail passed directly through that spot. The trail was just a mowed path through the vegetation. 4 1/2 miles and a little over 2 hours we were home. I rode my bike back to the trailhead and picked up the car. This afternoon we drove into Lamar to visit Walmart. We are always curious about the clientele that we will encounter in these various Walmarts that we visit in different parts of the country. People watching is always fun---or appalling, depending on which store you visit. The pics were taken on the hike.

John Martin Reservoir SP Colorado

Nothing particularly blog worthy occurred today. We did about a 5 hour drive. We are now in the mountain time zone. I had a heck of a time adjusting to the central time zone. This change probably won't be any different. Even though we're in Colorado we cannot see any mountains. We are pretty much due east of Pueblo still in the plains. This is the last full day of the 4th of July weekend so hopefully things will become less hectic. We are here 2 nights.

Wakeeney kansas KOA

We have begun our drive southward. We started out on I 80 and are at Wakeeney KS camped right next to I 70. Literally right next to it. During the drive we had 2 noteworthy incidents. There is a brand new interchange in Omaha that apparently just opened up. I needed to change highways there. Ms Garmen thought I was driving in the dirt. I missed the turn. There were 2 U-turns and a lap around a church parking lot. 20 minutes later we were back on course. The other incident could have been ugly. A guy passed me in a pickup truck with a smoker in the truck bed. This is a heavy iron smoker like Seth and I have. He's about 200 yards ahead and we see a huge brown cloud of smoke billow up in the center of the the road. The car directly behind the pickup swerves and the pickup immediately pulls over. The smoker fell out of the truck. The cloud of smoke was ash. The smoker bounced on to the left shoulder. The pickup was on the right shoulder. We got through there unscathed. The owner of the smoker had a big problem. We head further west tomorrow. We are at the end of the line in the pic.

Viking Lake SP Iowa

The good news is we 1. Are headed west finally and 2. We found a place to camp on the 4th of July. The bad news is we're still in Iowa. There is a trail/road around the lake that I rode to acquaint myself with this parks ambience. I am now well acquainted. One thing we have noticed while camping on lakes in Missouri and Iowa is that there is always a large, well populated, sandy, beach. I'm not sure how to feel about that. It's sad in that the people on the beach might not have ever been to a real one or might not ever get a chance to see a real one. On the other hand, I'm glad that someone decided that importing sand and making a beach on a lake in middle America might be a good idea. Tomorrow is a long drive. We will end up in Kansas at a KOA. That will be our first commercial campground of the trip. The pics were taken on my bike ride. (The trail over the dam and a view of the lake.)

Sugar Bottom Recreation Area

We are still on the same lake, we just moved to a different campground. The reason for the move involved some convoluted reasoning that I won't get into. I don't think I've mentioned this before but the last few campgrounds we have used didn't have campsite water hookups. Electric only. We have had to fill up our water tank when we arrive at the campground. There is a fresh water fill station generally near the dump station.  The freshwater tank in this coach is smaller than the MP was so we are only good for 3 days. We haven't used extreme water conservation protocols so we might be able to stretch it another day but 4 days with the MP was pretty easy. It might be a weight thing. We are still getting used to this one. Jenny has been working hard trying to find us places to stop. That's what she's doing in the pic. We move tomorrow.

Coralville day 3

I finally got out on my bike today. I rode for an hour. When I got back to the trailhead I noticed a sign that said that bikes were not allowed. Oops! Jenny made 2 trips to Target to buy some stuff that's not available in Walmart. There is a 9 hole disc golf course on this side of the lake. We did that this afternoon. I won my onesome by a wide margin. We move tomorrow for one more night in a different campsite across the lake. We are bumping up against 4th of july weekend campers and we have been backed into a corner. Campsites have been tough to reserve. After tomorrow we will get serious about heading west.

Coralville day 2

Mission accomplished? Today was devoted to getting the leveling jacks fixed. Our problem was that the left front hydraulic jack wouldn't fold down from it stored position. We got to the factory on time and they pretty much got right on it. One guy started working on it, then 2, then 3. They changed this part and then they changed that part. Nothing was working so they finally just put on a new jack. The lead mechanic claimed he had never seem our problem before. Figures. We are not calling this new RV anything yet because it hasn't cost us any money to fix it yet. We are sure that won't last long and we'll be forced to come up with something clever. We have all day tomorrow at this site and then we move to a different campground on this same lake.