Bridges? We ain't got no stinking bridges! We don't need no stinking bridges!

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June 29th

Sorry, but I couldn't resist paraphrasing the great line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Eli Wallach's death this week at 98 kind of reminded me of this movie and this great line although he was not in the movie.

Madison County, Iowa is the covered bridge capital of Iowa.  Made popular by the novel "The Bridges of Madison County" the county lost no time in converting these historic treasures into publicity and tourist attractions.  When you are a farming area you've got to do something to increase tourist trade and the resulting dollars, don't you?

Most of the bridges are from about the same time period - 1870 to 1884 and construction techniques are very similar.  Unlike the covered bridges we had in Chester County, PA and Frederick County, MD, these are "cookie cutter" designs.  There is very little variation in exterior looks and interior construction.  Oh well, they are still nice to look at and explore.  The bridges are actually named after the property owners nearby the original location.

Cutler-Donahoe (1870)
Re-located to the city park in Winterset

Cedar (1883, rebuilt in 2004 after an arson fire in 2002)
Only bridge you can drive over

The Holliwell is the longest bridge at 122 ft

Imes (1870)  re-located to dry ravine in St. Charles

Hogback (1884)

Roseman (1883)

Westward Ho! - to Winterset, Iowa

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June 22

On Sunday, June 22 we headed further west along I-80 to the lovely little town of Winterset, IA.  OK, why Winterset?   We actually had a resident of the town ask us the same thing which prompted us to ask her why she lived here.  Her response was "It's a great place to raise kids" as in away from all the bad things in cities.  Iowa seems pretty benign to me.

1.  It's got a great city-owned campground.  Nice sites, full hook-ups with 50 amps, and only $16/night.

2.  John Wayne - who is more Western than that?

3.  Bridges - as in covered bridges.  Remember the book and motion picture "Bridges of Madison County"?

4.  And we are only an hour away from where we went to college - Graceland University in Lamoni. IA.

Iowa weather can be interesting!  This is about 30 miles east of Des Moines

Pretty soon we were going 45 mph and being blown all over the road.

Special insect greater at our campsite.  These a 17 year locusts and when the temperature hits the '80s we have lots of noise and bugs looking for love in all the wrong places.  Like mayflies, they hatch, breed, and die all within a day or two.

The Duke

John Wayne's birthplace

This covered bridge resides in the city park next to the campground.

Madison County Court House, c.a. 1876.  It really dominates the skyline in Winterset.  It is completely symmetrical with each face looking the same.   

A quick visit to Cedar Rapids

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June 21st,

Besides being our 45th wedding anniversary and Mary's 67th Birthday, we spent a quiet day visiting a historic estate in Cedar Rapids.

If you are in this area of Iowa, I suggest you take a side trip to Brucemore.  Built in 1884, the house and grounds are in beautiful shape.  Brucemore was only occupied by three families since construction and was always lived in until it was deeded to the National Historic Trust in 1981.  The house contains many of the original pieces of furniture as well.  Sadly, no photos of the interior are permitted.

The home is Queen Ann style.

The pool was added in the 1920s.

Extensive formal gardens

Learn more about Brucemore here.  BTW, the second owner was the head of Quaker Oats and liked to keep pet lions on the estate.

We're Going West...

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June 17th,

We finally crossed the Mississippi today and we are heading west - if only a short bit to the Amana Colony.  We met up with our old friends Steve and Karen and new friends Bill and Kris and enjoyed a nice dinner at one of the local German restaurants.  They were both off the next day leaving us all alone to explore the area.

If you want to know more about the Amana Colonies, I suggest you Google them.  After visiting a few of these utopian societies across the US, Amana was the only one that managed to keep itself together without a catastrophic split.  Many of the descendants of the original families live and prosper in the surrounding area.

Yes, Mary does drive the motorhome.  In fact, she drove pretty much the whole way from Van Wert, OH to the Indiana-Illinois state line.  

