Sep. 4, 2009
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Missiouri, er, uh, Kentucky!
For those who live in Missouri, I apologize that we did not take the time to get to know anything about your great state. We just drove straight through it, only stopping for gas. We were very anxious to get to Kentucky, and as I said in my Kansas post, were just about out of money. So no touristy activities for us!
I would put up the Welcome to Kentucky sign, but we did not get a picture of it. It was dark, raining, and we were all feeling a little befuddled at that point. We had not actually intended to drive all that way, and had looked for a comping spot in Missouri, but the only one we found was totally unsatisfactory. Thinking that RV parks were a dime a dozen like back in the western U.S. we moved on. We were WRONG! Apparently the eastern half of the U.S. isn't as keen on RV parks as the western half where you can find at least one in nearly every town.
So we spent the night in Paducah, KY. A nice place but it's rather hard to feel friendly toward an area when you spent several hours of the night wondering why your power just up and quit. I told Dear Man to just forget it and get in bed, he could research it in the morning when he had better light. He finally did so, but he was unhappy, and restless.
Next we went to visit my friend Nancy Carter. She is everything I thought she would be; kind, fun, gracious, and cute as a bugs ear.
Nancy lives on very cool farm and it had lots of photo opportunities that the girls took advantage of.
After our short visit, we moved on to our new home area. Again, RV parks are quite scarce and the closest one we could stay at, was nearly an hour away from where we wanted to be.
To keep from getting too lumpy, or rather more lumpy, after a long day in the motorhome sitting around, Dear Man and I went for walks.
Kentucky is just so beautiful! We really enjoy the scenery. It hasn't been too terribly humid this year, and everyone tells us this is not normal for Kentucky! We're glad though, as I'm sure even the locals are.
Now one thing you have to try, if you ever find yourself in this grand old state, is a beverage called Ale 8 One (A Late One). A friend of ours gave us a six pack as a welcome gift.
At first we weren't too crazy about it, but after a grueling hike it was the cheapest beverage to be had, even cheaper than water, and boy did it taste good! Now we're all die hard Ale 8 drinkers.
What crazy hike did we go on that near to killed me? Natural Bridge State Park! It was a humid day, for us anyhow, and I puffed my way up and up to a truly awesome landmark. On our way up, and down, we had to pass through this narrow pass.
Just like anywhere else in this great world, some people are rude and when we were half way through the pass we had to turn around and go back because some teens were coming back down. They just stood there staring at my over heated self and waited for me to go back instead of going back themselves, and instead of making way for the obviously sickly and "elderly". To be gracious though I should not say anything bad about them, but Bless their Hearts.
After our hiking back up, and then back down, we then fell in love with Ale 8s. While purchasing them, the rather grumpy man who had nothing kind to say about the State Park system told us to go eat at a place called Bruen's. We decided to take his suggestion. After all, it didn't sound like he offered his praises to just anything.
During a long and vexing attempt trying to locate Bruen's, Bluejane decided that it was some sort of Kentucky hoax and that people here would send you off on a search to Bruen's but there is no such place. By the time you are ready to ask for directions the person you ask will laugh and say, "You've been Bruened!" Then they would hand us a t-shirt with the same proclamation.
I did finally get out and ask for directions and they lady said, "It's r-eye-t be-hind-us." Sure enough it was.
As the little man at the Park had said, the food was good! It was also very well priced, it cost us less to eat there than it would have cost us to eat at McDonald's! Definitely go to Bruen's if you are ever near Stanton, KY.
I have tons of stories to share about our life here so far, I can't wait to post them. So far, we like it here very much!
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Sep. 3, 2009
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Kansas Isn't Flat--at Least, Not the Part I Saw
All my life I've heard how flat Kansas is. How you can see for miles and miles, right to the horizon. So when we started into Kansas I thought it must be so because their welcome sign was very . . . flat.
As we drove through I kept waiting for it to be flat. While there was certainly some flat areas, I could always see a hill or two or three, somewhere. I think maybe I was taking people a little too literally when they said that Kansas was flat.
We had a mission in Kansas. Two in fact. First up was Dodge City.
