Dateline Yankton, SD
Lat 42.8586
Long -97.5246
I am back filling blogs in an attempt to catch up on what's happened since the last post.
The day after blogging about the pups, Shelby and I pushed off from The Sanctuary and headed out I-64, passing this town along the way.
With South Dakota being a little over 900 miles away, I planned to break the trip into several segments of 300 miles or so each, but as it turned out, that was not to be.
After a scenic and uneventful drive, we came up on St. Louis. We could see the Arch from many miles away, but my goal was to bypass downtown and skirt around. That sort of happened. Even at around 8pm at night we hit a lot of traffic going over the bridge crossing the Mississippi so didn't really get a chance to enjoy the scenery.
I managed to get us through town without incident or being shot in East St. Louis, but it took a lot of patience, planning and just flat out being careful.
Eventually, traffic and civilization thinned out and we spotted a Flying J Truck stop ahead. My buddy and RV Mentor Arthur swears by these, so we decided to pull in, gas up, grab a bite and assess the situation.
It was lucky we did, as when I chatted with a waitress she asked me which way we were coming from. She said it was lucky we were not coming from the West as the roads were being closed due to approaching cells of intense storms. So in a sense we were lucky, but now stuck.
The short version of the outcome is that we waited for a while for a storm that changed direction and avoided us and for the first time camped in a truck stop. Positioned between a guy running a diesel engine all night and another running a generator, we had no power for the AC so just sweated it out in the camper. I repositioned it to take advantage of the wind coming into the overhead vents which offered a tiny bit of respite but introduced the worry of my neighbor's fumes coming in. We woke up alive and unrefreshed and pressed on.
Kansas City was a bit easier to bypass, which we did, pressing on into Iowa.
Iowa is what you probably think it is. The whole state is crops. To its credit, its rest areas are the only ones we have seen on the journey which offer free Wifi access. We drove along until the energy ran out, then pushed on a little farther. When I started splashing water on my face to stay awake I knew I had pushed too hard so I pulled over into a convenient rest area and checked my GPS for a campground.
We were less than two miles from the KOA Campground in Onawa. I phoned to check on space and was told they had plenty. Less than ten minutes later, I was standing in their office checking in.
As this photo shows, the campground was adjacent too (surprise) a big field of something.
Shelby now spends most of her days and nights sleeping, except when we are driving. She stays right next to me, leaning over the seat on a pillow I have arranged for her, and watching the scenery. Never makes a peep in the car or has ever had an accident. When she wants to look out the window, she nudges my left shoulder with her nose until I lower her window halfway. She then props her foreleg on the armrest and lets her ears fly in the breeze. While I have heard this is not a good thing for dogs, as they can catch debris or bugs in their eyes, I judge whether we are in bug zones. She usually only wants to stay out for a couple seconds anyway, then returns to her co-pilot position.
So she was pretty tired when we arrived, pretty much sacking out immediately upon docking.
The campground was clean, level and the people who ran it were super friendly, but the WiFi was non-existent. I went up to chat with the lady who ran the place who explained that it frequently went out so she just used her Verizon as backup. 'Nuff said. I did, too.
We only stayed the one night. Waking up refreshed and ready, we pushed off to South Dakota, which I will describe in the next entry.
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