We arrived at D&W Lake camping and RV Park In Champaign late yesterday afternoon, about 4:00 and are all set up. Anne-Marie and I dashed off to Sara and Michael’s for dinner, and to see Grace, our now four year old Granddaughter. The plans for the upcoming week are a shopping trip for the girls, and a farmers market tomorrow morning downtown in Urbana, Illinois. We fueled the van yesterday, and the falling gas prices and some expert driving had the cost at about 43 cents per mile, for moving the trailer.
This morning, Anne-Marie got into the shower, and had the unpleasant experience of discovering that yesterday when we were setting up the trailer, we forgot to turn on the hot water heater. She got partially wet, and as the shower water got cooler and colder, she turned the water off, stepped out of the shower stall, and looked at the hot water control switches, and turned them to on. The water tank is real quick to heat, and it is to be turned off for travel, but it needs to be switched on after setup.
Upon checking in at the RV Park, here in Champaign, we were told that the weekly rate is the rate for six nights and the seventh is free, but we were not told that internet is not included with the weekly rate. This park subscribes to Tengo Internet services, and upon check in, the customer is given a unique passcode to log into the wireless services, but the free service is for only overnight campers. The weekly rate for the internet service is nearly the rate of the seventh nights stay at the RV Park, the only savings is for the owner of the RV Park. With our Wi-Fi antenna, I am able to reach a tire store, a MacDonald's, and a Pilot Gas station, all about a half mile away, but the signals are secured, or right on the edge of not working. I have now internet through the tire store, so we are in good shape.
Our home in Champaign, showing the Wi-Fi antenna deployed.
We have traveled through about 700 miles of soybeans and corn, and the northern states are having a real problem with dry weather hurting the crops. In Minnesota, Anne-Marie and I were driving by miles of a crop that we couldn’t identify, it looked like onions, but taller, and it had branches on the main stalk, and after we got to Wisconsin, we were told that it was really sick corn, with no moisture from rain. The farmers are complaining about the lack of rain here in Illinois, but the crops look good compared to up north.
Anne-Marie and I are moving the trailer south to Champaign, Illinois today. This should be a easy drive of 259 miles, as there are no mountains in the way. We will get to drive on a section of Toll Road, in northern Illinois, and there is not an easy way around it for towing a trailer. We attempted to travel an alternate route last summer, and there were stop signs and stop lights, at nearly every crossroad, and the toll saved didn’t offset the the panic stops and longer travel times to avoid a couple of dollars in toll. We have signed up for a weeks stay at D&W Lake camping and RV Park, and It is 13 miles from Sara & Michael’s house, and this is as close as we can get. Their house is for sale, and the trailer parked in front, may let a prospective home buyer drive by and not see that the house is for sale.
I don’t know what our length of stay is going to be, as I ‘m not in the planning loop, but my short-term memory issues may have lost what the plan is, and I might have been told what the plan is, but I have just forgotten that I was told. I do quite well with what is the plan for today, and I can recall what we did yesterday, if I took pictures.
Here in Madison, Wisconsin, it is 101deg’s, and Anne-Marie and I just don’t feel like going anywhere today. The community of Deforest is having a lot of activities in the city park, the parade was this morning, a car show till 4:00, beer garden, and food venders, all this and more, just three miles from the RV Park, and we don’t have the energy in the heat today. We have been on the run every day for a while, so I guess it’s OK to have a day off.
I made lunch today.
Way back when we were still in Tucson, Arizona, I felt that we needed a electric skillet of some type, or something a little larger than what we could use on the gas cook top in the trailer. When cooking on the gas cook top in the trailer, an awful lot of heat is put into the trailer, and when it is too warm, this isn’t helpful. We had purchased a Cuisinart Panini Grill, the year before, and it became the favorite appliance for me, but it was a bit messy, being open on the sides, and allowed splatters to jump out. The panini grill, in addition to being a bother to clean, it would get hot all around, top, bottom and sides, and put a lot of heat into the trailer. I’m not saying that it is a bad appliance, because it makes great sandwiches, it makes a lot of heat and releases it in the trailer. Nearly all appliance manufactures make some type of electric grill or skillet, but our needs were for a somewhat small one, perhaps 10 inches across, and this small size really narrowed the field to just a few. We already owned two Zojirushi rice cookers, and they are about the best engineered small appliances to be found, so I read all that I could find on the skillets they manufacture. The neatest feature of the skillet is that the base contains the heat, and is cool on the bottom and sides, and the skillet base heats the most even I’ve ever seen, Anne-Marie noticed that when simmering, the heat is uniform across the bottom of the pan, center to the outside edges. It still gets hot on the top, and heat is heat, but the release of heat into the trailer seems to be a lot less than the panini grill we used before.