Dear Man really wanted to go to Boot Hill. It was a very good museum, with a movie to watch, a reproduction of Dodge back in the early years, a shoot out at high noon, old-time photos, a gift store, and just some neat stuff to see and do. We did get our pictures taken old west style, the whole family as a group and then just the children. They are now hanging on our living room wall along with a WANTED poster with our name on it and our alias, The Tumble Weed Gang.
That's Dear Man and I at Boot Hill Cemetary, as the sign so plainly says.
Eyebright got some good shots of the shoot out at High Noon but this was my favorite.
That is the Sheriff of Dodge and he was about to take on two unruly cattle drivers who wound up robbing the bank.
While we were checking things out, we met a neat little man named Charlie Meade. He gave us his business card and if we mail it to him he will send us a package of materials about the history of Dodge. Charlie is a Special Deputy US Marshal. Be sure to ask for him if you are ever in Dodge and get his card!
It was time to get out of Dodge and move on to Kansas destination number two, Independence. Yes, that's Independence Kansas, not Missouri. The home, or near home, of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
That's Dear Man standing in the doorway. As you can see it was not a very tall house. It was small inside, of course, and I even checked to see if the bedstead had rope run across the frame, just like in the book. It did. There was even a China Shepherdess on the fireplace mantle.
At this site there is a school and a post office, brought from other places and to just give you an idea of what those would have looked like from that time period, or so. The gift shop was pretty nice as well, and we bought the Little House on the Prairie audio CDs to listen to in the car.
The town of Independence was NEAT! We liked it very much and it has a great city park with a small zoo, water park, tennis courts where people actually play at 8:00 at night.
While in Kansas we did two other things. Took a picture of our dear Mouse the Motorhome Cat. She traveled very well and we were pleased with the arrangements we had made for her commode. I'll show pictures of that another time, for the traveling curious.
The other thing we did was get those car window paint markers and put this on the back of the motorhome.
In case you can't read it, it says, Kentucky or Bust. On the car side windows we put, Look out Kentucky, here we come! Eyebright didn't get a picture of that evidently.
Don't ask me why, but I liked Kansas. I wouldn't want to live in Dodge, but I could easily live in Independence. We were anxious to get on with the trip though, and running out of money, we had only one more state to get through before Kentucky and we couldn't wait!
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Aug. 31, 2009
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Colorado--Land of a Million Raindrops
As usual, let's start off with the state welcome.
We didn't get out and get our picture taken with this one because we came upon it so quickly and there wasn't much of a spot to pull a motorhome over. As you can see it is a rather gray day. It poured rain that night, and nearly every day while we were there. It's a nice sign though.
The above picture doesn't exactly show just how bad the rain had been on this particular day. There was an actual tornado watch, I had no idea that Colorado even had tornados.
We spent several days in Colorado Springs visiting with some blog friends and we were thrilled to finally meet them in person! Awesome family, wonderful time, and some pretty serious silliness took place! Too bad I can't show you.
However, if you are ever in Colorado Springs, one super place to eat is The Airplane Restaurant. We enjoyed it very much, it had great food, and was well worth the stop.
Colorado Springs was also where I was introduced to Chipotle Mexican Grill. Oh YUMMY! Chipotle is now my favorite "fast" food restaurant.
We went to see the Garden of the Gods but that was the day of the tornado watch and rain, rain, rain. I did take a picture of the Kissing Camels, but my picture turned out to look more like kissing squirrels. Once again, I saw a piece of Oregon. There is a rock at Garden of the Gods that looks like it was plucked out of Smith Rock State Park. I don't know what happened to the picture I took of it though.
We liked Colorado, especially Colorado Springs, and if Dear Man could get a job there we wouldn't be sad about it.
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Aug. 21, 2009
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Wyoming in a Nutshell
I can finally put some more pics on here and get on with talking about our trip to Kentucky! After Utah, we traveled into Wyoming.
Isn't this a nice sign? As you will see in future posts, not all states take such care and pride in their welcome signs. When we made our quick stop to get pictures of the sign, we had to wait for another family who was taking pictures of it too. We made a deal with them, take a picture of us and we'll take a picture of you. Perhaps there picture is on their blog somewhere in the blogosphere!
Wyoming was pretty at first and again I was reminded of Oregon.
What doesn't show up very well here are the painted hills of Wyoming. I don't remember now what they called them, but that's what we call them in Oregon. The clay and dirt is in layers of color, and some of the hills are just one solid color of red, green, or yellow.