This map is from the turn of the last century, c.a. 1900.  Those aren't roads you are looking at - they are railroad lines.

Yes, the insects are larger in farm country.  This one would take out your windshield.

Amana Colonies RV park.  It's a very large field but the sites are wide and long.

A bit of an apology

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I know, excuses, excuses, excuses.  It's not that we haven't been traveling but, in a way, we haven't.  We've done doctor visits, dentist visits, kid's birthdays, visits with friends, a couple of rallies but not too much "traveling".  But that is about to change as we get a bit of a late late start on heading out West.

So where were we since April 8th?

We started off the month of April in Franklin, NC.  We have stayed there before and just love the area.  Big mountains, beautiful campground but we were well ahead of the visitors to the area.  This can cause too little socializing and too much thinking - like "we need to visit our doctor and dentist and, and...  So after a week in Franklin, we fired up the beast and headed North to Fort Chiswell, VA - again, travel but not to anyplace we hadn't been before.  We got to Fort Chiswell just in time for a whopping big storm with snow, rain, and high winds.  So we sat and waited for the weather.  

The Great Outdoors at Sunset
Franklin, NC

After the big mess we cruised into Gettysburg, PA for a 2 week stay at Artillery Ridge Campground.  Not our favorite place but the least expensive campground close to Frederick, MD where we lived for 19 years.  So we commuted back and forth to Frederick almost everyday to shop, have lunch or dinner, or visit the medical folks. 

After the birthdays, medical and dental tuneups, and countless dinners and lunches with the old neighborhood, we headed off to Mammoth Cave.  Originally we were headed to Louisville, KY because I had three diabetes programs scheduled and we wanted to visit our daughter-in-law's parents - until someone figured out that the programs were scheduled for Derby Week.  Oops.  Well we went anyway and took the Southern route back down I-81 (to Fort Chiswell, again!), to I-40, to I-65 back north to Bowling Green.  

Bowling Green, KY is more than the Corvette Museum and Corvette Assembly plant, it's got a really nice train museum as well.  We hit the museum on National Train Day or something like that and, in usual form, we didn't take any pictures.  

The Corvette Museum is worth the stop.  As many are aware, the museum had a bit of a problem with a sink hole which opened up and swallowed a number of rare Corvettes.  Well, the hole is still there but the cars are out and now sitting in the museum.  We asked one of the Proctors the origin of the sink hole, "It's a cave".  No surprise there, this whole area is filled with caves. 

Yep, it's a big hole that eats cars.

The initial reports were "We'll fix everything that fell in!"

I don't think so...

These two had minor damage.

If you are a Corvette future purchaser, you can arrange to pick up your new car right at the Museum.  It was kind of neat to see about 20 cars on a grid ready for delivery.  Owners were milling about getting ready to take them home.  I was just trying to figure out if anyone made a baseplate for the new models and could the car be towed four-down.  Oh, and there is that money thing...  Well maybe I won't be driving one after all. 

We were off to Mammoth Cave National Park to go cave exploring.  There are a number of Ranger escorted tours available but sometimes, when you get older, parts aren't working as well as they used to.  So common sense limited us to a one of the shorter tours.  The NPS is doing their best to preserve the caves and has been changing out lighting to prevent the growth of unwanted mold and algae in the cave.  Flash photography is not permitted and the net results are no pictures inside the cave of the formations and its bugs and other critters.  But I did take a couple of pictures:

Historical entrance

Manmade entrance into another section of the cave

After Mammoth, we started back North - Stopping in Louisville for a night to have dinner with our daughter-in-law's parents and then on to Elkhart, IN.  We used Elkhart as a staging area for the Escapee's Rally in Goshen and met up with our friends Steve and Karen.  They had convinced their Arizona neighbors Paul and Laura to come along to the Rally as well.  We realized that we had a mid-Atlantic thing going - Steve and Karen are from Northern Virginia, Paul and Laura are from Delaware, and we are from Maryland.