It’s now 102deg, hot outside.
Yesterday, Anne-Marie and I didn’t have a busy day, but we did want to visit the National Mustard Museum, and Brennan’s Market with the super produce section, and meat counter.
The National Mustard Museum is a store on the ground level, and a museum in the basement. The store sells all known types and flavors of mustard, that are in production today. This picture of the displays, show how the flavors are separated by type flavor or from what location. There are fruit flavors, cheese flavors, vegetable flavored (garlic and onion are popular) and any grind from whole seed to the finest grind, and color from yellow to brown. All flavors in the store are available for tasting, just go to the tasting counter, and the staff have a large cooler with all flavors, and will provide small spoons of any flavor. If you wanted, the staff would provide samples all day, until your taste buds became a bit numb. Anne-Marie is at the tasting counter, deciding between two flavors, the one she likes the best.
The store even has a gift shop area, T-shirts and hats. The museum has many hundreds of mustards on display from all around the world, even a movie theater showing the history of mustards through the ages.
We visited Brennan’s Market, as Anne-Marie has a favorite smoked cheese, that we have only found here in Madison. Brennan’s store has a meat market that is like the Midwestern states small town meat markets, with their special flavored brats and sausage. We bought four of the flavors.
Sand Hill Cranes, this pair have a half grown youngster between them, on the ground and colored a light brown. This group has about twenty of them, feeding at the edge of the pond. The other side of the pond had over twenty of the sand hill cranes milling about.
Today when we were at Costco, while I was walking down the tool isle, I saw a female on the adjacent isle walking briskly, and holding a bottle of rum with both hands. I thought she might be a employee, but then she twisted the cap off, and still walking, took a long drink from it while still walking. She put the cap back on, and stashed the bottle in between the displays, and then continued walking briskly. I was shocked, as I have never seen any behavior of this type, eating or drinking something, and hiding it in the store. I hurried down my isle, so to keep track of her, and she just seemed to walk in large circles in the bakery section, not looking at or for anything. I was looking for a store employee, and trying to keep track of the female that took that big drink of rum, and she stopped at the meat counter, and I found a employee to report her to. I overheard her speech and she was talking so fast, it was almost gibberish. I took a manager to the area where she stashed the bottle, and she drank or spilled nearly a cup from it. The store management thanked me for the information, and had five or six employees watching her, and I don’t know the outcome. I have difficulty with not reporting theft of any type, I don’t look for it, and when I witness someone stealing anything, I am shocked.
Yesterday, we pulled the trailer from Austin, Minnesota, to Madison Wisconsin. We made a lunch stop at the Cracker Barrel in Wisconsin Dells, and it was a pretty good Cracker Barrel experience. The neighborhood is quite busy around Wisconsin Dells, the mapping program that I use shows 9 amusement parks, 25 campgrounds, and 102 motels in a ten mile circle. There are a lot of water parks, big water parks, some next to the highway, and we could see that they were full of kids, all this in the heat of the day. This would have been great for us, back when our kids were younger, there is a lot for families to do.
Shortly after setting up the trailer at the Madison KOA RV Park, the trailer hadn’t cooled off with the A/C on, so we left the trailer to cool. Anne-Marie and I had a shopping list for several stores, Camping World, Home Depot, and Penzey’s Spices.
The Camping World and Home Depot stores created projects for me, and I have found storage space for the supplies, and I hope I don’t forget the supplies, or the projects they were purchased for. I tend to buy parts, store them, and forget the project, the parts, and the storage space, only to rediscover the project at a later date, and I can’t remember where the parts are.
Penzey’s Spices is a place for many sizes and styles of your most used spices
Anne-Marie in the kitchen display area of the store. It was after this picture that the store clerk cautioned me about the company policy about pictures inside the store, “personal use only”, and then something I didn’t understand, and the word “internet”, and I replied with “OK”. I turned the flash off on the camera, and took a few more pictures, I think it’s OK. Anne-Marie uses a lot of spice stuff, with every thing she cooks, and keeping track of where the Penzey’s Spice stores are located, is very important to her for replenishing spice supplies.
