June 25, 2019: First, my apologies for not posting the past few days, but we have traveled over 1,500 miles since leaving home on the 20th and we have not always had good cell signal at some campgrounds. So this is to kind of get caught up. I will do better going forward.
We spent last night at the Lewis & Clark State Park near Onawa, Iowa after driving about 320 miles from Long Branch State Park in Macon, Missouri via highways US-36 to St. Joseph, MO and north on I-29. I-29 skirts along the Missouri River and we saw MASSIVE flooding. Tens of thousands of acres are still underwater and many exits were closed because the roads they lead to are still underwater, even though the flood waters have receded several feet. Sad!
This is a very nice state park and we are parked beside a lake. A thunderstorm rolled through around 4:30 this morning. When we arrived at the park, with no reservation of course, the sign said the campground is full, but we saw lots of empty campsites with reserved signs dated from one to a few days in the future. We talked to another camper and he said the campground hosts here are too lazy to keep the sites updated as to vacancy, so they just put up the full sign even though it is currently half empty. So we just used a site that was marked reserved for a couple of days from now and paid our $16 for an electric only site.
Today we will continue north on I-29, then head off northwest to Jamestown, North Dakota to see the “World’s Largest Bison”, but it’s over 400 miles, so will get there tomorrow. And we will get to add another state sticker to our map! Yeay!!!!
June 23-24, 2019: After a short run of less than 200 miles we arrived in Macon, Missouri and set up camp in the Long Branch State Park. Monte and Kathy Ashmore (I went all through grade and high school with Monte) live in Macon and they took us on a tour of their home and Macon and took us out for a very good Mexican dinner. They visited with us at our trailer until after 10:00 PM and we had a very enjoyable evening with them.
Long Branch State Park is very nice, but I forgot to take a picture of our campsite. Before leaving the park we dumped our two gray water tanks at the campground’s dump and left the park at 9:45 AM.
June 22, 2019: We traveled several miles on highway MO-8, one of the hilliest and curviest roads we’ve ever been on and finally found a campsite at the Meramac Spring Country Store Campground. It was an okay place for $32 for a full hookup site that we only used electric. Earlier in the afternoon we sat out a bad rain storm in a church parking lot in the country. Our truck and trailer continue to do well with no problems, except for a minor issue with the rear roll down blind that some rough roads shook loose and the bathroom power vent that will not open.
June 21, 2019: Nice drive through the country today. We camped at the Lucky Lady Casino (Caruthersville, MO) right beside a very full, flood stage Mississippi River and the casino’s campground was on the river side of the levee!! A pretty nice campground with four campers using it. Jeri actually walked out of the casino around $30 ahead and that about covered the camping fee. She got “trapped” in the casino when she went to pay for our site by a big rainstorm. LOL
I took this picture out one of our trailer windows.
June 20, 2019: We hooked up and left the house a few minutes after 8:00 this morning. We stopped at the Flying J in St. Augustine to top up our diesel fuel and I finally hit the CAT Scales with our fully loaded rig to get our real weights. Simple, quick process with their app and all our weights are easily with max axle weights by several hundred pounds. Our total rig, truck and trailer came in a bit over 22,000 pounds. We traveled I-95, I-10 and I-75 to Tifton, Georgia before heading off on non-interstates to Albany and Columbus, Georgia, then into Alabama. Drove through some rain and after over 400 miles we camped at the Scenic Drive RV Campground just south of I-20 east of Birmingham, AL. One little mishap—we missed the kind of hidden entrance to the RV campground and I made a poorly executed u-turn at a wide spot in the road with our big rig. I knocked of one of the rear jack snap pads. I discovered it missing when we were setting up, so unhooked the truck and drove the short ways to find it. I put it back in the next morning as we were breaking camp.
It is GREAT to be on the road to more new RV adventures!!
Bill & Jeri RV Travels 