From the left:  Karen, Steve, Laura (with Riley) and Paul

And we have figured out where and with who we are spending this Winter.  The Who are pictured above and the place is Palm Creek Resort in Casa Grande, AZ.

Post Escapees Rally, we needed to be somewhere close to an airport.  Fort Wayne wasn't too far from Goshen and place in Ohio.  Originally we going to stay at the fairgrounds in Celina, OH but after they kept making mistakes with our site reservation and location we decided to start a search for a replacement.  This was made more difficult by the upcoming Memorial Day holiday.  We found a campground East of Van Wert, OH, Huggy Bear, but there were not any ratings posted online about it.  We called, found they had a site, jumped in the Fit and went and had a look.  Here's the view out the windshield at our site:

Huggy Bear hosts about 300 seasonal campers as well as sites for 100-125 weekenders.  The sites are big, all have 50 amp electric, water, and sewer.  They can easily handle big rigs.  Kind of a hidden gem in Middle Point, OH.  

And once in a while you get a weather bonus as well...

A full rainbow isn't a bad way to end a rainy day

There are things to do around here (although not much).  Fishing isn't bad out front.  There's always Wapakoneta and best of all there is Eldora  Speedway.  

Neil Armstrong Museum
(you remember him, right?)

Our friends John and Alice popped in from Ontario to attend the dirt track racing at Eldora.  The races being held were the late model stock cars.  We attended the Saturday night $100,000 Dream race.  It was dusty, noisy, and lots of fun.  And did I mention exciting.  I think both of us were amazed how these cars performed on a half mile track.  Something to see.

This week I'm off Scottsdale, AZ (I know, it's hot there) for a couple of days for an educational seminar.  Once I'm back we are setting off West.  We are aiming for Glacier National Park by early August so stay tuned.

Catch Up Time

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I can't believe we haven't posted since December 23rd.  It's not like we haven't been busy, we just haven't been traveling too much.  We didn't exactly sit but we did take short trips to see Mickey (Fort Wilderness) with our friends Bert and Virginia from Maryland and to Stephen Foster State Park to visit with Roger's old college roommate Craig and his wife Mary.

So here's a crash update in 14 pictures of the past 3 1/2 months:

Yes, it did get cold in Williston this winter.  One day we found the North Entrance fountain pretty much frozen.  The date was January 7, 2014.  We found out pretty quick that all of the major storms that plagued the East Coast this winter came right through our part of Florida.  Still better than being buried up to our as**s in snow.

Birthday boys Roger and Bill had their party on January 22nd.  This was the first time in memory that I met someone who shared the same birthday as I did.  No, the bike was not my present, it was just a way to get around a rather large campground and haul those balloons with me.

Disney

As I mentioned earlier, we spent a couple of days at Fort Wilderness visiting with our friends Bert and Virginia from Maryland.  We did one theme park - Animal Kingdom (that's the Tree of Life above) which was enough for these old bones.  Getting anywhere near a Disney property starts the giant vacuum cleaner that sucks all of the money out of your wallet.  Remember Scrooge McDuck?  He's alive and well within the Disney corporation.

Homosassa Springs State Park

When you are camping along the Nature Coast of Florida, you have to see the manatees.  The area of Florida we were in has a number of large freshwater springs that are a constant 72 degrees F.  While manatees look like they have a load of blubber like a seal to protect them from the cold, they in fact, cannot tolerate cold water much below 72 degrees.  Homosassa Springs was a former commercial wildlife park that they state has rehabilitated into a zoo for native animals.  They also operate a manatee rescue operation for injured manatees.  

 Can't visit Florida without a seeing a gator.  These were in the state park and really large specimens.

A free swimming manatee near the outlet of the spring.  The state regulates the area around the spring and the river to reduce our impact on these animals.  Strict boat restrictions give the animals a level of safety.