This is a wide view of some displays, there is a lot of spice stuff here. When we entered the front door, and throughout the store, the wonderful smells of spices were in every corner. All spices have a sample jar or container to smell of, and some caution is necessary with the red powders. In one store I took the sample jar and shook it, opened the lid and took a small smell of the red dust cloud, and immediately had a fit of sneezing, the clerk said that the chili powder does that to a lot of people. I don’t shake the jars of the red stuff before I smell any more.
We are here in Madison till Thursday, when we are moving the trailer to Champaign, Illinois.
Anne-Marie and I arrived at the closest RV Park to Austin, Minnesota, and once we had the trailer setup, we dashed off to the Spam Museum, back in Austin. The Museum is as much of a history of the Hormel business in Austin, as it is about Spam, the canned ham.
The Museum is in this building, and it’s much more extensive than it looks from the outside. There is even a guard house at the driveway entrance, to direct visitors. Many rooms with bright and well done displays.
Their Spam Shop has everything imaginable that has been labeled Spam, and lots of customers throughout, Anne-Marie is right of center, pondering a Spam T-shirt. Another display shows the vastness of the Hormel products, and the varied preservation systems, refrigeration, freezer, canned-packaged.
The Spam Exam Game show, and the Monty Python display with a full run of their skit.
A restored buggy, from the time that George Hormel started the company. The Hormel company played a large role in provisioning the troops in WWII, and one camp was named Spamville. Their food products are sent all over the world from this and other processing plants. We drove through a industrial area to reach the Museum, and the Hormel name is on a lot of buildings. Anne-Marie bought one of the Bacon Spam cans, and we each got a new shirt from the Spam Store.
The banner picture is of our trailer in this RV Park, and it is a nice setting. The Jellystone Park Camp-Resort, just east of Austin, Minnesota has 350 sites, and is jam-packed with kids, and kid stuff, and things to do for family's. This is a picture of one part of the pool area, and waterslide. This is a place where family’s setup camp, and the kids have free run of the whole park, fishing ponds, water tubing in the creek, hiking-biking trails. They even have a track area for the kids to race their radio controlled vehicles. The family next to us have six bikes in their yard, and toys, and games scattered about, and even a tent used for the boys bedroom out back of the trailer. The boys and girls both will dash off to the pool, water-slide, and come back wet and tired, hang out for a few minutes, play a game, run to the bike rental shop and rent a low-rider trike, return the trikes and head back to the pool. This park isn’t full but there is a flurry of activities going on all the time, a very high energy, busy RV Park, for family’s. The price structure for the camping spaces vary a bit, $30 for a primitive site on a weekday to $90 for a all inclusive premium site on the lakeshore on a holiday, we chose the basic water/electric site with no extra activities.
The drive yesterday wasn’t as tiring as the previous day, we still had the energy to visit the Spam Museum, after setting the trailer up, and we even had dinner in a small restaurant, after the museum visit. We fueled the van yesterday, and even with the falling gas prices, the cost of moving the trailer was 50 cents per mile.
Today, we will be traveling to Madison, Wisconsin.
7:30AM and it is 77 deg outside.
Work campers are used by a lot of RV Parks. They are generally retired folks, supplementing retirement, or only used as a way to get RV space in trade for working a few hours a day. These folks make a commitment to stay on for a few months or for the whole season, and this is common in the northern states, as well as southern states.
Yesterday when we pulled into the KOA Park here in Sioux Falls, we were directed to a parking/staging area, prior to registering, by an old guy in a golf cart. The RV Park was busy, and he seemed to be in a rush, because he also escorted incoming RVs to their assigned parking spots. Anne-Marie was driving the van at the time, and he was talking as he was directing, but we couldn't understand a thing he was saying, “Rer ea glan malff eurrn goot. Ogay! Galf ra gntoor.”, and motioning with his hands as we parked. We went to the counter after being parked, checked in and were given a piece of paper with our assigned space number written on it to give to our escort. “Gnalop n lolf gig sil rennf pfftt” said our escort, and hopped on to his cart and led us on the way. I could detect something that sounds like English, but his soft spoken nature combined with what seemed to be a strong southern Cajun accent, and Anne-Marie and I shrugging. His hand motions seemed to direct us well, but when I asked him to repeat what he had just said, he only got a bit louder. We smiled, Said “OK, Thank you”, and nodded our heads, as he hurried off to park the next incoming RV, “Surlf ba gnalf nice binnun” he said.
Travel day today, we are going to see how far across Minnesota we can get today.