However, after about an hour or so, Wyoming gets incredibly boring. How boring? Even the billboards on the side of the road complain.
I don't know how well you can see the children on that billboard but they are getting rather grumpy. As the sign says we still had 20 miles to go and this was only one of a series of these signs for Little America.
It was so boring that I ate two whole bags of Cheetos in order to keep myself awake while driving and that was just during the time I drove. Eyebright managed to drive for quite awhile herself but finally had to beg me to take over before she fell asleep. Aside from these billboards, there was nothing to look at.
See,that's me eating a Cheeto. It was so, so, boring that Eyebright had nothing better to take a picture of.
After several long hours though we finally got into Laramie and the Rocky Mountains. Something to see, finally! Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures, or if we did I didn't remember where they were from.
We had hoped to meet a friend in Cheyenne, but it turned out that she wasn't home due to a bad mold. Cheyenne was nice though and we have some other friends from Oregon who have just moved there, after our drive through. It's amazing what this economy is doing! Friends and family scattering to the winds in order to find work.
We were also going to camp in Cheyenne, but the campgrounds were all full due to Pioneer Days. We had to push on to Colorado to find a campground.
I keep hearing that Wyoming is beautiful, so I'll give it another chance on our trip back through, but we'll head up farther north then the route we traveled this time around. First we'll stop and visit my friend though, who had the bad mold. Hopefully she won't have a recurrence of it.
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Jul. 26, 2009
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Good-bye to Familiar Places and Familiar Faces
I don't normally blog on a Sunday from my personal blog, but I tried to do this last night and something wretched happened. So I gave up and went to bed! Let's try it again today.
The hardest part of the move is over. We've said good-bye to friends and family. We've gone past the point of where we've been before. From here on out it's new friends and faces.
I promised you some pictures, but I had to steal them from Eyebright because my card reader won't work.
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Apr. 1, 2008
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Come Sleet, Snow, Rain or Hail, Sagerats Camping Trips Will Not Fail!
This past weekend we went camping in our new motorhome. Dear Man has named it RVena. It was just a quick trip to pick up Dear Man's bow from the archery shop and to test the motorhome before any longer trips were made.
The weather was not in our favor. The wind blew so hard and it was so cold the first night that when we woke up the next morning the west side of the trailer was a solid sheet of ice. Thankfully, we were snug and warm inside the motorhome. We stayed at a decent enough campground called the Narrows. I say only decent because while it was clean, friendly, and has internet, it was after all near Burns, OR which is not my favorite spot on God's great earth.
There was a yurt there at the campground, so after the honeymoon couple left we asked to take a peek inside, never having had the pleasure to view the inside of a yurt. It was very nice and I told the children that perhaps when they got married we could have yurts built on our property to house them.
Second day dawned fair and we headed off toward John Day. First we made a quick stop in Canyon City at the community center. They were having a garage sale to raise funds to fix the center. Not finding anything too interesting to actually purchase, we traveled on to our camping destination, Clyde Holliday State Park. It was pretty and there was only one other camper by the time we went to bed.
Next morning we woke up to three inches of snow and more falling. Not certain of what the road conditions would be like further on down the road, we decided to break camp early and head home. Again, we had spent a snug and cozy night, Dear Man actually got hot.
While we spend most of our time in the motor home due to the weather we absolutely loved the trip and didn't want to come home. I'm trying to talk Dear Man into letting us become fulltimers, (those who live in their RV permanently). I'm finding all kinds of interesting information about fulltiming! As I learn I'll share with you, whether you care to read it or not.
Dear Man doesn't think I would be happy fulltiming. Looking around our house at all the stuff we have been blessed with he thinks I would have a hard time parting with it all. Not so! I'm actually longing for the day when my children will move out and I can fully outfit their own houses thereby removing it all from my house. The only reason I keep this stuff is for them.
Besides, I could put my really good treasures in storage and come back to them someday when I'm forced to give up fulltime RVing. I want to do it now before I'm decrepit and cranky and Dear Man is still alive. I doubt it will happen though. Dear Man is not in favor of it, at least not as long as we have to do it with four children on a permanent basis. Still, I'll keep researching. I can dream can't I? |
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