Stephan Foster State Park

About a month later, we made a short run North to Stephen Foster State Park.  The Suwannee river runs through the park and that is the only tie to Foster we could find.  He never visited Florida and was only in the South one time in his life.  Oh well.

Bell Tower in the park.  This plays melodies all day long and also serves as the chimes for the clock.  Unusual in that it uses tubular bells instead of the cast kind with a clapper.  It also uses a paper roll much like a player piano to operate the bells.  

College roomie Craig and his wife Mary.  They were on their way back from Gulf Shores State Park where they like to winter - and this year they had winter.  They live north of Chicago and were headed back.  Craig is retired but still coaches tennis.  Maybe some day they will see the light and hit the road like us.

Goodbye To Williston

We said goodbye to Williston on Friday, March 14th but not without some goodbyes to our new friends from Ontario (as in Canada, eeh).  The top picture is one of John and Alice who own the only two dogs (other than Gabi) to be allowed in the coach.  John and Alice told us the dogs were having withdrawal symptoms after we left.  Well we missed the dogs and John and Alice as well.  It's tough to stay in one spot so long.

Mike and Judy, bottom picture, are from even further north in Ontario.  We heard from them the other day - still lots of snow at home.  We may have to return to Williston just to catch up with everyone's adventures next year.

Off to Red Bay

Our reason for leaving Williston was to get a new mattress.  Our new pillow top mattress that came with the coach had developed two craters.  Mary cornered one of the Tiffin execs at the Tampa Super Show and let him know that she wanted a new mattress.  He invited her to come to Red Bay, lay down on every mattress they sold, and pick one.  We would only have to pay the cost difference (not retail difference) between the two.  Red Bay offers camping at the Service Center but it is often very hard to come by due to demand.  We tried to time our visit so that we were there during the Perry, GA FMCA rally and before the mass of snowbirds headed North.  We arrived on a Saturday and got a parking spot without a problem.  Five days later, people had to dry camp.

We got our mattress replaced with a SleepNumber which seems to be working out very well.  We had a few minor issues repaired and were out of the service bay in two days.  Then it was off to Bay Diesel to get our 6 month chassis service completed.  

We had planned to meet up with our fellow fulltimers Steve and Karen at the Sevierville Tiffin Rally but family matters caused them to have to cancel.  We decided to stick around Red Bay but we moved out of the Service Center Campground and into the Self-service Campground for the next week.  They got their service completed and we both had our coaches washed and waxed.

Chattanooga

Our reservation for the Tiffin rally had us arriving on Friday, March 28th but being Spring and weather being a bit iffy, we decided to head to Chattanooga with Steve and Karen and Bill and Kathy (new friends who claim Arizona as their home).  Bill and Kathy knew of a campground (Camping World) that was central to a lot of stuff in Chattanooga and had spent a couple of days there previously.  So, Steve and Karen stopped for the night before heading home to Virginia and we stayed 2 nights with Bill and Kathy.

Caravaning to Chattanooga

So what is there to do in Chattanooga?  The aquarium, of course.  Featuring both fresh and salt water aquariums the Chattanooga aquarium is worth the trip.  Our favorite displays were the jelly fish.

And no, the picture is not upside down, the jelly fish was.

Sevierville, TN  River Plantation Camping Resort

Sevierville sits at the foot of the Smokeys and is getting almost as built up and Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.  Normally these aren't our favorite areas to visit but it was a rally and it was good to get together with 80+ Tiffin owners.  We did take some time to visit Great Smokeys National Park - specifically the Cade's Cove area which we had never visited.

There was still snow in the higher elevations when I took this picture.  Most of it had melted by the time we visited Cade's Cove but the area around Clingman's Dome (highest point on the East Coast) remained closed a few more days. Cade's Cove was lovely the day we visited.

Much more peaceful and relaxing than the hoards of people in Gatlinburg.

Next stop - Franklin, NC