Go East, Old Man!

Spring Robin in Elk Horn

Our home has been rolling down the road toward Maine. After leaving Lincoln, NE, we headed north to Pender, NE, to the Blue Ox factory where we had our tow bar, the part that connects our car to our motor home, checked and repaired. It was still in pretty good shape after 5 years of traveling.

We developed a problem with our slide awning, designed to cover the main slide to keep it clean. It failed to unroll when the slide extended, requiring a ladder and some muscle to open it and extend it before the slide went out. The awning is made by Carefree, and a call to one vendor in Lincoln resulted in a report of "No we don't want to deal with Carefree". Camping World in Council Bluffs said they might be able to fix it, so we went there after Pender. But Camping World really didn't want to help either, saying that they might replace it, but it would likely take a couple weeks. We decided that getting it fixed in Maine would be our best course of action.

Danish Windmill in Elk Horn

From Council Bluffs, we roamed along I80 to Elk Horn, IA, listed as an "overnight stop" on one of our RV lists. We found a wonderful Danish Windmill and Danish Immigrant Museum there, and a tiny campground which offered us electric. In the morning, we toured the sights, anso found a nice quilting store on Main Street.

We could have made one more stop on our way to Rochester, but made the trip in one day. We arrived at the Silver Lake Campground around 5:30 PM, got ourselves parked and set up, and began contacting our friends there. We had planned most of our appointments for the following week, so we called Mayo and asked that they reschedule. We managed to moev up everything, including our dentist appointments.

I made plans with Curt Kraft to play golf on the next day. Now that Curt is retired, that was no problem for him. It was the first of 6 golf outings in 1-1/2 weeks, interrupted only by Clinic visits and weather one day. That was a load of fun.

The time in Rochester was wrapped up by a get together with my former work mates at Jon Camp's new house in Stewartville. It was good to see everybody and chat for a while. I showed a boatload of pictures and ate altogether too much. Thanks, Jon.

Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn

On Saturday, May 1, we moved the house to Lake City, MN. They were having their annual 100 mile garage sale along the Mississippi River, and we toured a few garages. We bought little... a few hostas to plant in our yet to be built Maine landscaping. Saturday night, we had dinner with John and Deb Wilkinson at the relaxing river condo. Good food and good company. We'll see them again in late summer when they come to Maine.

Sunday began our trek east. We stopped at a Flying J in Beloit, IL for an overnight. We ate at a greasy spoon in a truck stop, and the next day, I developed serious diarrhea and a low fever. We kept moving though, and arrived later in the day at the Elkhart Red Cross, our home chapter for our volunteer activities. We got our paperwork up to date, and they found a couple tasks for us to do while we were there. We also did some shopping at the RV places. I managed to find a pair of awning arms which may effect a repair for the awning.

I was thoroughly embarrassed that night when I set off the alarm in the Red Cross building. I had unlocked a door while going back and forth to repair an Ez Up shelter for them, looking up info on the Ez Up web pages. At 9:30 PM I realized that I had not re-locked the door, and apparently nobody from the Chapter had caught that fact. So I opened it and locked it, setting off the alarm. I went back into the motor home and said to Consuelo, "the cops will be here soon." And they were. I reported my actions, he said fine, then somebody from the Red Cross came out and turned off the alarm. Embarrassing, but had to be done. Turns out that the Exec Director was the one that was supposed to check the locks, so she was embarrassed, too.

On leaving Elkhart, our main slide failed to retract. After trying several things, I relented and gained access to the manual gear to roll the slide in. Fortunately, a little elbow grease was enough to get the slide moving up a ramp it needs to climb, after wich it retraced the rest of the way on its own. One more thing to fix in Maine.

We stopped for overnights in Hubbard, Ohio and near Scranton, PA, before finally arriving at Croton Point Park in Croton, NY.